What’s the best way to overcome depression? Antidepressant drugs, or Buddhist meditation?
A new trial has examined this question. The short answer is that 8 weeks of mindfulness mediation training was just as good as prolonged antidepressant treatment over 18 months. But like all clinical trials, there are some catches.
Sex costs amazing amounts of time and energy. Just take birds of paradise touting their tails, stags jousting with their antlers or singles spending their weekends in loud and sweaty bars. Is sex really worth all the effort that we, sexual species, collectively put into it?
Most biologists think that sex is totally worth it. With sex, every new generation receives a fresh combination of genes from its parents. This makes it easier to adapt to changing environments, as genes can spread quickly through a population.
In asexual species every child will be genetically identical to its parents, making it hard to compensate for disadvantageous mutations. Biologists expect that deleterious mutations will pile up in asexual species in a process known as Muller’s ratchet. With every mutation in an asexual lineage, Muller’s ratchet clicks one step closer to extinction.
People’s predilections for promiscuity lie partially in their DNA, according to a new study.
A particular version of a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4 is linked to people’s tendency toward both infidelity and uncommitted one-night stands, the researchers reported Nov. 30 in the online open-access journal PloS One.
The same gene has already been linked to alcoholism and gambling addiction, as well as less destructive thrills like a love of horror films. One study linked the gene to an openness to new social situations, which in turn correlated with political liberalism.
Other muscles can simulate a smile, but only the peculiar tango of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. Psychologists call this the “Duchenne smile,” and most consider it the sole indicator of true enjoyment. The name is a nod to French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne, who studied emotional expression by stimulating various facial muscles with electrical currents. (The technique hurt so much, it’s been said, that Duchenne performed some of his tests on the severed heads of executed criminals.)
In his 1862 book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, Duchenne wrote that the zygomatic major can be willed into action, but that only the “sweet emotions of the soul” force the orbicularis oculi to contract. “Its inertia, in smiling,” Duchenne wrote, “unmasks a false friend.”
Psychological scientists no longer study beheaded rogues — just graduate students, mainly — but they have advanced our understanding of smiles since Duchenne’s discoveries. We now know that genuine smiles may indeed reflect a “sweet soul.” The intensity of a true grin can predict marital happiness, personal well-being, and even longevity. We know that some smiles — Duchenne’s false friends — do not reflect enjoyment at all, but rather a wide range of emotions, including embarrassment, deceit, and grief. We know that variables (age, gender, culture, and social setting, among them) influence the frequency and character of a grin, and what purpose smiles play in the broader scheme of existence. In short, scientists have learned that one of humanity’s simplest expressions is beautifully complex.
Human intelligence is puzzling. It is higher, on average, in some places than in others. And it seems to have been rising in recent decades. Why these two things should be true is controversial. This week, though, a group of researchers at the University of New Mexico propose the same explanation for both: the effect of infectious disease. If they are right, it suggests that the control of such diseases is crucial to a country’s development in a way that had not been appreciated before. Places that harbour a lot of parasites and pathogens not only suffer the debilitating effects of disease on their workforces, but also have their human capital eroded, child by child, from birth.
Nobel prize nominee Umberto Veronesi raised some controversy a couple of years ago when he stated that he believed humanity was moving towards a bisexual future. The famous oncologist was not just looking to raise havoc. He actually had some good points to make. For example, he cited the scientific fact that the vitality of male reproductive cells has gone down by 50% since the end of World War II.
Based on evidence about the dissociation between sexuality and reproduction, the endless possibilities of artificial fertilization, and the fact that men and women are producing less and less hormones every day, Veronesi predicted that, as sexual interaction will lose its mainly reproductive function, bisexuality will become the norm rather than the exception.
Despite being about as familiar and as commonplace as you can get, we still don’t have a clear understanding of why humans yawn.
We know we start yawning early. We know we yawn when we’re tired. We know we yawn when we’re bored. And we know that yawning can sometimes be contagious. But the function, the why, has been elusive.
A new paper by Giganti and Zilli ties together a couple of yawning’s features: that the amount people yawn varies throughout the day, and that yawns can be contagious. But does the contagiousness of yawns vary throughout the day? (…)
They tested their subjects several times on a single day. (…) Yawns are most contagious at 7:30 pm. (…)
The paper suggests there are at least two kinds of yawns, a spontaneous yawn and a yawn in a social setting. Maybe the reason yawns have thwarted our efforts to understand them is that a single explanation for yawns you make alone completely fail when you try to apply it to yawns you make around other people.
Natural selection acts by winnowing the individuals of each generation, sometimes clumsily, as old parts and genes are co-opted for new roles. As a result, all species inhabit bodies imperfect for the lives they live. Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day. Here are ten. (…)
2. Hiccups
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away. (…)
6. We’re awfully cold in winter
Fur is a warm hug on a cold day, useful and nearly ubiquitous among mammals. But we and a few other species, such as naked mole rats, lost it when we lived in tropical environments. Debate remains as to why this happened, but the most plausible explanation is that when modern humans began to live in larger groups, our hair filled with more and more ticks and lice. Individuals with less hair were perhaps less likely to get parasite-borne diseases. Being hairless in Africa was not so bad, but once we moved into Arctic lands, it had real drawbacks.
7. Goosebumps don’t really help
When our ancestors were covered in fur, muscles in their skin called “arrector pili” contracted when they were upset or cold, making their fur stand on end. When an angry or frightened dog barks at you, these are the muscles that raise its bristling hair. The same muscles puff up the feathers of birds and the fur of mammals on cold days to help keep them warm. Although we no longer have fur, we still have fur muscles just beneath our skin. They flex each time we are scared by a bristling dog or chilled by a wind, and in doing so give us goose bumps that make our thin hair stand uselessly on end.
8. Our brains squeeze our teeth
A genetic mutation in our recent ancestors caused their descendants to have roomy skulls that accommodated larger brains. This may seem like pure success—brilliance, or its antecedent anyway. But the gene that made way for a larger brain did so by diverting bone away from our jaws, which caused them to become thinner and smaller. With smaller jaws, we could not eat tough food as easily as our thicker-jawed ancestors, but we could think our way out of that problem with the use of fire and stone tools. Yet because our teeth are roughly the same size as they have long been, our shrinking jaws don’t leave enough room for them in our mouths. Our wisdom teeth need to be pulled because our brains are too big.
Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.
Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.
Study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems. The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower.
There is also evidence from a study with animals in zoos in Japan that elephants have considerable numerical skills.
Elephants have proved adept at recognising the difference between two quantities of objects as they were placed into buckets. It is a test which has also been done with a range of primates, including human children.
According to Professor Byrne, elephants outperformed all those other species. “Their abilities didn’t seem to be limited in quite the same way as monkeys, apes and children would be.”
Take a look at the periodic table and you’ll find that almost all the elements up to the atomic number 94 occur on Earth in relatively decent amounts. In addition, nuclear physicists can prepare samples of elements up to 104 because they form as by-products of the decay of other elements.
Beyond that, the so-called superheavy elements have to be made by hand, using particle accelerators to fuse nuclei together. In this way, physicists have fashioned elements with atomic numbers all the way up to 118. Atoms of these elements survive for only a fraction of a second before decaying, which is why they don’t occur naturally on Earth.
But these elements are more stable than physicists originally thought, leading to the prediction that there ought to be an “island of stability” for superheavy elements further up the periodic table.
That raises an interesting question: why don’t we see these elements on Earth? The answer, according to Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is that we do see them, but only in concentrations too small for most analytical techniques to detect.
He’s even claimed to have found the superheavy element 122 in a sample of thorium.
Today, Marinov is back with a similar claim. He says that the superheavy element 111, also known as roentgenium, is chemically similar to gold and so ought to be found in tiny quantities in any lump of gold.
Cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperature (below −150 °C, −238 °F or 123 K) and the behavior of materials at those temperatures.
The word cryogenics stems from Greek and means “the production of freezing cold”; however the term is used today as a synonym for the low-temperature state. It is not well-defined at what point on the temperature scale refrigeration ends and cryogenics begins, but most scientists assume it starts at or below -240 °F (about -150 °C or 123 K).
Memory difficulties such as those seen in dementia may arise because the brain forms incomplete memories that are more easily confused, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. The findings are published today in the journal Science.
Currently, memory problems are typically perceived to be the result of forgetting previously encountered items or events. The new research (using an animal model of amnesia), however, found that the ability of the brain to maintain complete, detailed memories is disrupted. The remaining, less detailed memories are relatively easily confused, leading to an increased likelihood of falsely remembering information that was not encountered.
Dr Lisa Saksida, from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, said: “This study suggests that a major component of memory problems may actually be confusion between memories, rather than loss of memories per se.
Assuming you’re in a heterosexual relationship, which is worse: for your partner to be unfaithful with a person of the opposite or the same sex?
According to a pair of US psychologists, the answer depends on whether you’re a man or woman. Men, they’ve found, are less likely to continue a relationship with an unfaithful partner who’s had a heterosexual affair, as opposed to a homosexual affair. For women, it’s the other way around - they’re more troubled by their male partner going off with another man.
NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. (…) NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic.
Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus — one of six elements considered essential for life — opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about.
The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.
Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.”
Why does a child grow up to become a lawyer, a politician, a professional athlete, an environmentalist or a churchgoer?
It’s determined by our inherited genes, say some researchers. Still others say the driving force is our upbringing and the nurturing we get from our parents.
But a new child-development theory bridges those two models, says psychologist George W. Holden at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Holden’s theory holds that the way a child turns out can be determined in large part by the day-to-day decisions made by the parents who guide that child’s growth.
Parental guidance is key. Child development researchers largely have ignored the importance of parental “guidance,” Holden says. In his model, effective parents observe, recognize and assess their child’s individual genetic characteristics, then cultivate their child’s strengths.
In 2005, the French city of Lyon introduced a shared bicycle system called Velo’v that has since inspired numerous other schemes around the world.
Velo’v differed from earlier schemes in its innovative technology, such as electronic locks, onboard computers and access via smart cards. The system now offers some 4000 bikes at almost 350 stations around the city. (…)
Since its introduction, the system has kept track of the start and finishing location plus travel time of every journey. Today, we get a detailed analysis of this data. (…)
Some of what they found is unsurprising. Over an average trip, cyclists travel 2.49 km in 14.7 minutes so their average speed is about 10 km/h. (…) During the rush hour, however, the average speed rises to almost 15 km/h, a speed which outstrips the average car speed. (…)
Curiously, the Wednesday morning speeds are systematically higher than on other days, even though there is no change in other factors such as the number of cars. This, say Jensen and co, is probably because women tend to stay at home and look after their children on a Wednesday in France. So the higher proportion of men pushes up the average speed.
Murder followed by suicide is not an uncommon event, and several research reports have appeared on the topic. For example, Palermo, et al. (1997) found that typical murder-suicide in the Midwest of America was a white man, murdering a spouse, with a gun in the home. In England, Milroy (1993) reported that 5% to 10% of murderers committed suicide. Most were men killing spouses, with men killing children second in frequency. Shooting was the most common method. Similar patterns have been observed in Canada and Japan.
Mass murder has become quite common in recent years, from workers at post offices “going postal” to school children killing their peers in school. (…)
There are many categories of mass homicide, including familicides, terrorists, and those who simply “run amok.” (…)
Holmes and Holmes (1992) classified mass killers into five types: Disciples (killers following a charismatic leader), family annihilators (those killing their families), pseudocommandos (those acting like soldiers), disgruntled employees, and set-and-run killers (setting a death trap and leaving, such as poisoning food containers or over-the-counter medications).
It has been difficult to study several of these categories of mass murderers because no one has developed a comprehensive list of murderers falling into the groups. The only category studied hitherto has been the pseudocommandos (also known as rampage murders). (…)
The 98 incidents with a single perpetrator took place from 1949 to 1999, with 90% taking place in the period 1980-1999. (…) 56 of the killers were captured, 7 were killed by the police and one by a civilian, and 34 completed suicide at the time of the act (that is, within a few hours of the first killing and before capture). (…)
In contrast to mass murder, serial killers are defined as those who kill three or more victims over a period of at least thirty days (Lester, 1995). No study had appeared prior to 2008 on the extent to which serial killers complete suicide, but the informal impression gained from studying the cases (e.g., Lester, 1995) is that suicide is less common among them. However, occasional serial killers do complete suicide. (…)
Some serial killers commit suicide after being sent to prison. (…)
Some serial killers have made failed suicide attempts (e.g., Cary Stayner) before they embarked upon their serial killing. They appear to have turned their suicidal urges into murderous rampages.
A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder.
It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains–that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.
A new program enables a robot to detect whether another robot is susceptible to lies, and to use its gullibility against it by telling lies, researchers claim.
The robot could be capable of deceiving humans in a similar way, according to the scientists, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Scientists are trying to teach robots to read - so they can understand road signs and shop names to ‘live’ for themselves.
Experts believe developing literate artificial intelligence should be relatively simple because computers are already able to turn scanned books into text.
According to Slashdot and some awesome guy named Big Alan (AKA Alan Hirsch):
… the key to a man’s heart, and other parts, is pumpkin pie. Out of the 40 odors tested in Hirsch’s study, a mixture of lavender and pumpkin pie got the biggest rise out of men ages 18 to 64. That particular fragrance was found to increase penile blood flow by an average of 40%. “Maybe the odors acted to reduce anxiety. By reducing anxiety, it acted to remove inhibitions,” said Hirsch.
