Posts

May 18, 2013

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4:34 PM | Friday Weird Science: What’s your fart volume?

Have you ever wondered just HOW much you fart per day? Like…would it fill a soda can? A soda bottle? And would you be willing to stick a tight fitting tube up your rectum and wear it around all day to find out? If not, that’s ok! They already wrote a paper on it. Head [...]

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3:40 AM | #SciAmBlogs Friday – quantum computing, rationalilty, armed Treebeard, Giant African Land Snails, invasive ladybugs, and more.

- Alan Woodward – Is It Quantum Computing Or Not? - Jag Bhalla – What Rational Really Means - Samuel Jones – Bush-crow diaries: Settling in with the Borana - Kalliopi Monoyios – Is Homosexuality Natural? Yes. So is male lactation. - Jamil Zaki – Eliminating political divides through morality: The [...]

May 17, 2013

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12:59 PM | Bora’s Picks (May 17th, 2013)

Protecting South America’s Crown of Biodiversity by Anne-Marie Hodge: Visiting a rainforest can be an exercise in challenged expectations. Everyone knows that rainforests are full of life: they teem with species, act as stages for unimaginably intricate food webs, and provide refuge for rare and even undiscovered organisms that exist nowhere else in the [...]

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2:19 AM | #SciAmBlogs Thursday – Mathematical Organisms, DNA Sequences, Frontal Cortex, green spaces, and more.

- Joselle Kehoe – Quantum Mechanical Words and Mathematical Organisms - Dennis Waters – Why Do Sequences Think They Are So Special? - Kyle Hill – Death By Lens Flare: Drink Into Darkness - Scott Barry Kaufman – Gorillas Agree: Human Frontal Cortex is Nothing Special - Maria Konnikova – Want [...]

May 16, 2013

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9:43 PM | Want to be happier and live longer? Protect green spaces

Central Park almost didn’t exist. When it was first proposed, no comparable urban green space could be found in the whole of the United States—and it seemed unlikely that one would arise on land that could be put to other, more profitable use – especially with New York real estate values on a steady rise. [...]

White, M., Alcock, I., Wheeler, B. & Depledge, M. (2013). Would You Be Happier Living in a Greener Urban Area? A Fixed-Effects Analysis of Panel Data, Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797612464659

Diener, E. & Chan, M. (2011). Happy People Live Longer: Subjective Well-Being Contributes to Health and Longevity, Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 3 (1) 1-43. DOI: 10.1111/j.1758-0854.2010.01045.x

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5:24 PM | Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned?

The old issue of genes, race and intelligence has exploded once again. The trigger this time is social scientist Jason Richwine, who recently co-authored a study of immigration for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The study contended that granting amnesty to illegal immigrants could cost the U.S. more than $5 trillion. After the [...]

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12:26 PM | Quantum Mechanical Words and Mathematical Organisms

Are thoughts more fundamental to our reality than particles? “Well, how can you talk if you haven’t got a brain?” Dorothy asked the scarecrow. And after a moment’s glance toward the sky, he replied honestly, “I don’t know.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, an influential mathematician and philosopher, whose work spanned the late seventeenth and early eighteenth [...]

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12:04 PM | Why Do Sequences Think They Are So Special?

We know that the living world depends on sequences of nucleic acids for its existence and ongoing operation. We also know that humans evolved the ability to create, manipulate, and copy acoustic sequences, and later to commit those sequences to the more permanent medium of writing. Finally, we know that our advanced technological civilization is increasingly dependent on storing, moving, and processing bit strings—sequences of zeros and ones. So what is it with sequences? […]

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3:21 AM | #SciAmBlogs Wednesday – smart dogs, vanishing frogs, cognitive chickens, spotted kiwis, memorable slugs, and more.

Enjoy the newest Video of the Week! - Karen Lips – What if there is no happy ending? Science communication as a path to change - Jag Bhalla – Tools Are In Our Nature - Samuel McNerney – The Bias Within The Bias - Jason G. Goldman – Cognitive Chickens and Memorable [...]

May 15, 2013

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7:26 PM | The squeaky wheel gets the grease…

…and the squeaky rat pup gets all the attention! Sci is at Neurotic Physiology today talking about rat pup squeaking, and what it means for mom’s attention. Head over and check it out.

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3:52 PM | Tools Are in Our Nature

Tools have changed our genes for millions of years. Paleo-people were not possible without them. Artificial aids preceded and enabled our bigger brains. The slings and arrows of our evolutionary fortune have not been entirely random. We have long intelligently designed factors in our own evolution. Chipped-stone hand axes testify that our ancestors used tools [...]

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2:30 PM | Cognitive Chickens and Memorable Sea Slugs

There is a rich tradition in psychology and neuroscience of using animals as models for understanding humans. Humans, after all, are enormously complicated creatures to begin even from a strictly biological perspective. Tacking on the messiness that comes with culture makes the study of the human mind tricky, at best. So, just as biomedical scientists [...]

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2:56 AM | #SciAmBlogs Tuesday – Angelina Jolie, Commander Hadfield, Robert Oppenheimer, Iron Man, ScienceSeeker Winners, and other superheros.

Lots of news on the Network today! First – we have launched a new blog – check it out! Second – several of our bloggers were winners or finalists of the ScienceSeeker Awards. Who? See here. Third – we have the new Image of the Week for you to see. - Hilda Bastian – Courage [...]

May 14, 2013

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8:59 PM | Congratulations to the winners of the ScienceSeeker Awards!

ScienceSeeker Awards have been announced earlier today. If you are not sure what this is, ScienceSeeker is the main portal for collecting, connecting and filtering science writing online, especially on science blogs (Note: it is a project of ScienceOnline of which I am one of the co-founders and co-chairmen). It is also the main tool [...]

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3:31 PM | The Basics of Good Health is the Subject of New eBook, Eat, Move, Think: Living Healthy

While many of us strive to live healthy lives, the task can be daunting and the information overwhelming. Should we be more concerned with our diet or with keeping our weight down? How important is exercise? What kinds of diseases should we really be worried about? In this eBook, “Eat, Move, Think: Living Healthy,” we’ve [...]

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2:51 PM | Why It Matters That Jolie Wrote About Her Medical Choice

Why does it matter if one person decides to tell the world that she’s gotten a double mastectomy? Well, if that one person happens to be Angelina Jolie, it means that there will suddenly be a whole lot more people who now know about the harmful consequences of having a faulty BRCA1 gene, a genetic [...]

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12:30 PM | Iron Man—Extreme Firmware Update 3.0

“Undergoing the Extremis Procedure remade my body from the inside out. Long story short, my body was turned into a kind of computer designed to interface with the Iron Man. There was no longer a division between me and the suit. My brain . . . evolved, I guess. Into a kind of hard drive.” [...]

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2:53 AM | #SciAmBlogs Monday – food recycling, lab dissections, suicide rise, mothers, butterflies, mosses, Hadfield, #400ppm, and more.

- Layla Eplett – Second Helpings: Recycling Cairo’s Food Waste - Rob Dunn – What is Wrong With Dissections? Hint, it is Not What You Think. - Samyukta Mullangi – ‘All I really want to do is sleep’ - Melanie Tannenbaum – The Incredible Importance of Mom - S.E. Gould – [...]

May 13, 2013

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6:16 PM | “All I Really Want to Do Is Sleep”

A recent article in NYTimes [1] declared that the rising rate of suicides among our baby boomer generation now made suicides, by raw numbers alone, a bigger killer than motor vehicle accidents! Researchers quoted within the article pointed to complex reasons like the economic downturn over the past decade, the widespread availability of opioid drugs [...]

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5:11 AM | Growing old with NF-kB

Aging happens. As you get older, your body slows down, eventually your brain slows down, too. Some things go gradually, and some go suddenly. To many people, this might seem like a pretty random process. We used to think of aging this way, as just…well cells get old, which means we get old, too. DNA [...]

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12:09 AM | The Incredible Importance of Mom

Imagine that you’re an infant monkey, and you’ve just been thrown into a cage after several hours in isolation. You’ve been deprived of food, so you’re starving. Facing you are two adult-looking (fake) monkeys, designed to look like each one could potentially be your mother. On the left is a “wire mother,” equipped with a [...]

May 11, 2013

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1:36 AM | #SciAmBlogs Friday – Lemuria, ‘jootsing’, #chemophobia, secrets of good marriage, Kahneman’s new terminology, and more.

- Chad Jones – DDT and Sucralose: A Case Study in Chemophobia - Jag Bhalla – Kahneman’s Clarity: Using Mysterious Coinage in Science - Melanie Tannenbaum – How To Have A Longer Marriage Than Kim Kardashian. and Follow PsySociety on Facebook! - David Bressan – A Geologist´s Dream: The Lost Continent of [...]

May 10, 2013

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8:43 PM | Follow PsySociety on Facebook!

As of today, PsySociety officially has its own Facebook Page! If you use Facebook and would like your News Feed to include updates from PsySociety, links to new pieces, and interesting posts about psychology, pop culture, and current events, please head over to the page and click that “Like” button! You can find the [...]

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4:33 PM | Why Buddha Isn’t Dead–and Psychology Still Isn’t Really a Science

I’ve been mulling over how I should follow up my previous post, the one with the subtle headline “Crisis in Psychiatry!” My meta-theme is that science has failed to deliver a potent theory of and therapy for the human mind. I’ve made this same point previously, notably in my 1996 Scientific American article “Why Freud [...]

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4:02 PM | Friday Weird Science: Are Boobs Better Bouncing and Braless?

Sci is at Neurotic Physiology today for Friday Weird Science, talking about boobs. And bras. Do bras really help prevent sagging? Or is braless better? And what does it mean when the science saying so hasn’t been published yet? Head over and check it out.

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3:22 PM | Moderated Discussion on Social and Emotional Learning: Preparing Our Children to Excel

Monday, May 13, 2013 | 7:00 P.M.–8:30 P.M. The New York Academy of Sciences For more information about the event click here. School has traditionally been about teaching kids new knowledge and skills. Most people have long believed that each child’s temperament and capacity for learning are more or less inborn—or at least, not the [...]

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12:15 PM | How To Have A Longer Marriage Than Kim Kardashian.

Two decades ago, a team of researchers led by psychologist John Gottman set out to determine one thing: Why do couples get divorced? Gottman decided to answer this question by trying something very simple: Recording married couples talking for 15 minutes about a recent conflict that they were having in their relationship, and then carefully [...]

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3:06 AM | #SciAmBlogs Thursday – diamonds, smart mice, rhino poaching, crocopocalypse, 400 PPM, and more.

- Martin Angler – Dye and Poison Stop Rhino Poachers - Simon Wellings – Some facets of the geology of diamonds - John McCarthy – Human brain cells alive in mouse brains. - Eric Michael Johnson – Equality and Individuality: A Collaboration Between Primates - Darren Naish – Crocopocalypse exposed in [...]

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12:47 AM | Hear Me Talk about Social and Emotional Learning!

On Monday, May 13, at 7pm, I’ll be moderating a panel at The New York Academy of Sciences. If you are in the area, please attend! Here a description of the event: Social and Emotional Learning: Preparing Our Children to Excel Monday, May 13, 2013 | 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM The New York Academy [...]

May 09, 2013

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3:28 AM | #SciAmBlogs Wednesday – natural storytellers, arranged bird eggs, holding the qaqa, anti-anxiety Tylenol, and more.

Check out the new Image of the Week and Video of the Week today. - Jag Bhalla – It is in our nature to need stories. - Ben Thomas – Tomorrow’s Anti-Anxiety Drug Is… Tylenol? - Felicity Muth – Birds arrange eggs in their nests to better detect imposters - Judy Stone [...]