EUREKA!

EUREKA!

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CAMPUS

NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH

Beast of Burden Global anxiety spurs Godzilla growth.

Godzilla, the irradiated dinosaur, has nearly doubled in size since first appearing in a 1954 Japanese film. In fact, the star has evolved 30 times faster than any other organism, according to a new paper in the journal Science. Anthropology professor Nathaniel Dominy and biology professor Ryan Calsbeek found a strong correlation between Godzilla’s growth and U.S. military spending during the past 65 years, which they use as a proxy for the collective anxiety of humanity. “If Godzilla is the embodiment of our anxiety, then our collective anxiety appears to be spiking as it did during the nuclear age of the 1950s,” the authors write. “Godzilla’s near invincibility almost always eventually leads humanity to the realization that they must work together to defeat it. The monster is thus more than a metaphor; it is a fable with a lesson for our times.”

First Quarter

Winter babies fill NFL ranks.

Football players born between January and March are more likely to play in the NFL, contends government professor Michael Herron and former Big Green quarterback Jack Heneghan ’18 in De Gruyter’s Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. The researchers examined 19,000 pro players born after 1940 and found that, compared to the general population, they were disproportionately born in the first few months of the year. Children born in the first quarter tend to develop faster than younger counterparts, gaining a lifelong advantage known as the “relative age effect.” “Football talent evaluators should recognize that relatively older players within a given year cohort are better bets, all things equal, to be successful NFL players,” they write. “Put another way, when NFL teams plan their draft strategies, they should take relative age into account.”