Washington University in St. Louis
In the world of gratuities, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis have shown that the larger the bill, the smaller the tip percentage that food servers, hair stylists and cab drivers receive. Leonard S. Green, Ph.D., Washington University professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, and Joel Myerson, Ph.D., research professor of psychology, compiled data from nearly 1,000 tips left in restaurants, hair salons and with cab drivers. Their findings indicate that the percent of the tip actually decreases with the amount of the bill across all three tipping situations.
An electrical engineer has devised a theory that sets the limits for the amount of data that can be hidden in a system and then provides guidelines for how to store data and decode it. Contrarily, the theory also provides guidelines for how an adversary would disrupt the hidden information.
A St. Louis researcher has found extensive genetic differentiation among populations of numerous Anolis lizard species inhabiting single Caribbean islands. While to the naked eye the lizards appear to be uniform, these lizards from the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Jamaica all show a surprising amount of genetic diversity. Glor goes to the islands and collects lizard samples to study morphology, or body features, and color patterns and then sequences DNA from the different species.
It's been called "The Last Place on Earth" by National Geographic magazine, and Time describes it as the "Last Eden." The Goualougo Triangle, nestled between two rivers in a Central African rain forest, is so remote that primate researchers who traveled 34 miles, mostly by foot, from the nearest village through dense forests and swampland to get there, have discovered a rare find: chimpanzees that have had very little or no contact at all with humans. The chimpanzees' behavior when first coming in contact with the researchers was a telltale sign of lack of human exposure -- the chimpanzees didn't run and hide.
