What the scientists are saying…
Our perceptions of boring
If you are a tax accountant who goes birdwatching on a Sunday after church, keep quiet about it. According to a new study, people with these characteristics are viewed as so boring, others will make up lies in order to avoid meeting them – and if forced to spend time with them, they will demand payment of upwards of £35 a day. For the research, participants were asked to rate how boring a job was, from one to seven. Data analysts and accountants were deemed to have the most dull jobs. The least boring were thought to be those involving science, journalism and the arts. In a separate part of the study, participants rated hobbies: “sleeping a lot” was deemed the dullest, followed by going to church, watching TV and birdwatching. If the person also lived in a medium-sized town, and complained a lot, that compounded the problem. Finally, the researchers asked participants to estimate how much they’d need to be paid to be persuaded to socialise with someone with various of these traits. Psychologist Dr Wijnand van Tilburg, who led the study, stressed that it was attempting to shed light on perceptions of boringness, not what type of people actually are dull. “If there’s an accountant who’s also a birdwatcher they may have fascinating stories about how they came to that combination of interests,” he added.
Vaping may not be a “gateway”
Young people who try vaping are more likely to go on to smoke – but this may not be because vaping is a gateway to smoking, new research suggests. It might simply be that the teens who try vaping are the ones who’d have tried smoking anyway. Researchers analysed the smoking rates of 16- to 24-year-olds in England in the 11 years to 2018. If vaping were a gateway to smoking, vaping and smoking rates should have been moving in lockstep at least to an extent. But while vaping rates rose to around 5% in 2013, and remained at that level until 2018, tobacco use fell from 30% in 2013 to 25% in 2018. Lead researcher Prof Lion Shahab said there is a “common vulnerability” between vapers and smokers: for instance, these teenagers may have a “genetic predisposition to try different things” or be coming under particular environmental pressures. He stressed, however, that the analysis hadn’t ruled out the possibility that vaping has some gateway effect.
The optimal number of daily steps
The idea that we should all aim to take 10,000 steps a day began to take hold in the 1960s, when a Japanese pedometer was named “Manpo-kei”, meaning the 10,000-steps meter. That figure seems to have been arbitrary – but it stuck. Now, a meta-analysis of 15 studies involving nearly 50,000 adults has found that taking 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day reduces the risk of early death by up to 54% among over60s – and that walking more than that brings no further benefits. However, it suggested that the under-60s should aim to get in between 8,000 and 10,000 steps per day for the greatest reduction in risk of a premature death. “The major takeaway is there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that moving even a little more is beneficial, particularly for those who are doing very little activity,” concluded the paper’s lead author, Dr Amanda Paluch. “Interestingly, the research found no definitive association with walking speed, beyond the total number of steps per day.”
Bringing wolves back to Scotland
The Highlands and the Grampian Mountains have been identified as the areas best suited for the reintroduction of grey wolves, owing to the abundance of deer for them to eat, and relative sparsity of people and roads. Deforestation and hunting helped drive the animals to extinction in Scotland in the 1700s. In a new paper, researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University argue that the absence of these predators has allowed deer populations to grow “beyond ecological sustainability” – one recent estimate found that deer numbers had doubled since 1990 to almost a million – and that were wolves to be reintroduced, it would relieve the “financial burden” of culls. The researchers said that a remote area, measuring some 19,000km2 in total, could support 50 to 94 packs of four wolves. They acknowledge, however, that public opinion and the impact on local farmers would have to be assessed before this “rewilding” could take place.