In recent years, economists and psychologists have joined forces to unravel the secrets of human happiness. “The Happiness Equation” is one researcher’s attempt to share his field’s discoveries with a broad audience. Nick Powdthavee, an economist at the University of York, deftly explains the main determinants of happiness: the small effect of money, the great effect of marriage and friends, the massive effect of personality. Even extremely good news (such as winning the lottery) and extremely bad news (such as losing a spouse) rarely changes an individual’s happiness for more than a couple of years. Mr. Powdthavee also explores the effect of happiness on success: Happiness today predicts higher job performance, better relationships and more years of health in the future.
Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.
Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.
researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.
The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory’s Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology.
We should expect men to be more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about short-term sexual attractions, while women have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. In contrast, women should be more more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about long-term pair-bonding, while men have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. By being more opaque on sensitive subjects, we can keep ourselves from giving off clear signals of an inclination to betray.
Do extraverts have more numerous and deeper social relationships? (…)
Recognising that our relationships aren’t monolithic, the researchers treated social networks as a set of three layers. The inner support group contains those people (typically around five) that you would turn to in a crisis. Around this are a further ten-odd people, a sympathy group who would be deeply affected by your death. Finally there is an outer layer of more variable size, containing people connected to you by weak ties. (…)
The researchers found extraverts had more people in every layer – more weak ties, but also more individuals they contacted frequently. Although larger social networks have been reported before, this study finds the effect after controlling for age, a potential confound in other studies. However, extraversion didn’t affect emotional closeness to their network: weak ties with occasional contacts don’t appear stronger in extraverts.
Intuition is one of those iffy concepts. Its purpose, use, and ontology have been heavily debated in its long and contentious history. Western proverbial jargon illustrates this: we’ve been told that he who hesitates is lost, but shouldn’t we look before we leap? And believe that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but don’t the clothes make the man?
Now, psychology is weighing in. However, in place of armchair-rationality, it is using empirical data to illustrate how we actually behave. With concrete data, it seems like the intuition debate could finally be put to rest. But the opposite has occurred. Psychology has shown both the powers and perils of intuition only to complicate matters. (…)
First, there is a question about perception: How much do we see? (…)
Second, there is a question about judgment and decision-making: Should I go with my gut? Or think things through?
It seems hard to imagine that anyone of sound mind would take the blame for something he did not do. But several researchers have found it surprisingly easy to make people fess up to invented misdemeanours. Admittedly these confessions are taking place in a laboratory rather than an interrogation room, so the stakes might not appear that high to the confessor. On the other hand, the pressures that can be brought to bear in a police station are much stronger than those in a lab. The upshot is that it seems worryingly simple to extract a false confession from someone—which he might find hard subsequently to retract.
Having pain that persists creates a lot of stress, but there are many people who can limit the effect on their life and carry on. These people seem to return to their everyday activities even if their pain hasn’t settled. Then there are the other people. This group have much more trouble managing with their pain. They have more disability, more distress, seek more treatments and the impact of their pain spreads from the direct effect on their life, to effects on people around them.
If we could identify, then treat the risk factors that can lead to trouble recovering from pain, we might be able to limit the long term effects that chronic pain can have on people and our community. While maybe 25 years ago the factors were thought to be biomechanical, or things like the extent of tissue damage – and yes, these do have some effect – over time it has become clear that psychosocial factors play an important role. (…)
Catastrophising has been identified as a risk factor for greater disability and distress. Catastrophising is the tendency to “think the worst” and has been viewed as an independent risk factor for longterm disability for some time.
What could be wrong with a gentleman opening a door for a lady? According to some social psychologists, such acts endorse gender stereotypes: the idea that women are weak and need help; that men are powerful patriarchs. Now a study has looked at how women are perceived when they accept or reject an act of so-called “benevolent sexism”* and it finds that they’re caught in a double-bind. Women who accept help from a man are seen as warmer, but less competent. Women who reject help are seen as more competent, but cold.
When lost in the desert or a thick forest — terrains devoid of landmarks — people tend to walk in circles. Blindfolded people show the same tendency; lacking external reference points, they curve around in loops as tight as 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter, all the while believing they are walking in straight lines. (…)
The researchers believe that loopy paths follow from a walker’s changing sense of “straight ahead.” With every step, a small deviation is likely added to a person’s cognitive sense of what’s straight, and these deviations accumulate to send that individual veering around in ever tighter circles as time goes on.
Turns out that your name is more influential than you think.
Researchers found that the “speed with which adults acquire items [correlates] to the first letter of their childhood surname.”
This means that when it comes to purchasing goods, people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the end of the alphabet tend to acquire items faster than people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet. They call it the “Last Name Effect,” and hypothesize that it is caused by “childhood ordering structure.”
In their words, “since those late in the alphabet are typically at the end of lines, they compensate by responding quickly to acquisition opportunities.”
‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background
The idea that other universes — as well as our own — lie within “bubbles” of space and time has received a boost.
Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “bubble universes” may have left marks on our own.
This “multiverse” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by. The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.
In our Solar System, planets fall into two types. First, there are the rocky planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus, which are similar in size and support gaseous atmospheres. Then there are the gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. These huge puff balls are two or more orders of magnitude bigger than their rocky cousins.
Perhaps strangest of all, there are no planets in between; nothing that sits on the borderline between rocky minnow and gas giant.
This sharp distinction has driven much of astronomers’ thinking about planet formation. One of the main challenges they have faced is to come up with a theory that explains the formation of two entirely different types of planet, but no hybrids that share characteristics of both.
That thinking will have to change. It now looks as if we’ve been fooled by our own Solar System. When astronomers look elsewhere, this two-tiered planetary division disappears.
Astrophysicists have now spotted more than 500 planets orbiting other stars and all of these systems seem entirely different to our Solar System. They’ve seen entirely new class of planets such as the Super-Jupiters that are many times larger than our biggest planet with orbits closer than Mercury.
But the one we’re interested in here has a mass that spans the range from Earth to Uranus, exactly the range that is missing from our Solar System.
Astronomers are calling these new types of planet Super-Earths, and so far they have found more than 30 of them.
According to a new study on tiny shrimp (Artemia franciscana), sex with partners from a different time could kill you.
Researchers at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE) in Montpellier, France, collected preserved brine shrimp eggs from various generations, and then reanimated them with water. Nicolas Rode and colleagues mated pairs of brine shrimp that had been reanimated from eggs preserved since 1985, 1996 and 2007, a period representing roughly 160 generations. They found that females that mated with males from the past or future died off sooner than those that mated with their own generation. The longer the time-shift, the earlier they died.
One potential contributing factor to increasing rates of overweight and obesity is the availability and affordability of a wide range of food choices. A variety of inexpensive fast food options provides consumers the ability to rotate restaurant selection and reduce the risk of monotony in food selection.
Animal studies demonstrate that animals provided the same types of food (or other types of rewards) tend to reduce the level of consumption. This is a behavioral trait known as habituation. Habituation represents the tendency to reduce total caloric intake when eating the same foods and to increase caloric intake when presented novel food choices. (…)
If you are interested in losing weight, eating the same thing daily may be a way to use the habituation process to aid calorie restriction.
Male seed beetles (Callosobruchus maculatus) have long spikes covering their penises [photo]. These spikes are thought to have evolved in response to female promiscuity, as a way of increasing the male’s chances of fertilizing a female’s eggs. Females, in response to the spikes, have evolved every man’s worst nightmare: spikes inside her vagina.
This is what evolutionary biologists call sexual conflict.
Males and females of a species have a common goal: to pass on their genes to the next generation. Sometimes, however, males and females have conflicting best strategies for getting that done. (…)
The penis of the male seed beetle punctures the female’s reproductive tract and, eventually, all those injuries will kill her. Females even have to kick the male constantly during mating to lessen the severity of the injuries–but she still won’t be deterred from hooking up again.
Why would male beetles want to harm females like this? (…)
While we’re on the topic of sharp penises that harm females, I thought I would throw in a little bed-bug action as well. Bed-bugs mate using what is known as “traumatic insemination.” Males bypass the female genitals entirely and pierce them in a specialized location on their bellies. They then ejaculate into the female sperm storage organ directly.
From amoeba to human, nearly all living things run on an internal clock, a circadian rhythm that regulates our respective business over a 24-hour period. (…)
But what if night stops coming, if daylight lasts all day? Stargazers already are seeing it. The illumination from streetlights and other artificial night lighting is now so persistently bright that 10 percent of the world’s population, and 40 percent of Americans, no longer view a night sky that the human eye perceives as fully dark. It’s a scientific loss for astronomers and a psychic one for the rest of us.
More and more, ecologists are finding that this false light also takes a toll on the natural world. Every year, night-migrating birds collide with bright buildings by the millions. Field studies have shown that artificial light changes the spawning times of certain species of coral and fish whose reproductive cycle depends on a lunar clock. It washes out the mating signals flashed by fireflies. One scientist found that a group of tree frogs halted their mating calls whenever the nearby football stadium held a night game and caused the sky to glow.
A tiny molecule harvested from a soil bacterium on Easter Island that evolved billions of years ago for no obvious purposes should have nothing to do with human beings. Yet it turns out miraculously to have potent immunosuppressive properties that allow doctors to successfully perform a liver transplant in a young girl.
In India, an excited young bride celebrates her upcoming wedding by coloring her hands bright yellow with turmeric, a spice that has been used for centuries as a key culinary ingredient. In France, a similar hallowed tradition demands a copious flow of red wine at weddings. In China, a bride and groom offer ginseng tea to their parents as part of a ritual.
Oblivious of all these events, thousands of miles away in the United States, scientists are struck by the remarkable effect that the active ingredients in turmeric, red wine and ginseng tea seem to have on a variety of disorders, from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Perhaps, they ardently hope, there’s a cure in there somewhere.
Chemistry is the human science. What the general public refers to as “chemicals” have a profound effect on our way of life. They can forge a bridge between the metabolism of a billion year-old sponge and the fervent hopes of a mother for her daughter’s life, between the joy of traditional weddings and food and that of seeing a loved one being cured of a terrible malady. Physics may concern itself with the beginnings of deep time and biology turns its eye on the origin of humanity itself. The wonders of physics and biology are undoubtedly spectacular, but chemistry is the science that most directly engages with our senses, the discipline that confronts us face-on every single day of our lives and demands that we react.
Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible. (…)
I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain.
For example, there are primarily three “atoms” of solid-object physical events: hits, slides and rings. Hits are when two objects hit one another, and slides where one slides along the other. Hits and slides are the two fundamental kinds of interaction. The third “atom” is the ring, which occurs to both objects involved in an interaction: each object undergoes periodic vibrations — they ring. They have a characteristic timbre, and your auditory system can usually recognize what kind of objects are involved. For starters, then, notice how the three atoms of solid-object physical events match up nicely with the three fundamental phoneme types: plosives, fricatives and sonorants. Namely, plosives (like t, k, p, d, g, b) sound like hits, fricatives (s, sh, f, z, v) sound like slides, and sonorants (vowels and also phonemes like y, w, r, l) sound like rings.
Researchers have begun to create a new technology that could soon allow humans and dolphins to talk to each other.
Dolphins have long been considered by scientists to be the most intelligent animals on the planet. But soon, with the help of newly developed underwater translation software, our two species may actually be able to talk to each other.
Armed with a waterproof computer, divers may soon be able to decipher the chirps of dolphins, then create and project an appropriate response, all in real time.
Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between “bring the surfboard to the man” and “bring the man to the surfboard”, for example.
