1. Given a sugar pill (which has no physical effect) people with certain conditions not only report feeling better, but see actual improvements in their condition.
2. Called the dose-response placebo effect, given two sugar pills, people report twice the benefit of one sugar pill (Demonstration to medical students of placebo responses and non-drug factors, Blackwell, 1972).  Interestingly, the Blackwell study also showed that pink placebo pills worked better as a stimulant and blue placebo pills worked better as a relaxant. There have been multiple other studies demonstrating this effect. See also Shapiro (1970) and the work by Moerman where he looked at clinical trials with ulcer treatments.
3. If someone believes a placebo has a negative effect, they can experience that negative effect.  This is called a nocebo. (Magne Flaten, Terje Simonsen, and Harald Olsen, “Drug-Related Information Generates Placebo and Nocebo Responses That Modify the Drug Response,” Psychososomatic Medicine, 61, no. 2 (1999): 250-255)
4. If a sugar pill is described as a muscle relaxant it will cause muscle relaxation.  If the same type of sugar pill is described as causing muscle tension, it will produce muscle tension.(Placebo-induced side effects. Shapiro, Arthur K.; Chassan, Jacob; Morris, Louis A.; Frick, Robert, Journal of Operational Psychiatry, Vol 6(1), 1974, 43-46)
5. Placebos can produce the same side-effects that the real drug the person thinks they’re taking would also produce. (Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, and Peter C. Gøtzsche, “Is the Placebo Powerless? — An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 344 (2001): 1594-1602, 10.1056/NEJM200105243442106)
6. When conducting a study, it is an error to assume that your treatment produced the improvement and everyone seeing improvement under the placebo are “only” experiencing placebo effects.  It could very well be that everyone who experience an improvement were experiencing a placebo effect. (Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, and Peter C. Gøtzsche, “Is the Placebo Powerless? — An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 344 (2001): 1594-1602, 10.1056/NEJM200105243442106)
7. Saltwater placebos administered via syringe are more effective than sugar pills. The original study is by Traut & Passarelli (1957). There’s been follow up studies since then, including “Do medical devices have enhanced placebo effects?” by Ted J Kaptchuk, Peter Goldman, David A Stone, William B Stason
8. Pacemakers improve heart function after they’ve been put in, but before they’ve been switched on. (Placebo effect of pacemaker implantation in obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy Cecilia Linde, Fredrik Gadler, Lukas Kappenberger, Lars Rydén. The American journal of cardiology 15 March 1999 (volume 83 issue 6 Pages 903-907))
9. Give people a sugar pill and tell them it’s a stimulant and they get stimulated.  Give people a relaxant but tell them it’s a stimulant and they get more even more stimulated.  Give people a relaxant, tell them it’s a relaxant and they have more molecules of the relaxant in their blood plasma than the people you gave a relaxant to but told them it was a stimulant. (Magne Flaten, Terje Simonsen, and Harald Olsen, “Drug-Related Information Generates Placebo and Nocebo Responses That Modify the Drug Response,” Psychososomatic Medicine, 61, no. 2 (1999))
10. We’re still pretty confused about the placebo effect and it’s causes.  There’s a mishmash of different things going on and we’re still picking them apart. Also, it’s really hard to design studies!

The male dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, are known to marine biologists for their messy social entanglements. Their relationships with each other are so unusual — they’re more like the intricate webs of the Mafia than the vertical hierarchies of chimpanzees — that, in a new paper, one team of scientists argues that the dolphins live in a social system that is “unique among mammals.” Intriguingly, the researchers also suggest that these complex, and often cooperative, relationships may stem in part from one simple, unexpected factor: the dolphins’ low cruising speed.

Interesting stuff.

However, one part of this article got me thinking about a tangential subject.  Dolphin’s rights.  Every so often I’ll hear about people calling for giving dolphins rights like humans give each other.  I guess this is because of the dolphin’s intelligence.

At first glance, dolphins seem to have a somewhat similar social system. Two or three adult males form a tight alliance and cooperate to herd a female for mating. (Female dolphins rarely form strong alliances.) Other male teams may try to spirit away the female—particularly if she is in estrus. To fight back, the first-level alliances form partnerships with other first-level alliances, thus creating a larger second-level alliance. Some of these second-level alliances have as many as 14 dolphins and can last 15 years or more. On some occasions, the second-level alliance can call in the troops from yet another group, “a third-order alliance,” as the researchers call them—leading to huge battles with more than 20 dolphins biting and bashing each other with their heads and tails over the right to keep or steal a single female.

Dolphins can be jerks.

I’m not any sort of expert about dolphins, but a surface reading of this makes this sound like a brutal sort of arrangement that wouldn’t be tolerated in civilized human society.

If we grant dolphins the same sort of rights we grant humans, are we obligated to try and police their behavior and protect those dolphins that are less fortunate than others?

A bunch of close-up photos of the eyes of different animals.

Most people don’t understand how mirrors work.  For example, when presented with the following scenario, most people get it wrong.

Imagine you’re at the entrance to a narrow corridor and further down, several feet away, hanging on the right-hand wall, there are three rectangular mirrors (30cm x 45cm) at head height. At what point, as you proceed down the corridor, do you think you’ll be able to see your face in the mirrors?

In another demonstration of the fallibility of our intuitions when it comes to mirrors:

If I asked you to draw a full-size outline of your head on a flip chart, and then to draw the outline of your head as it appears in the mirror, would you draw the two outlines the same size? You shouldn’t do because the mirror image of your head (as it appears to you) is exactly half its true size, irrespective of how far you are from the mirror, a fact that few people realise.