Alien abduction insurance is an insurance policy issued against alien abduction.

The insurance policy is redeemed if the insured person is abducted by aliens.

The very first company to offer UFO abduction insurance was the St. Lawrence Agency in Altamonte Springs, Florida. The company says that it has paid out at least two claims.

The company pays the claimant $1 per year until their death or for 1 million years, whichever comes first. Over 20,000 people have purchased the insurance.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Faces are important for non-verbal communication in daily life, and eye gaze direction provides important information for adult–infant interaction. Four-month-old infants and adults better recognize faces when accompanied with direct gaze, suggesting a special status of ‘eye contact.’ Whether mutual gaze plays a role in face recognition from birth, or whether it requires expertise, is investigated in this paper. We conducted a between subjects design, for a total of four experiments, […] to investigate newborns’ ability to recognize faces when gaze direction is manipulated. We predicted that a face accompanied with direct gaze would be better recognized by newborns. In contrast, we expected no evidence of identity recognition when newborns were familiarized with a face with averted gaze. According with our expectations, newborns were able to recognize a face identity when previously familiarized with direct gaze, but not with averted gaze. However, this effect was face identity-specific. Overall, our results suggest that direct gaze can modulate face processing and affects preferences and face identity learning in newborns.

{ Infant and Child Development | PDF }

oil on canvas { Mark Ryden }

The behavior of crowds at heavy metal concerts […]. In these crowds, fans often form circles called mosh pits and then run together with physical abandon, bouncing off one another with arms flaying and legs kicking.

“The collective mood is influenced by the combination of loud, fast music (130 dB, 350 beats per minute), synchronized with bright, flashing lights, and frequent intoxication,” say Jesse Silverberg and pals at Cornell University in Ithaca.

The resulting disorder may sound chaotic but Silverberg and co say it turns out to have all the properties of self-organised emergent behaviour. Today, they reveal the results of their study of this phenomenon.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

The study suggests that we have limited ability to perceive mixed color-shape associations among objects that exist in several locations. […]

Say, for example, a person sees a string of letters, “XOOX,” and the letters are printed in alternating colors, red and green. Both letter shape and letter color need to be encoded, but the associations between letter shape and letter color are mixed (i.e., the first X is red, while the second X is green), which should make neural synchrony impossible.

“The perceptual system can either know how many Xs there are or how many reds there are, but it cannot know both at the same time,” Goldfarb and Treisman explain.

{ APS | Continue reading }

graphite, paint, and ink on paper { Abu Bakarr Mansaray }

In other words, people with depression are not pessimists, they are realists.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

photo { Jesse Untracht-Oakner }

To determine whether “folk myths” regarding the relationships of penile size to body height and foot size have any basis in fact, 63 normally virilized men were studied. Height and stretched penile length were measured; shoe size was recorded and converted to foot length. Penile length was found to be statistically related to both body height and foot length, but with weak correlation coefficients. Height and foot size would not serve as practical estimators of penis length.

{ Annals of Sex Research, 1993 }

Gary and members of his law firm filed a lawsuit late Monday in federal court in Fort Pierce on behalf of Chubby Checker, the 71-year-old singer known for “The Twist,” against Hewlett-Packard and its subsidiary Palm Inc. over the use of Checker’s name on a software application that claims to estimate the size of a man’s penis based on his shoe size…

{ via Improbable | Continue reading }

photo { Leon Levinstein }

Teenagers from all walks of life who believe people can’t change react more aggressively to a peer conflict than those who think people can change. And teaching them that people have the potential to change can reduce these aggressive reactions. […]

The researchers who carried out this study sought to determine whether teens in any environment (rich or poor, violent or nonviolent) could develop a belief—that people’s character traits are fixed and can’t change—that led them to react aggressively.

“Our past research showed that believing people’s traits are fixed leads teens to think the world is full of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, with nobody in between; they are then quick to classify people as one or the other,” according to David Yeager, assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, the study’s lead investigator. “In our new research, we found that teens in this ‘fixed’ mindset, even after a minor offense like getting bumped in the hall or being left out of a game of catch, relegated peers to the ‘bad person’ group, decided that they had offended on purpose, and want aggressive revenge.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

art { Julie Cockburn }

UFO reports have been evaluated in terms of the supposed reliability of eyewitness accounts and questionable photographic evidence. The constraints that interstellar distances, time and the conservation of energy impose on interstellar space travel for these supposed alien craft seem never to be considered by UFO proponents. Since they do provide descriptions of spacecraft of circular disks, cylinders and triangles that move strangely and rapidly and vary in size from 50 feet in diameter to 300 feet long, I undertake here to apply these constraints to the design of a hypothetical spacecraft in order to determine the feasibility of such craft and their use for interstellar travel. As a physicist and astronomer I think it important to consider not just the accounts of alien contact, but the physics of such a possibility as well.

For my model I have chosen a spacecraft with a crew of six that will leave its planet for a planet in the habitable zone of a star 10 light years away. It will be accelerated at a rate of 10 m/s² (10 meters per second squared) to a velocity of 0.5 times the velocity of light (0.5c, where c is the velocity of light). The time for it to reach this velocity is given by this equation:

t = v/a = 1.5×10⁸/10 = 3.06×10⁷s = 174 days

(a = acceleration in meters/second squared; v = velocity in meters/second; s = time seconds)

This is remarkably short compared to the nonrelativistic time of 20 years for the trip to the destination star. I have chosen 0.5c to minimize the relativistic mass increase of the spacecraft and to minimize travel time. The acceleration rate is approximately equal to the gravity the crew would experience on an earth-like home planet.

The spacecraft would be constructed in orbit from components delivered by shuttles. It would include, in addition to engines and fuel, an internal power supply for all the operational systems as well as life support systems and sustenance for the crew. For a 20-year trip this would necessarily be a small nuclear reactor. A mechanism for rotating the crew’s quarters to provide artificial gravity would be essential. I have chosen a live crew rather than robots or androids because all of the alien encounter and abduction stories indicate their presence. A shuttle for transporting the crew to the surface of the destination planet would also have to be on board.

Our current space shuttles have an unloaded mass of 10⁵ kg. Consequently, considering all of the requirements, a mass of 10⁷ kg is not unreasonable for our model. The kinetic energy of the spacecraft, defined as the energy any object has by virtue of its motion, at 0.5c is

E = ½mv2 = 0.5×10⁷×2.25×10¹⁶ = 1.13×10²³ joules

(m is the mass of the spacecraft and v is the velocity equal to 0.5c).

This is the energy that must be supplied by engine thrust to reach 0.5c

The only source that can supply energy of this magnitude is thermonuclear fusion. […] This energy would be expended over the 174 days of acceleration and is equal to 1.8 megatons per second during acceleration. […] For propulsion of the hypothetical spacecraft the blast energy would have to be converted, with near 100% efficiency, to a constrained unidirectional particle beam with thrust pulses of 1.8 megatons per second for 174 days. For a round trip to a star 10 light years distant this rate of energy expenditure would be needed for slowing down at the destination, leaving, and slowing down again when returning to the home planet after a 40 year expedition.

A lesser source than thermonuclear fusion would be inadequate to provide the required energy for traveling at 0.5c. A lower velocity would mean travel times of hundreds to thousands of years. A lower acceleration rate would greatly increase the time to reach the desired velocity. […]

There is no possible material construction that can constrain and direct the thermal and blast energy of the nuclear fusion rate required for interstellar travel. Consequently, I conclude that alien spacecraft cannot exist.

{ Skeptic | Continue reading }

Any spacecraft, whether from present or future technology, would have a significant inertial mass. Ten thousand years from now conservation of energy will apply anywhere in the galaxy as well as it does today. […]

In point of fact we do have proof of the effects of two megaton unconstrained nuclear fusion reactions, and because of the maximum cohesive force that electrons can create between protons no substance will remain solid above 5000ºC.

{ Skeptic | Continue reading }

There is human DNA discarded carelessly all over New York City and one artist has been picking up a little of it and making facial reconstructions of what its owner might look like.

“I’ve worked with face recognition and speech recognition algorithms in the past, but I had never considered the emerging possibility of genetic surveillance; that the very things that make us human: hair, skin, saliva, become a liability as we constantly face the possibility of shedding these traces in public space, leaving artifacts which anyone could come along and mine for information,” Heather Dewey-Hagborg, a self-described information artist, wrote in a blog post introducing the concept that she has spent about a year working on. […]

She has taken DNA samples found on the streets of New York City from cigarette butts and gums and has been able to determine gender, ethnicity (based on the mother’s side) and eye color.

{ The Blaze | Continue reading | The Boston Globe | DNA could be used to visually recreate a person’s face }

Memory is a strange thing. Just using the verb “smash” in a question about a car crash instead of “bump” or “hit” causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There’s a way around it, however: get a robot to ask the questions. […]

Two groups - one with a human and one a robot interviewer - were asked identical questions that introduced false information about the crime, mentioning objects that were not in the scene, then asking about them later. When posed by humans, the questions caused the witnesses’ recall accuracy to drop by 40 per cent - compared with those that did not receive misinformation - as they remembered objects that were never there. But misinformation presented by the NAO robot didn’t have an effect.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Hunger, thirst, stress and drugs can create a change in the brain that transforms a repulsive feeling into a strong positive “wanting,” a new University of Michigan study indicates.

The research used salt appetite to show how powerful natural mechanisms of brain desires can instantly transform a cue that always predicted a repulsive Dead Sea Salt solution into an eagerly wanted beacon or motivational magnet. […]

This instant transformation of motivation, he said, lies in the ability of events to activate particular brain circuitry.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Interest in sensations from removed body parts other than limbs has increased with modern surgical techniques. This applies particularly to operations (e.g., gender-changing surgeries) that have resulted in phantom genitalia. The impression given in modern accounts, especially those dealing with phantoms associated with penis amputation, is that this is a recently discovered phenomenon. Yet the historical record reveals several cases of phantom penises dating from the late-eighteenth century and the early-nineteenth century. These cases, recorded by some of the leading medical and surgical figures of the era, are of considerable historical and theoretical significance. This is partly because these phantoms were associated with pleasurable sensations, in contrast to the loss of a limb, which for centuries had been associated with painful phantoms. We here present several early reports on phantom penile sensations, with the intent of showing what had been described and why more than 200 years ago.

{ Taylor & Francis | Continue reading }

related { Study of a rare disease making people look like a woman but having male genitals under study }

Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to use $400 million in federal funding to buy beachfront homes as he seeks to reshape the New York coastline so the state is better prepared for storms like Hurricane Sandy.

The cash would come from the $51 billion Congress approved last month to help the region recover from the Oct. 29 storm.

The governor would use the money to pay owners the pre-storm value of their homes. More than 300,000 houses in New York were damaged by Sandy.

Once sold, the houses would be razed and the land would remain vacant.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Modern physics deals with some ridiculously non-intuitive stuff. Objects act as though they gain mass the faster they move. An electron can’t decide if it’s a particle, a wave or both. However, there is one statement that takes the cake on sounding like crazy talk: Empty space isn’t empty.

If you take a container, pump all the air out of it, shield it from electric fields and plop it in the deepest of intergalactic space to get it away from gravitational fields, that container should contain absolutely nothing. However, that’s not what happens.

At the quantum scale, space is a writhing, frantic, ever-changing foam, with particles popping into existence and disappearing in the wink of an eye. This is not just a theoretical idea—it’s confirmed. How can this bizarre idea be true?

Even though in classical physics we are taught that energy is conserved, which means it cannot change, one of the tenets of quantum mechanics says that energy doesn’t have to be conserved if the change happens for a short enough time. So even if space had zero energy, it would be perfectly OK for a little energy to pop into existence for a tiny split second and then disappear—and that’s what happens in empty space. And since energy and matter are the same (thank Einstein for teaching us that E=mc2 thing), matter can also appear and disappear.

And this appears everywhere. At the quantum level, matter and antimatter particles are constantly popping into existence and popping back out, with an electron-positron pair here and a top quark-antiquark pair there. This behavior is the reason that scientists call these ephemeral particles “quantum foam”: It’s similar to how bubbles in foam form and then pop.

{ Fermilab | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Adams }

[T]he Forer effect, named after its inventor, psychologist Bertram Forer. In 1948, he set up an experiment where he gave personality tests to a number of subjects, then used them to see if he could construct an accurate personality summary. […]

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

In reality, that is the exact same analysis Forer gave to every one of his subjects, compiled from a bunch of random horoscopes.

{ Cracked | Continue reading }

In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II. […]

I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not. […]

“You never saw it,” Michael repeated. “We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it.” Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David’s words, and then appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own. […]

All of us “transfer” experiences to some extent, and at times we are not sure whether an experience was something we were told or read about, even dreamed about, or something that actually happened to us. […]

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else.

{ NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Phil Stern, Robert Aldrich, Casting Pin Up Girl for “Attack,” 1947 }

For over two decades researchers have shown that there are unexpected consequences when an individual actively tries to avoid certain thoughts. First, you will start thinking about the thought you are trying to avoid more. Second, if the thought is about a behavior, you increase the likelihood of engaging in that behavior. In short, avoidance makes you less able to control what you think and what you do. Further research is necessary to explore why thought avoidance is such a prolific self-control strategy when all available evidence points to its counterintuitive consequences. […]

Thought suppression commonly refers to the act of deliberately trying to rid the mind of unwanted thoughts. In early investigations researchers demonstrated that the suppression of a particular thought often resulted in the subsequent increased return of the unwanted thought, a phenomenon termed the ‘rebound effect.’ This basic effect has been replicated on many occasions, and a more recent meta-analysis suggests the rebound effect is robust.

Therefore, there is currently a general acceptance of the view that thought suppression does not work as a strategy for controlling one’s mind, and if anything makes one more susceptible to unwanted intrusive thoughts. For example, after watching a disturbing news item, I may attempt to suppress thoughts about this disturbing footage. However, the likely outcome of this will be that I will think about the footage more not less, and I may even begin to feel obsessed. […]

Studies have reported that thought suppression can have behavioral consequences. […] How many times have you carried a tray of food or drink thinking whatever happens I must not spill this, only to then redecorate the living room with it? These errors seem to plague us and chastise us all the more so because we knew exactly what we shouldn’t have done ahead of time. Thereby, it seems that the act of trying not to, or suppressing invites one to do exactly the opposite. […]

One must avoid using thought suppression in instances where one is attempting to control a behavior. This is especially pertinent when attempting to control behaviors such as smoking, excessive alcohol or food intake, as these are likely areas where thought suppression will feature as a control strategy.

{ The Psychologist | Continue reading }

People usually associate the color black with aggression. Previous studies have revealed that people are perceived as more aggressive, and act more aggressively, when wearing dark clothes. To investigate the influence of black clothing on criminal justice agency personnel, this study examined whether police departments that wear dark uniforms are more aggressive than those that wear lighter uniforms. It was predicted that departments utilizing black uniforms would experience more assaults on officers, citizens killed by police, and excessive force complaints. No statistically significant difference was found between departments wearing black and light uniforms.

{ Criminal Justice and Behavior | Continue reading }

Several experimental studies have shown that human social relationships are positively affected by the weather. Cunningham (1979) found that participants approached by an interviewer to participate in a survey were less reluctant to comply on sunny days compared with cloudy days. In a second study by this author the outside level of sunshine was found to be significantly related to the gratuity left by restaurant customers for a waitress. Hirshleifer and Shumway (2003) reported that sunshine level was positively correlated with returns on the stock market. Simonsohn (2007), examining actual university admission decisions, found that applicants’ academic attributes were weighted more heavily on cloudy days while non-academic attributes were weighted more heavily on sunny days. […]

Rind (1996) conducted an experiment in hotel rooms that did not have windows. A male server who delivered food and drinks to the rooms reported the sky conditions (sunny, partly sunny, cloudy, or rainy) to guests. More tips were left when the server mentioned pleasant weather conditions. In the study by Rind and Strohmetz (2001) a server in a restaurant was asked to either leave the backs of customers’ checks blank or to write one of two messages: that the weather would be good the next day or that the weather would not be so good the next day. More tips were found to be left by the customers when they were given a favorable forecast. […]

If actual or expected pleasant weather conditions facilitate positive social relationships, we can hypothesize that other behaviors, such as a courtship solicitation, are affected by weather. […]

Young women were more likely to give their phone number to a young man when solicited during sunny days.

{ Taylor & Francis | Continue reading }

The manner in which men and women evaluate potential romantic partners has been a prominent topic of evolutionary psychology for the past several decades. The impact of an individual’s sexual history on his or her desirability to potential mates has traditionally been an area of particular interest. Numerous studies have shown that having many past sexual partners adversely impacts one’s desirability as a potential mate.

This finding has been described as a manifestation of psychological mechanisms designed to avoid cuckoldry and ensure selection of more committed partners. If this explanation is correct, then the amount of time elapsed since the end of one’s previous relationship should also influence his or her desirability as a mate; specifically, a man’s or woman’s recently-ended intimate relationship could pose a risk to their potential partner’s reproductive fitness through resource diversion or cuckoldry, respectively. The recency hypothesis has not been empirically examined and is the focus of the present investigation.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }