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Gallery: The 10 Worst Jobs in Science

Be grateful, dear reader, that someone else does the hard, dangerous and downright grody work involved in truly audacious science

Posted 4.8.10 at 2:31 pm 3 Comments

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Bad Dance Observer

Nigel Buchanan

It’s no chore to watch supermodels shake it in a nightclub. But Peter J. Lovatt, a former professional dancer and a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in England, must examine the often unflattering gyrations of everyone from preteens to the elderly in search of the influences and motivations behind human dancing. Lovatt and his team record videos of the dancers and then quantify their groove thang using a special movement-analysis technique and software. Other times, observers rate traits such as the overall attractiveness of the dancers’ movements on video, or the observers wear a visor that tracks what elements of the dancer they are looking at. Findings suggest that young women rate the dancing of middle-aged men as less attractive than the dance moves of younger men, perhaps an evolutionary trait that discourages women from choosing older mates—middle-aged men tend to use big, uncoordinated movements, and women typically find complex movement most attractive. But don’t lose hope. Above age 60, men dance with more complexity. They also exhibit their highest dance confidence at that age. No wonder grandpa thinks he works it so good.

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Read the article: The 10 Worst Jobs in Science (and the Best One Ever)

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3 Comments

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cgessert

04/13/10 at 2:14 pm

We read with interest Jason Daley's article on "The 10 Worst Jobs in Science" in your April 2010 issue, and were surprised to find that our team here in Duluth, MN won the "#1 Just Plain Gross" top billing!

In the section on "Feces Piper," the article correctly identifies the problem (recurrent Clostridium difficile infection) and the solution (reintroduction of healthy stool), but is a bit wide of the mark on the issue of aesthetics. We have been providing "fecal transplants" for more than 15 years, and we find that patients with recurrent C. diff infection are uniformly receptive to the idea of re-introducing healthy stool into their GI tracts, so as to break the cycle of unpleasant symptoms, expensive treatment, and recurrence.

As Jason Daley observes in his article, no controlled studies of fecal transplants have been published, but we are in the process of correcting this omission. We recently received funding to conduct a placebo controlled, blinded trial of fecal transplants for the management of recurrent C. diff. We would be pleased to provide more information about the trial to any readers who are suffering from recurrent C. diff infection.

Sincerely,

Charles E. Gessert, MD, MPH
Senior Research Scientist
SMDC Health System
400 E 3rd Street
Duluth, MN 55805-1983
218-786-8176
cgessert@smdc.org
cgessert@eirh.org

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quest_trader

04/14/10 at 11:10 pm

akward jobs made the world as it is .

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BNicholson

04/15/10 at 4:43 pm

Gee, and I thought kissing was tough to study.
www.tinyurl.com/ygorj6p

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