The way you dance can reveal information about your personality, scientists have found.
Using personality tests, the researchers assessed volunteeers into one of five “types”. They then observed how each members of each group danced to different kinds of music. They found that:
* Extroverts moved their bodies around most on the dance floor, often with energetic and exaggerated movements of their head and arms.
* Neurotic individuals danced with sharp, jerky movements of their hands and feet – a style that might be recognised by clubbers and wedding guests as the “shuffle”.
* Agreeable personalities tended to have smoother dancing styles, making use of the dance floor by moving side to side while swinging their hands.
* Open-minded people tended to make rhythmic up-and-down movements, and did not move around as much as most of the others.
* People who were conscientious or dutiful moved around the dance floor a lot, and also moved their hands over larger distances than other dancers.
He’s back in Iraq, on foot patrol, nervously walking down a street that suggests Basra, when it happens again—an explosion right across the street. The sidewalk shakes, he smells the acrid smoke, and as the panic starts to take over, his therapist says, “Turn right and walk up those stairs over there.” He goes up a stone stairway to the roof of a building and then watches the blast again, safely removed.
Only the client isn’t back in Iraq—he’s watching the scene unfold on a computer screen.
Therapists are making increasing use of virtual reality (VR) therapy, which, several studies suggest, increases the effectiveness of exposure therapy, the most empirically supported treatment for anxiety disorders such as PTSD and phobias.
A metanalysis in the April 2008 Journal of Anxiety Disorders found that VR is more effective than recalling memories exclusively through narrative, and just as effective as in vivo exposure for a wide range of anxiety disorders.
The concept of trust is in many ways the connective tissue of society—governing everything from our personal relationships to our common use of currency.
Most, if not all, of the decisions we make every day rely on one form or another of trust. But what if our capacity for faith is simply the result of brain chemistry?
Economic researchers are uncovering the chemical triggers in our brains that spark feelings of trust—and using their findings to better understand how markets work.
Does forensic evidence really matter as much as we believe? New research suggests no, arguing that we have overrated the role that it plays in the arrest and prosecution of American criminals.
A study, reviewing 400 murder cases in five jurisdictions, found that the presence of forensic evidence had very little impact on whether an arrest would be made, charges would be filed, or a conviction would be handed down in court.
A mere 13.5 percent of the murder cases reviewed actually had physical evidence that linked the suspect to the crime scene or victim. The conviction rate in those cases was only slightly higher than the rate among all other cases in the sample. And for the most part, the hard, scientific evidence celebrated by crime dramas simply did not surface. According to the research, investigators found some kind of biological evidence 38 percent of the time, latent fingerprints 28 percent of the time, and DNA in just 4.5 percent of homicides.
I was reading my feed the other day and an article called “Having oral sex increases likelihood of intercourse among teens” came up. Naturally, the first thing that came to mind was “No shit”. The second was “How could someone get paid for researching this?” (…)
This study isn’t alone in the obviousness of its results:
▪ “Spouses with identical residential addresses before marriage: an indicator of pre-marital cohabitation.“, showing that the majority of English and Welsh newly-weds live together before marriage;
▪ “Don’t want to show fellow students my naughty bits: medical students’ anxieties about peer examination of intimate body regions at six schools across UK, Australasia and Far-East Asia”, showing that first year med students don’t like their classmates formally examining their genitals and breasts.
▪ “Determinants and consequences of female attractiveness and sexiness: realistic tests with restaurant waitresses.“, showing that more attractive waitresses get more tips.
It turns out there’s some truth to the idea that people of other races “all look alike.” A new study demonstrates that people have more trouble recognizing faces of people of other races.
While this effect has been observed for almost a hundred years, scientists still don’t fully understand why it happens and who it happens to. (…)
Both the Caucasian and Asian groups had a much more difficult time recognizing identical faces from another race.
Other things came out: weekend are good, spending too much time alone is bad, illness is a major drain on your emotional well-being, and so is caring for another adult, or a child (major increases in worry and stress there). College graduates report more stress, and otherwise being a college graduation has no significant effect on your daily happy or sad events. Religion increases positive daily life events, but doesn’t decrease sadness or worry.
Smoking turned out to be a REALLY strong predictor of low emotional well-being, and came out regardless of income or education or anything else. (…)
The negative things in life seem to affect people making less than $75K a lot more than higher incomes. Things like headaches and illness are reported more frequently (but whether or not these are related to stress isn’t determined).
In addition, the pain of some life occurrences, like divorce or chronic disease, is made a LOT worse by being of lower income.
So basically, more money does NOT mean more problems, but at a certain level, less money DOES.
The famous lifelike poses of many victims at Pompeii—seated with face in hands, crawling, kneeling on a mother’s lap—are helping to lead scientists toward a new interpretation of how these ancient Romans died in the A.D. 79 eruptions of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius.
Until now it’s been widely assumed that most of the victims were asphyxiated by volcanic ash and gas. But a recent study says most died instantly of extreme heat, with many casualties shocked into a sort of instant rigor mortis.
Everyone knows someone who likes to listen to some music while they work. Maybe it’s one of your kids, listening to the radio while they try to slog through their homework. (…)
It’s a widely held popular belief that listening to music while working can serve as a concentration aid, and if you walk into a public library or a café these days it’s hard not to notice a sea of white ear-buds and other headphones. Some find the music relaxing, others energizing, while others simply find it pleasurable. But does listening to music while working really improve focus? It seems like a counterintuitive belief – we know that the brain has inherently limited cognitive resources, including attentional capacity, and it seems natural that trying to perform two tasks simultaneously would cause decreased performance on both.
The currently existing body of research thus far has yielded contradictory results. Though the results of most empirical studies suggest that music often serves more as a distraction than a study aid, a sizable minority have displayed some instances in which music seems to have improved performance on some tasks.
Decision making is an area of profound importance to a wide range of specialities - for psychologists, economists, lawyers, clinicians, managers, and of course philosophers. Only relatively recently, though, have we begun to really understand how decision making processes are implemented in the brain, and how they might interact with our emotions.
‘Emotion and Reason’ [by Alain Berthoz] presents a groundbreaking new approach to understanding decision making processes and their neural bases. The book presents a sweeping survey of the science of decision making. It examines the brain mechanisms involved in making decisions, and controversially proposes that many of our perceptual actions are essentially decision making processes. Whether looking, listening, hearing, or moving, we choose to attend to certain stimuli, at the expense of others.
Berthoz also considers how many decision making processes involve an internal dialogue with our other self, and how this dialogue with our “doppelganger” might be represented in the brain.
We’d like to believe that most of what we know is accurate and that if presented with facts to prove we’re wrong, we would sheepishly accept the truth and change our views accordingly.
A new body of research out of the University of Michigan suggests that’s not what happens, that we base our opinions on beliefs and when presented with contradictory facts, we adhere to our original belief even more strongly.
Undoubtedly you have heard that dogs can sense earthquakes before the tremors occur. While anecdotes are common, experimental evidence supporting these claims remains elusive. The USGS in the 1970′s even examined the ability of animals for prediction “but nothing concrete came out of these experiments.”
Cueing on changes in the weather is frequent among the animal kindgom. Indeed, the daily, seasonal, and annual cycles of animals are triggered to changes in temperature, day length, precipitation, among a host of other environmental cues. But predicting the weather changes including large catastrophic weather events such as cyclones and hurricanes may be of another ilk.
Being able sense an oncoming major hurricane or cyclone would prove an invaluable trait for animal. Storm surges can both decimate and rearrange marine habitats especially in coral reefs. (…)
In 2009, the typhoon Morakot passed over the Philippines, Taiwan and eventually mainland China. (…) Researchers counted sea snakes in the coastal area before (July), directly before (August 5-6, labelled during below), and after the typhoon (August 12-17th). (…)
Data suggests that snakes senses the approach of the typhoon even before it made landfall.
If the world is going to hell, why are humans doing so well?
For decades, apocalyptic environmentalists (and others) have warned of humanity’s imminent doom, largely as a result of our unsustainable use of and impact upon the natural systems of the planet. After all, the most recent comprehensive assessment of so-called ecosystem services—benefits provided for free by the natural world, such as clean water and air—found that 60 percent of them are declining.
Yet, at the exact same time, humanity has never been better. Our numbers continue to swell, life expectancy is on the rise, child mortality is declining, and the rising tide of economic growth is lifting most boats.
So which is it? Are these the best of times or the worst of times? Or both? And how imminent is our doom really? In the September issue of BioScience, a group of scientists attempts to reconcile the conflict and answer the question: “How is it that human well-being continues to improve as ecosystem services decline?”
A team of engineers, physicists and mathematicians conducted a three and a half year study to find out exactly how cats manage to move the milk from saucer to mouth, while keeping their chins dry in the process.
And far from simply slurping at the bowl, researchers at MIT, Virginia Tech and Princeton University say the technique exhibits “a perfect balance between two physical forces.”
It was known from a 1941 study that when they lap milk, cats extend their tongues in a backwards ‘J’ – meaning the top of their tongue touches the surface first.
But recent high speed footage has shown that the top surface is the only part of the tongue to touch the liquid – meaning that unlike in dogs, where the tongue is fully immersed and used as a ladle, a more refined technique is at work.
The tip of the cat’s tongue scarcely brushes the liquid’s surface before it is rapidly drawn back. This forms a column of milk between the tongue and the surface, which the cat captures by closing its mouth.
This column is created by a balance between gravity pulling the liquid back to the bowl, and inertia – the tendency of a substance to move in a given direction until another force intervenes.
Cats instinctively know how to strike this balance in order to time the lapping and to capture the liquid in their mouths, according to journal Science.
At about 3am on 8 October last year, an asteroid the size of a small house smashed into the Earth’s atmosphere over an isolated part of Indonesia. The asteroid disintegrated in the atmosphere causing a 50 kiloton explosion, about four times the size of the atomic bomb used to destroy Hiroshima. The blast was picked up by several infrasound stations used by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization to monitor nuclear tests.
No one was injured in the blast but the incident highlights the threat that planet faces from near Earth asteroids. Astronomers expect a strike like this once every 2-12 years. And the US congress has given NASA the task of sweeping the skies to identify anything heading our way. So far NASA has looked for objects of a kilometre or more in size and determined that none of these is on track to hit Earth in the foreseeable future.
But what of smaller objects? Various estimates show that an impact with an asteroid just 50 metres across would cause some 30,000 deaths (compared with 50 million deaths from an impact with a 1 kilometre-sized object).
This raises two important questions. The first is how best can astronomers monitor the skies for these smaller objects. The second is what to do should we find something heading our way.
Dr Pieter Vermeesch and colleagues had the same question about the sand in the Namib Sand Sea – one of the world’s oldest and largest sand deserts. We know little about where sand in the Namib, or other large deserts, comes from. How long the sand has been blowing around the 34,000 km square desert was also a mystery, although we know southwest Africa has been dry for at least five million years.
The team tracked the sand’s origins back to sediments in South Africa’s Orange River using natural uranium 238 clocks. Uranium 238 – the most common type of natural uranium – turns into lead over billions of years. Older sand contains more lead. In an area containing sands of varying ages, zircon sand grains can be linked to their source by the amount of uranium and lead they contain.
The next question was how long ago the sand left the Orange River bed and blew north into the Namib Sand Sea. The team again used natural clocks to retrace the sand’s path along the Namibian coastline. This time, they looked at radioactive beryllium (Be), aluminium (Al) and neon (Ne) in sands from quartz-containing rocks.
When sand is near the Earth’s surface, it’s bombarded by cosmic radiation – energetic particles from outer space. These particles collide with atoms of Be, Al and other elements in sand grains, causing them to become unstable. When the grains become buried in dunes, they stop being bombarded. The amount of unstable cosmogenic Be and Al declines over time – indicating how long ago the grains were buried.
Why war? Darwinian explanations, such as the popular “demonic males” theory of Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, are clearly insufficient. They can’t explain why war emerged relatively recently in human prehistory—less than 15,000 years ago, according to the archaeological record—or why since then it has erupted only in certain times and places.
Many scholars solve this problem by combining Darwin with gloomy old Thomas Malthus. “No matter where we happen to live on Earth, we eventually outstrip the environment,” the Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc asserts. “This has always led to competition as a means of survival, and warfare has been the inevitable consequence of our ecological-demographic propensities.” Note the words “always” and “inevitable.”
LeBlanc is as wrong as Wrangham. Analyses of more than 300 societies in the Human Relations Area Files, an ethnographic database at Yale University, have turned up no clear-cut correlations between warfare and chronic resource scarcity. (…)
War is both underdetermined and overdetermined. That is, many conditions are sufficient for war to occur, but none are necessary. Some societies remain peaceful even when significant risk factors are present, such as high population density, resource scarcity, and economic and ethnic divisions between people. Conversely, other societies fight in the absence of these conditions. What theory can account for this complex pattern of social behavior?
The best answer I’ve found comes from Margaret Mead, who as I mentioned in a recent post is often disparaged by genophilic researchers such as Wrangham. Mead proposed her theory of war in her 1940 essay “Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity.” She dismissed the notion that war is the inevitable consequence of our “basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human nature.” This theory is contradicted, she noted, by the simple fact that not all societies wage war. War has never been observed among a Himalayan people called the Lepchas or among the Eskimos. In fact, neither of these groups, when questioned by early ethnographers, was even aware of the concept of war. (…)
Warfare is “an invention,” Mead concluded, like cooking, marriage, writing, burial of the dead or trial by jury. Once a society becomes exposed to the “idea” of war, it “will sometimes go to war” under certain circumstances.
New Yorkers are accustomed to strong odors, but several years ago a new aroma began wafting through the city’s streets, a smell that was more unnerving than the usual offenders (trash, sweat, urine) precisely because it was so delightful: the sweet, unmistakable scent of maple syrup. It was a fickle miasma, though, draping itself over Morningside Heights one afternoon, disappearing for weeks, reemerging in Chelsea for a few passing hours before vanishing again. Fearing a chemical warfare attack, hundreds of New Yorkers reported the smell to authorities. (…) The city quickly determined that the odor was harmless, but the mystery of its origin persisted for four years.
During maple syrup events, as they came to be called, operators at the city’s popular NYC311 call center—set up to field complaints and provide information on school closings and the like—were instructed to reassure callers that they could go about their business as usual.
But then city officials had an idea. Those calls into the 311 line, they realized, weren’t simply queries from an edgy populace. They were clues.
On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity.
Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes.
Fifteen months after the Maple Syrup Mystery was solved, mayor Michael Bloomberg paid a visit to the 311 call center. (…) Launched in March 2003, 311 now fields on average more than 50,000 calls a day, offering information about more than 3,600 topics: school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park events, pothole repairs. The service has translators on call to handle some 180 different languages.
…an essential difference between genetics, the study of a fixed inheritance in DNA, and epigenetics, which is the study of how the environment affects those genes, causing different ones to be active at different rates, times and places in the body.
Evolutionary approaches to human behavior have often been framed in terms of “good” and “bad”: Why did homosexuality evolve if it’s “bad” for the genes, because it reduces the chance that they’ll be passed on to a new generation? Why wouldn’t an impulsive temperament be “selected against,” seeing as its possessors would be more likely to fall off cliffs? Some thinkers have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain why a “maladaptive” behavior hasn’t disappeared. (…)
When we focus on particular genes in your particular cortex turning “on” and “off,” the selective forces of evolution aren’t our concern. They’ve done their work; they’re history. But your genes, all “winners” in that eons-long Darwinian process of elimination, still permit a range of human behavior. That range runs from a sober, quiet conscientious life at one extreme to, say, playing for the Rolling Stones at the other. From the long-term genetic point of view, everything on that range, no matter how extreme, is as adaptive as any other. Because the same genes make them all possible.
In other words, the epigenetic idea is that your DNA could support many different versions of you; so the particular you that exists is the result of your experiences, which turned your genes “on” and “off” in patterns that would have been different if you’d lived under different conditions.
