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How Do Our Brains Process Another Person's Gaze?
How do we know when someone is looking at us? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Paul King, Computational Neuroscientist, on Quora.

There are several things going on when you see someone looking at you, all of which happen very quickly.

This applies to actually seeing someone looking at you, not "sensing it" from behind or in the periphery.

Primates (including humans) are unique in the degree to which the eyeball can move around in the eye socket. This allows visual attention to be shifted quickly without physically moving the head.

Primates and certain other mammals can tell when another animal is looking at them, but humans are particularly good at doing this from a distance. In fact, humans have the added ability to be able to tell where someone is looking, even when it is not at them.

It is easy to see why this skill confers an evolutionary advantage: By being able to do this, you can essentially "read out" the location of another animal's attention. If you are a social animal, and the one looking at you is a superior, you'd better behave. Or if it is an inferior, you are being challenged and need to respond so you don't lose your place in the status hierarchy. For humans, knowing where another human is looking allows you to read their mind regarding what they are thinking about. This is invaluable when trying to learn language, since it allows you to pair particular words with particular objects in the environment. Pointing is also effective for this.

So, how do we do it?

Detecting the direction of gaze has to do with noticing the relative location of the dark spot of the eye (the pupil and iris) in the context of the whites of the eye. The differential size and location of the white region shows where the eye is pointed. And if the pupil is exactly in the middle with equal white regions on each side, then the eyes are looking at you. We can see this from across the room. Head direction also provides a cue, which is primarily determined by where the region of the two eyes and the nose are relative to oval face region, with hair as another reference marker. When the head is turned, the brain has to do some geometry to determine gaze direction from both head angle and relative eye angle.

Figure: Ratio of dark to light region of eye reveals direction of gaze. Bottom row: Location of facial features relative to head reveals head orientation. The visual system combines head orientation and eye orientation to calculate direction of gaze.

There is an additional effect that happens when "eyes meet". When you look at someone and they look back, you have the feeling that your gaze was met. This can feel uncomfortable, and the person who was "caught" often quickly looks away. This effect is caused by a feedback loop. The second person to make eye contact sees immediately that the first person is looking at them. The first person realizes they were "discovered" and responds often according to perceived relative status or confidence. There is also the mutual knowing that eyes met, which becomes a shared event establishing a transient relationship.

The meeting of gaze helps people recognize each other. You may think you recognize someone, but if they seem to think they recognize you too by not looking away, then the odds are greater that you are both correct. The visual systems of both individuals thus collaborate to establish mutual recognition. This happens quickly and subconsciously, allowing the social exchange to move forward toward acknowledging each other. If one person doesn't acknowledge back, it becomes an awkward case of mistaken identity.

Public speakers use the illusion of eye contact to create emotional intimacy with the audience. When people learn public speaking, they are told to glance around the room as they talk. This creates the illusion of intermittent eye contact with as many people in the room as possible, which allows the audience to feel that the speaker is talking to them personally, creating a feeling of intimacy with the speaker.

When TV newscasters deliver the news, they want the audience to have the impression they are talking to them. To accomplish this, they talk to the camera lens as if it was a person. In movies, actors avoid looking at the camera so that the audience never experiences mutual eye contact with them, preserving the feeling that the viewer is invisible. To look at the camera is called "breaking the fourth wall."

This question originally appeared on Quora. - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:

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Why Women Are Smarter Than Men
Trying to compare intelligence and gender doesn't typically yield much in the way of productive discussion, but sometimes research comes along that's worth opening this particular can of worms.

Decades of research show unequivocally that men and women are equal in general intelligence (IQ), but that isn't the case when it comes to emotional intelligence (EQ). There are subtle, and not so subtle, differences in men's and women's expression and understanding of emotions that must be explored and understood.

Gender is a common place for people to assign labels around emotion. Such generalizations have pegged women as everything from the "fairer sex" to overly emotional, and men from emotionally aloof to explosive. You'll find that none of these platitudes are true.

"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." -Timothy Leary

TalentSmart has tested the emotional intelligence of more than a million people and it's clear that women have the upper hand. While women's overall EQ score is just a couple of points higher than men's, this is a statistically significant difference that shows that women have greater skill in using emotions to their benefit.

It just doesn't answer the pressing question: why?

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To understand why women outscore men, we have to look at scores for each of the four emotional intelligence skills by gender. There's a reliable pattern in the data that points to some interesting explanations for the gap.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is how well you understand your own emotions in the moment, as well as how well you understand your tendencies--the people and situations you handle well and those that push your buttons. This is the one place where men and women have perfectly equal scores. It's also a place where men have been given a bad rap. People often assume that men aren't tuned in to their emotions or don't understand them. Clearly, that isn't the case. Of course, men also have a tendency to hop on this bandwagon--by feigning to have no awareness or understanding of their emotions--in the hope of avoiding any accountability for their actions. Now we know better.

Self-Management

Self-management is what you do with your emotions once you're aware of them. Since you can't make emotions disappear, effective self-management requires channeling your emotions into producing the behavior that you want. This is the one area where men outscored women. I believe that the best explanation for gender differences in emotional intelligence is how we are socialized growing up (reinforced by societal gender pressures we experience as adults). In the case of self-management, men are often expected to be emotionally "strong" and in control of their emotions, which may explain why they outscore women slightly.

Social Awareness

Social awareness is how well you understand the emotions and experience of other people. This requires the ability to tune in to body language and other unspoken signals, since people don't usually come out and say what's going on with them. This is an area where women outscore men by a fairly large margin (statistically speaking). This is also a skill that women are socialized to practice and possess from childhood in ways that men aren't. Right or wrong, women are expected to take care of other people (and are rewarded for doing so). This gives them an upper hand when it comes to social awareness. Men, to their detriment, aren't rewarded for social awareness in the same way that women are, and this carries over into adulthood.

Relationship Management

Relationship management is the pinnacle of emotional intelligence. It requires that you use self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness in concert to better your relationships as you interact with other people. You cannot hope to get the most out of your interactions with other people until you understand your emotions, cue in to their emotions, and use this knowledge to adjust your approach on the fly. Women have a slight edge in relationship management for reasons described in the social awareness section above.

The Advantage

Emotional intelligence presents a significant advantage for women in the workplace. Whether you're a man or a woman, don't just sit back hoping that you're one of the high-EQ types. EQ is a flexible skill that you can improve with effort. To that end, here are a few things that you can do to improve your EQ today:

Limit Your Caffeine Intake

Drinking excessive amounts of caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline, and adrenaline is the source of the fight-or-flight response. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response to ensure survival. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you're responding to a curt e-mail. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. Caffeine's long half-life ensures you stay this way as it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body. High-EQ individuals know that caffeine is trouble, and they don't let it get the better of them.

Get Enough Sleep

It's difficult to overstate the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence. When you sleep your brain removes toxic proteins from its neurons that are by-products of neural activity when you're awake. Unfortunately, your brain can remove them adequately only while you're asleep. So when you don't get enough sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc by impairing your ability to think. Skipping sleep impairs your brain function across the board. It slows your ability to process information and problem solve, kills your creativity, and catapults your stress levels and emotional reactivity. High-EQ individuals know that their self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when they don't get enough sleep. So, they make sleep a top priority.

Stop Negative Self-Talk in Its Tracks

The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that--thoughts, not facts. When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your brain's natural tendency to perceive threats (inflating the frequency or severity of an event). Emotionally intelligent people separate their thoughts from the facts in order to escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive, new outlook.

Appreciate What You Have

Taking time to contemplate what you're grateful for isn't merely the right thing to do; it also improves your mood because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis, found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood, energy, and physical well-being. It's likely that lower levels of cortisol played a major role in this.

Why do you think women outscore men in emotional intelligence? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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How to Stop the Racist in You
By Jeremy Adam Smith, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton

In the wake of racially charged bloodshed in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, and Dallas, the city of Cleveland hosted the Republican National Convention.

There Iowa Rep. Steve King argued that only whites had made contributions to civilization, while other "sub-groups" did not. Asked to clarify his remarks, King--who keeps a Confederate flag on his desk--did not back down. "The Western civilization and the American civilization are a superior culture," he said, deliberately associating "Western" and "American" with white. No leader at the convention publicly disavowed King's assertion.

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This is just the latest example of what seems to be a rise in polarizing public language that meets the dictionary definition of "racist"--"having or showing the belief that a particular race is superior to another." King's argument is an example of explicit, conscious prejudice, when someone outwardly expresses, through words or behavior, a view denigrating a particular group.

But what explains the fact that police departments are more likely to use force against black suspects than white ones, at a time when so many departments are consciously trying to reduce these discrepancies? What could explain why companies explicitly committed to diversity show racial bias in hiring decisions? Why would caring teachers be more likely to punish black students more harshly than white students?

In these cases, and many others, scientific evidence suggests that we're seeing the effects not of explicit prejudice but of implicit bias--the unconscious, often knee-jerk prejudices that subtly guide our behavior.

The distinction between explicit and implicit bias is important, because it changes how we address prejudice in every corner of society, from police departments to schools to homes. If the problem is with racists--individuals like Steve King--then the solution is to identify them and limit their influence. That does need to happen; indeed, after Chief David Brown took over the Dallas police department in 2010, he fired over 70 officers from his force--and excessive-force complaints dropped by 64 percent.

But the new science of implicit bias suggests that the problem is not only with bad apples. Instead, prejudice is a conflict that plays out within each and every one of us.

Since we published the book Are We Born Racist? in 2010--which explores racial prejudice as a neurological and psychological process--we've seen more and more research into the automatic and measurable associations that people have about others, and the subtle and unconscious behaviors that these associations influence. In many daily circumstances, automatic associations are natural and harmless. Not so when a police officer pulls a car over for a broken tail light, and the negative associations he has with the face of the driver can produce deadly results; or when a black defendant's facial features can make a jury more likely to give him the death penalty.

Last summer, Greater Good published a series of articles by researchers and law enforcement officials about how to reduce the negative influences of implicit bias in the criminal justice system. But this research isn't just for cops and judges--it can help all of us to understand how our brains work and why we are not as different as we might like to think from a police officer who shoots an unarmed suspect.

Indeed, the fact that implicit bias occurs outside of our awareness but affects explicit behaviors--from whether we pull a trigger to how we judge a resume to how we discipline young children--can deeply threaten our self-image. If I have implicit bias, does that mean I'm not really committed to fairness and equality? Am I, at a deep and unconscious level, actually a racist?

The answer is both yes and no. We all carry prejudices within ourselves--and we all have the tools to keep them in check.

From explicit to implicit bias

When we think of "racists," our minds conjure up people like the San Francisco police officers who were recently caught using racially derogatory words in text messages, or perhaps politicians like King. Their pronouncements shock many of us with their old-fashioned racism, in which people's out-group attitudes are conscious, explicit, and openly endorsed. This type of racism was characteristic of majority group members' attitudes up until around the 1950s--and today it does indeed appear to be undergoing a vocal revival in public life.

What current discussions about implicit bias recognize, however, is that a great deal of contemporary racism comes from people who say they don't want to be racist.

Evidence of this tendency emerged when negative attitudes or stereotypes became publicly frowned upon in the 1960s and 70s, and many people felt social pressure to not get "caught" saying something that sounded racist--an extrinsic motivation that many have labeled "political correctness."

This formulation implies that egalitarian behavior is not real or truly felt, but rather, a social grace to mask an unacceptable attitude. As many supporters have said about GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, he "says what nearly everybody thinks, but is too fearful or polite to say." This conception makes someone like Trump sound "honest," but by implication, suggests that those who speak up for egalitarianism are being somehow "dishonest."

Things become even more complicated when a person (or institution) sincerely values egalitarianism yet engages in some kind of behavior that nonetheless betrays bias. Many studies find evidence of anti-black bias in pain-killer prescription and other kinds of medical treatment. One study found that job applicants with stereotypically African-American names were less likely to be invited to be interviewed. And, despite the avowed commitment of the courts to "justice for all," the connection between criminal sentencing and race is well documented.

For many people, the very possibility that they too might get caught saying one thing but doing another is extremely threatening and aversive. That threat, in fact, has a name: aversive racism. It refers to the type of racism in which a person's implicit biases are so out of line with their conscious values that social situations where they experience this conflict--such as interracial interactions--are something to fear and avoid.

In a 2008 study, for example, white participants who were about to discuss racial profiling with a fellow study participant who was black literally sat further away from them, and this distance was not predicted by their level of racial bias. Instead, it was predicted by their fear of being perceived as racist. In these kinds of situations, we create a self-fulfilling cycle of negative racial interactions--and to avoid them we may avoid contact with different kinds of people altogether.

This dynamic, ironically, can deepen racial segregation and inequality.

Did we evolve to be racist?

These behavioral findings have counterparts in neuroscience.

We often hear descriptions of the brain's limbic system as our "reptilian brain" that responds to environmental cues with the same level of sophistication as an alligator. Lightning quick and outside of our control, the limbic system has been called the seat of our fight-or-flight responses, perfectly adapted to the eat-or-be eaten environment of our early ancestors. A central player in this prehistoric narrative is the amygdala, a pair of almond-like structures that form part of the limbic system. Early findings that the amygdala responds strongly to fear conditioning led to the view that the amygdala is the structure that sets in motion the fight-or-flight response.

Researchers like Elizabeth Phelps and Mahzarin Banaji wrote a significant chapter in our understanding of implicit bias when they found that faces of different races trigger different amygdala activation in the brain, and that there's a relationship between levels of implicit bias and amygdala activity. These findings have fueled a conception of implicit bias as not only unconscious and automatic, but also as biologically determined--part of our ancestral heritage. The implication there is that our only hope is to contain it, but never realistically to overcome it.

Newer research--often by the same people--is beginning to challenge the core assumptions of this narrative. Once again, the amygdala plays a central role. Scientists are beginning to recognize that the amygdala, rather than responding exclusively to negative or fear-inducing stimuli, instead seems to be exquisitely sensitive to emotionally important information in the environment. This is a subtle but important difference, and suggests that depending on the task or the situation at hand, the amygdala may be able to respond differentially.

In one study, researchers found that the amygdalae of participants activated at levels consistent with how negatively they rated a set of faces, in line with prior findings. However, amygdala activity was also related to their judgments of the positivity of faces. And when they judged faces using a scale that was anchored by both positive and negative endpoints, the amygdala tracked the overall intensity of the responses. In other words, the amygdala is more than just a "fear" center, and its activation doesn't necessarily indicate prejudice.

In another study, researchers had participants engage in a face-sorting task in one of two different conditions--either by race, or by membership in teams that included people of different races. Interestingly, the amygdala did not only track race information--it tracked the socially relevant membership (team or race) depending on the social task in front of participants. This tells us that the amygdala is not necessarily pre-wired to detect race information, but rather, to track and respond to the category or social grouping that is most relevant at a given time.

Rather than contradicting an evolutionary narrative, however, these findings merely challenges us to think a little more broadly about the usefulness of categorization even in early times--we may have had to quickly recognize a member of an "out-group" on the basis of race, but it would have been just as helpful to quickly track whether an individual of the same race as us was part of a nearby enemy tribe. When we consider that "in-group" versus "out-group" distinctions don't neatly fall along racial categories, we can begin to consider that race is not a biological inevitability, but a social construction with social significance that our amygdala tracks.

In other words, if the brain adjusts to quickly process information that is deemed as socially relevant, it may be within our power to redefine what is socially relevant. And, rather than needing to squash or cover up our base biases, perpetually caught in a Freudian tug-of-war between Id and Superego, the current view opens the possibility of redefining our social environment so that it doesn't need to track race as a socially significant marker.

Six ways to stop the racist in you

What are the implications of this new way of thinking and conceptualizing brain function for our understanding of prejudice--and of how can we use it to limit our own biases?

At its most basic level, this new understanding of the brain reveals it not as a layered organ showing the layers of our evolution, as might layers of sediment in a canyon. Rather than thinking in terms of dualistic structures--primitive/evolved, emotion/thought, limbic system/neocortex--we are coming to understand that the brain is much more interconnected than previously thought.

But beyond this understanding, these new findings show that our automatic processes (including our implicit biases) are not unchangeable, and that we can learn new behaviors that can become second nature.

An everyday example shows how this is possible. Consider that not one of us is born learning how to drive, and yet by the time many people are adults, we find ourselves not even thinking about it even as we expertly maneuver the car. One day, with practice, egalitarianism might be like driving a car: a skill learned over time but eventually so automatic as to be second nature.

So what are the tricks that you can use to stop the racist in you? There are many, of course, but here are six to consider that follow from the scientific insights we describe.

Consciously commit yourself to egalitarianism.
But recognize that unconscious bias is no more "the real you" than your conscious values. You are both the unconscious and the conscious.
Acknowledge differences, rather than pretend that you are ignoring them.
Seek out friendship with people from different groups, in order to increase your brain's familiarity with different people and expand your point of view.
It's natural to focus on how people are different from you, but try to consciously identify what qualities and goals you might have in common.
When you encounter examples of unambiguous bias, speak out against them. Why? Because that helps create and reinforce a standard for yourself and the people around you, in addition to providing some help to those who are the targets of explicit and implicit prejudice.

Those are steps you can take right now, without waiting for the world to change.

But this research has implications that go well beyond the personal. The split-second reaction of a police officer who shoots an unarmed black man might not be very different from your own. Instead of asking the question of whether a person is or is not racist--because we're all a mix--we can turn to thinking of the ways in which we might engineer our social environment to address racism and its worst effects, without believing that any one step will be a blanket fix.

Knowing that bias is part of the structure of our minds we can ask, for example, how can we change policing so that the results of bias are less deadly? How can we address economic inequality between different groups so as to reduce the stress on communities that are historically the targets of racism? What can school districts do to make sure teachers come in daily positive contact with different kinds of people, and receive training in techniques to help them consciously reduce unconscious bias?

There are many fronts in the campaign against bias, both implicit and explicit, but they all have one thing in common: us. We are all potentially part of the problem--and we can all become a part of the solution.

This essay was revised and updated by Smith from a piece by Mendoza-Denton and Amanda Perez in the journal Othering & Belonging, published by the UC Berkeley Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.

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Why Can't We Remember Our Early Childhood?
By Jeanne Shinskey

Most of us don't have any memories from the first three to four years of our lives.

In fact, we tend to remember very little of life before the age of seven. And when we do try to think back to our earliest memories, it is often unclear whether they are the real thing or just recollections based on photos or stories told to us by others.

The phenomenon, known as "childhood amnesia," has been puzzling psychologists for more than a century--and we still don't fully understand it. But research is starting to suggest an answer: Autobiographical memory might begin with the stories we tell each other.

The journey into language

At first glance, it may seem that the reason we don't remember being babies is because infants and toddlers don't have a fully developed memory.

But babies as young as six months can form both short-term memories that last for minutes, and long-term memories that last weeks, if not months. In one study, six-month-olds who learned how to press a lever to operate a toy train remembered how to perform this action for two to three weeks after they had last seen the toy. Preschoolers, on the other hand, can remember events that go years back. It's debatable whether long-term memories at this early age are truly autobiographical, though--that is, personally relevant events that occurred in a specific time and place.

Of course, memory capabilities at these ages are not adult-like--they continue to mature until adolescence. In fact, developmental changes in basic memory processes have been put forward as an explanation for childhood amnesia, and it's one of the best theories we've got so far.

These basic processes involve several brain regions and include forming, maintaining, and then later retrieving the memory. For example, the hippocampus, thought to be responsible for forming memories, continues developing until at least the age of seven. We know that the typical boundary for the offset of childhood amnesia--three and a half years--shifts with age. Children and teenagers have earlier memories than adults do. This suggests that the problem may be less with forming memories than with maintaining them.

However, this does not seem to be the whole story. Language also plays a role. From the ages of one to six, children progress from the one-word stage of speaking to becoming fluent in their native language(s), so there are major changes in their verbal ability that overlap with the childhood amnesia period. This includes using the past tense, memory-related words such as "remember" and "forget," and personal pronouns, a favorite being "mine."

It is true to some extent that a child's ability to verbalize about an event at the time that it happened predicts how well they remember it months or years later. One lab group conducted this work by interviewing toddlers brought to accident and emergency departments for common childhood injuries. Toddlers over 26 months, who could talk about the event at the time, recalled it up to five years later--whereas those under 26 months, who could not talk about it, recalled little or nothing. This suggests that preverbal memories are lost if they are not translated into language.

How stories make memories

However, most research on the role of language focuses on a particular form of expression called narrative, and its social function. When parents reminisce with very young children about past events, they implicitly teach them narrative skills--what kinds of events are important to remember and how to structure talking about them in a way that others can understand.

Unlike simply recounting information for factual purposes, reminiscing revolves around the social function of sharing experiences with others. In this way, family stories maintain the memory's accessibility over time, and also increase the coherence of the narrative, including the chronology of events, their theme, and their degree of emotion. More coherent stories are remembered better. Maori adults have the earliest childhood memories (age 2.5) of any society studied so far, thanks to Maori parents' highly elaborative style of telling family stories.

Reminiscing has different social functions in different cultures, which contribute to cultural variations in the quantity, quality, and timing of early autobiographical memories. Adults in cultures that value autonomy (North America, Western Europe) tend to report earlier and more childhood memories than adults in cultures that value relatedness (Asia, Africa).

This is predicted by cultural differences in parental reminiscing style. In cultures that promote more autonomous self-concepts, parental reminiscing focuses more on children's individual experiences, preferences, and feelings, and less on their relationships with others, social routines, and behavioral standards. For example, an American child might remember getting a gold star in preschool whereas a Chinese child might remember the class learning a particular song at preschool.

While there are still things we don't understand about childhood amnesia, researchers are making progress. For example, there are more prospective longitudinal studies that follow individuals from childhood into the future. This helps give accurate accounts of events, which is better than retrospectively asking teens or adults to remember past events which are not documented. Also, as neuroscience progresses, there will undoubtedly be more studies relating brain development to memory development. This should help us develop other measures of memory besides verbal reports.

In the meantime, it's important to remember that, even if we can't explicitly remember specific events from when we were very young, their accumulation nevertheless leaves lasting traces that influence our behavior. The first few years of life are paradoxically forgettable and yet powerful in shaping the adults that we become.

This essay was revised from one originally published in The Conversation.

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Danger, Will Robinson
The night sky, at least when you can see it, appears placid, serene and as inviting as a cold brew on a muggy afternoon.

Don't be fooled. The real universe is a nasty mélange of stuff that's mostly scorching hot or bitterly cold. The blackness of space is shot through with lethal particles and radiation. Without doubt, the "final frontier," often depicted as a beguiling playground for our Spandex-attired descendants, is deceptively treacherous.

Not only that, it's out to get you.

How's that? Well, you can start with the usual litany of heavenly harm: Asteroids that can mindlessly cannon our world, revenging their own destruction with ours, or solar flares, which could fatally sicken any humans who dare to rocket themselves to Mars. Then there's Mars itself, which even on a good day is less hospitable than the worst environment on Earth.

This cast of cosmic unpleasantries is well known. But there are other baddies whose malevolence is on a grander scale.

Consider gravitational waves. Their discovery is trumpeted as perhaps the most significant science result of the past thousand days. The waves themselves are feebler than the Lichtenstein Navy, as anyone who has read about the LIGO instrument knows. But that's because these waves come from far away. The slight shaking of space-time that made the headlines in February resulted from the collision of two black holes having a combined mass of five dozen suns. Their mutually assured destruction quickly released as much energy as all the stars in our galaxy have belched into space since Aristotle wrote rhetoric.

That prodigious, black hole crash twiddled the cosmos here at Earth, more than a billion light-years from the collision, and it may also have let loose a burst of radiation which, if you were near enough to the action, could ruin your whole planetary day.

It was an explosion of incomparable vigor, and explosions can be dangerous. But you may figure this is someone else's problem, and maybe not even that. After all, who's going to be hanging out in the vicinity of a pair of suicidal black holes?

But there's another threat that's more worrisome: Gamma Ray Bursts, the result of a slightly different variety of cosmic mishap. When large stars die, they don't go gently into the night. Single stars can implode, or two small, dead stars can collide. Either way, the resulting black hole is celebrated with a brief flash of gamma rays a million trillion times brighter than the Sun.

Because most of this energy is shot out in two, oppositely directed beams, it's highly concentrated. It could damage the atmospheres of planets even light-years away, which would be bad news for any biology.

GRBs are not rare. Astronomers find a new one just about every day. And this points out the fact that the universe is a war zone in which random and lethal explosions occur in the star clouds of every galaxy.

This has led some scientists to speculate that the majority of cosmic real estate is essentially a no man's land for life. A recent suggestion is that GRBs rule out 90 percent of all galaxies for life, and even the Milky Way is probably barren except for its outer realms (where we are).

That may sound like really bad news for biology. But wolves in the forest are bad news too, although there are still plenty of creatures out there. Only 15 percent of Earth's surface is arable, but nonetheless, there are billions of humans. So sure, most cosmic real estate may be worthless, but that may be OK.

However, the discovery of these mega-dangers does raise a maddening question: Why is the universe set up in such a way that GRBs don't happen a hundred times more often, or aren't a hundred times more energetic? After all, if that were the case, you wouldn't be reading this.

And there would be no one else able to read it either, in all the vast expanse of space.

Are we that lucky? If you believe in multiple universes, then maybe the correct answer to that question is yes. Sure, most of these hypothesized, other universes would be sterile. But not ours: we're just a winner in the most powerful of powerball lotteries, marveling at our fortune at being in a cosmos that is at least partially habitable.

If this seems too contrived -- if you're not a fan of this idea -- then science can't help you. Yet.

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More Coca-Cola Ties Seen Inside U.S. Centers For Disease Control
In June, Dr. Barbara Bowman, a high-ranking official within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unexpectedly departed the agency, two days after information came to light indicating that she had been communicating regularly with - and offering guidance to - a leading Coca-Cola advocate seeking to influence world health authorities on sugar and beverage policy matters.

Now, more emails suggest that another veteran CDC official has similarly close ties to the global soft drink giant. Michael Pratt, Senior Advisor for Global Health in the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the CDC, has a history of promoting and helping lead research funded by Coca-Cola. Pratt also works closely with the nonprofit corporate interest group set up by Coca-Cola called the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), emails obtained through Freedom of Information requests show.

Pratt did not respond to questions about his work, which includes a position as a professor at Emory University, a private research university in Atlanta that has received millions of dollars from the Coca-Cola Foundation and more than $100 million from famed longtime Coca-Cola leader Robert W. Woodruff and Woodruff's brother George. Indeed, Coca-Cola's financial support for Emory is so strong that the university states on its website that "it's unofficially considered poor school spirit to drink other soda brands on campus."

CDC spokeswoman Kathy Harben said Pratt had been on a "temporary assignment" to Emory University but his work at Emory "is completed and he is now back on staff at CDC." Emory University websites still show Pratt as currently assigned as a professor there, however.

Regardless, research by consumer advocacy group U.S. Right to Know shows Pratt is another high-ranking CDC official with close ties to Coca-Cola. And experts in the nutrition arena said that because the mission of the CDC is protecting public health, it is problematic for agency officials to collaborate with a corporate interest that has a track record of downplaying the health risks of its products.

"These alignments are worrisome because they help provide legitimacy to industry-friendly spin," said Andy Bellatti, a dietitian and founder of Dietitians for Professional Integrity.

One key message Coca-Cola has been pushing is "Energy Balance." Consumption of sugar-laden foods and beverages is not to blame for obesity or other health problems; a lack of exercise is the primary culprit, the theory goes. "There is increasing concern about overweight and obesity worldwide, and while there are many factors involved, the fundamental cause in most cases is an imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended," Coca-Cola states on its website.

"The soda industry is keen on deflecting the conversation away from the well-documented negative health effects of sugar-sweetened beverages and onto physical activity," said Bellatti.

The messaging comes at a time when leading global health authorities are urging a crack-down on consumption of sugary food and beverages, and some cities are implementing added taxes on sodas to try to discourage consumption. Coca-Cola has been fighting back in part by providing funding for scientists and organizations who back up the company with research and academic presentations.

Pratt's work with the industry appears to fit into that messaging effort. Last year he co-authored a Latin America health and nutrition study and related papers funded in part by Coca-Cola and ILSI to investigate the diets of individuals in Latin American countries and to establish a database for studying the "complex relationship existing between energy imbalance, obesity and associated chronic diseases..." Pratt also has been acting as a scientific "advisor" to ILSI North America, serving on an ILSI committee on "energy balance and active lifestyle." And he is a member of the ILSI Research Foundation Board of Trustees. He also served as an advisor to an international study of childhood obesity funded by Coca-Cola.

ILSI's North American branch, whose members include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo Inc., Dr Pepper Snapple Group and more than two dozen other food industry players, states as its mission the advancement of the "understanding and application of science related to the nutritional quality and safety of the food supply." But some independent scientists and food industry activists consider ILSI to be a front group aimed at advancing the interests of the food industry. It was founded by Coca-Cola scientific and regulatory affairs leader Alex Malaspina in 1978. ILSI has had a long and checkered relationship with the World Health Organization, working at one time closely with its Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and with WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer and the International Programme on Chemical Safety.

But a report by a consultant to WHO found that ILSI was infiltrating WHO and FAO with scientists, money and research to garner favor for industry products and strategies. ILSI was also accused of attempting to undermine WHO tobacco control efforts on behalf of the tobacco industry.

One April 2012 email exchange obtained through a Freedom of Information request shows Pratt as part of a circle of professors communicating with Rhona Applebaum, then Coca-Cola's chief scientific and regulatory officer, about difficulties getting cooperation on a study in Mexico from that country's National Institute of Public Health. The Institute would not "play ball because of who was sponsoring the study," according to an email Peter Katzmarzyk, a professor of exercise science at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, sent to the group. Appelbaum defended the integrity of the research and expressed anger at the situation, writing "So if good scientists take $$$ from Coke - what? - they're corrupted? Despite the fact they're advancing public good?" In the email exchange Pratt offered to assist "especially if these issues continue to arise."

Emails show Pratt's communication with Applebaum, who also served a term as ILSI's president, continued through at least 2014, including discussion of work for "Exercise is Medicine," an initiative launched in 2007 by Coca-Cola and for which Pratt serves as an advisory board member.

Applebaum left the company in 2015 after the Global Energy Balance Network that she helped establish came under public scrutiny amid allegations that it was little more than a Coca-Cola propaganda group. Coca-Cola poured roughly $1.5 million into the establishment of the group, including a $1 million grant to the University of Colorado. But after Coca-Cola's ties to the organization were made public in an article in The New York Times, and after several scientists and public health authorities accused the network of "peddling scientific nonsense," the university returned the money to Coca-Cola. The network disbanded in late 2015 after emails surfaced that detailed Coca-Cola's efforts to use the network to influence scientific research on sugary drinks.

Coca-Cola has been particularly zealous in recent years in working to counter concerns about consumption of beverages with high sugar content and links between sugary beverages and obesity and other diseases. The New York Times reported last year that Coke's chief executive, Muhtar Kent, admitted that the company had spent almost $120 million since 2010 to pay for academic health research and for partnerships with major medical and community groups involved in curbing the obesity epidemic.

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of "Soda Politics," said that when CDC officials work so closely with industry, there is a conflict of interest risk the CDC should consider.

"Officials of public health agencies run the risk of cooptation, capture, or conflict of interest when they have close professional ties with companies whose job it is to sell food products, regardless of the effects of those products on health," said Nestle.

Pratt's ties to Coca-Cola and ILSI are similar to those seen with Bowman. Bowman, who directed the CDC's Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, worked early in her career as a senior nutritionist for Coca-Cola and later while at the CDC co-authored an edition of a book called Present Knowledge in Nutrition as "a publication of the International Life Sciences Institute." The emails between Bowman and Malaspina showed ongoing communications regarding ILSI and beverage industry interests.

During Bowman's tenure, in May 2013, ILSI and other organizers invited Bowman and the CDC to participate in a project ILSI was engaged in with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a "branded foods database." Travel costs for Bowman would be paid by ILSI, the invitation stated. Bowman did agree to participate and the CDC provided funding, at least $25,000, Harben confirmed, to support the database project. The 15-member steering committee for the project held six ILSI representatives, documents show.

Both Bowman and Pratt have worked under the direction of Ursula Bauer, director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. After U.S. Right to Know publicized emails about Bowman's ties to ILSI and Coca-Cola, Bauer defended the relationship in an email to her employees, saying "it's not unusual for Barbara - or any of us- to correspond with others who have similar interests in our areas of work..."

Still, Bowman announced an unexpected retirement from CDC two days after the emails were made public. CDC initially denied she had departed the agency, but Harben said this week that was only because it took some time to "process" Bowman's transition to retirement.

The relationships raise fundamental questions about how close is too close when public officials collaborate with industry interests that can conflict with public interests.

Yoni Freedhoff, MD, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa and founder of the Bariatric Medical Institute, said there is a real danger to when public health officials become too close with corporate players.

"Until we recognize the inherent risks of conflicts of interest with the food industry and public health, there is near certainty that these conflicts will influence the nature and strength of recommendations and programs in ways that will be friendly to industries whose products contribute to the burden of illness those same recommendations and programs are meant to address," Freedhoff said.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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