`Problem drinkers often don’t know how to take a joke or understand a punchline, according to German researchers.
In their study of 29 recovering alcoholic patients in a clinic in the western German city of Bochum, participants were tested to measure their mood, intellectual ability, memory, psychomotor skills and capacity to appreciate jokes. [..]
The researchers found a marked difference in the responses of the two groups, with less than 68 per cent of the alcoholics able to pick the right punchline, which the researchers said was option ‘d’, versus 92 per cent in the healthy control group.’
`[..] New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking – the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick – are far more common than people acknowledge.
These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.
The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. [..]
The brain seems to have networks that are specialized to produce an explicit, magical explanation in some circumstances, said Pascal Boyer, a professor of psychology and anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.’
`The world of marine biology is scratching its collective head after a female shark gave birth to a pup even though it had apparently been nowhere near a male of the species.
The bonnethead shark has been swimming in a tank at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, US, with two female companions for the past three years. [..]
The pregnancy could be a case of parthenogenesis – or asexual reproduction – which, although common in some amphibians, has never been reported before in sharks.
More likely, say the zoo’s scientists, the shark was impregnated before she came to the center and retained a male’s sperm in her reproductive tract until she was mature enough to conceive.’
`We are surprised to see our work on reprogramming adult stem cells used to support arguments that research involving human embryonic stem cells is unnecessary. On the contrary, we assert that human embryonic stem cells hold great promise to find new treatments and cures for diseases. …
The work that we performed and that was cited in the White House policy report is precisely the type of research that is currently being harmed by the President’s arbitrary limitation on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. …
We feel that the President’s restrictive policy has directly impeded research that provides a hope for cures for millions of Americans. …’
`Drinking tea can reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke, but only if milk is not added to the brew, German scientists have said.
Research has shown tea improves blood flow and the ability of the arteries to relax, but researchers at the Charite Hospital at the University of Berlin in Mitte found milk eliminates the protective effect against cardiovascular disease.
“The beneficial effects of drinking black tea are completely prevented by the addition of milk, said Dr Verena Stangl, a cardiologist at the hospital.’
`Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.’
Long article, but interesting. I didn’t realise pig shit turned ponds pink. :)
`Let me tell you why they are so cool.’
`The graph shown above relates the arithmetic mean IQ measured in various country’s populations, to the fraction of each country’s population that believes religion is very important.
The green diamonds represent individual countries; the yellow line is a linear regression (y = mx + b), calculated by the least squares method. The United States data point is circled in red.’
The gist is that religiosity is inversely proportional to intelligence. I’m not all that surprised. [shrug] :)
`It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe – and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.
Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look. [..]
He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, – Nasa’s current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second – it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy.’
`New research shows that the level of nicotine in major brands of American cigarettes has gone up by 11 per cent in the period 1998 to 2005. [..]
The scientists examined annual data submitted by tobacco manufacturers to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH). [..]
Upon analysing the data the scientists found that the manufacturers have increased the level of smoke nicotine yield in cigarettes by an average of 1.6 per cent for each year between 1998 and 2005. And they did this in two ways. First by directly altering the concentration of nicotine, and secondly by changing the design features to increase the delivery efficiency of nicotine.’
`It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.
It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.
Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.’
`Rebels in eastern Congo have killed and eaten two silverback mountain gorillas, conservationists said Wednesday, warning they fear more of the endangered animals may have been slaughtered in the lawless region.
Only about 700 mountain gorillas remain in the world, 380 of them spread across a range of volcanic mountains straddling the borders of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda in Central Africa.
One dismembered gorilla corpse was found Tuesday in a pit latrine in Congo’s Virunga National Park, a few hundred yards from a park patrol post that was abandoned because of rebel attacks, according to the London-based Africa Conservation Fund. Another was killed in the same area on Jan. 5, said the group, which based its report on conservationists in the field.’
`With studies showing that U.S. jails can’t enforce bans on sex between inmates, lawmakers and AIDS-prevention advocates say it’s time to start distributing condoms in Washington prisons.
Legislators are pushing a bill calling for a five-year plan to reduce the number of sexually transmitted infections among inmates.
Though the bill does not specify condom distribution, its prime sponsor, Rep. Jeannie Darneille, D-Tacoma, said she hoped it would rekindle stalled discussions about providing inmates with protection. “We have to start somewhere,” she said.’
`Although advances in oncology have brought therapies to deal with many different cancers, pancreatic cancer remains very difficult to treat. Worse yet, unlike lung cancer and smoking, or cervical cancer and HPV, little has been known about the etiology of the disease. Now a new study has revealed a link between pancreatic cancer and a relatively common infection, one that many people might find surprising: gum disease.
The link arose from data gathered from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. This long-running study began two decades ago and involves men working in health-care professions returning a survey every two years. As it turns out, after controlling for age, BMI, smoking and other factors, periodontal disease carried a 63 percent higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer.’
`Your 14-year-old daughter shows up on MySpace in a bikini. Her 13-year-old friend is wearing a miniskirt that might make Britney Spears blush. Time to panic? Not necessarily.
Wearing short-shorts and belly shirts, grinding to hip-hop hits, and posting provocative pictures of themselves on the Internet – the behavior of many teen and tween girls has parents wondering if their daughters are bound for a lifetime of promiscuity and loose morals.
But some psychologists and child-development specialists believe nothing about the teenage drama has really changed. While young women may express their sexuality more overtly than they have in the past, for the most part, their behavior isn’t cause for alarm. It’s a necessary step in growing up.’
`New research by the University of Warwick reveals that a Nobel Prize brings more than just cash and kudos – it can also add nearly two years to your life.
The research by Professor Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, and Matthew Rablen, (a former Warwick postgraduate researcher now a government economist), is published this month in a study entitled “Mortality and Immortality”. [..]
Professor Oswald said: “Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic. Once we do the statistical corrections, walking across that platform in Stockholm apparently adds about 2 years to a scientist’s life-span. How status does this, we just don’t know.”‘
This is the official “Account of the Accident”. It’s quite long but kinda interesting, if you like that sorta thing. :)
The full report is also available.
`Better-for-you snacking has come down to this: fresh fruit all but guaranteed to make kids belch.
It’s Fizzy Fruit – whole grapes or slices of apples or pineapples carbonated in a secret process with the same carbon dioxide that’s in soft drinks but without added sugar. [..]
Food scientist Steven Witherly predicts kids may like it so much that overall fruit consumption actually could rise. But Witherly, author of the upcoming book Why Humans Like Junk Food, warns, “The consumption of non-fizzed fruit may decrease.”
One nutritionist is concerned. “Will this get kids used to eating fruit in an unnatural form and deter them from eating it in a natural form?” asks Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. “It’s sad that we’ve come to this state of affairs.”‘
`Parts of the original DARPAnet were built like a tank to survive a thermonuclear holocaust. But much post-modern net construction is utterly gossamer, all air and microwaves. Wherever the two come together, boxes full of integrated circuits bear labels that specify how much power they can handle, and solid state textbooks reveal how much of the silicon gets hot, and how much just sits around. In short, you can do the math.
A statistically rough (one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz, straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.
Applying the unreasonable power of dimensional analysis to the small tonnage of silicon involved yields much the same result. [..]’
An amusing little web comic.
`The BBC came under new fire after it announced plans for a £200,000 TV documentary devoted to the most offensive word in the English language.
The programme – tentatively titled I love The C-Word – is billed as examining why the word has become more mainstream in recent years. [..]
Both the BBC and North One claimed it will not be sensationalist. A spokeswoman for the programme said: “It will look at how a word that was considered completely unacceptable has moved into the mainstream, particularly by younger people. The tone will be a serious exploration of the word.”‘
This gas is denser than air, so you can do some interesting things with it. It will make your voice deeper if you inhale it, and you can float little boats on it. Fun. :)
The wiki has more information about sulphur hexafluoride.
see it here »
`The birth of a rhino is to be captured on a BBC-run webcam in what zookeepers believe will be a world first.
Sita, a one-tonne black rhino, is due to give birth this month at Paignton Zoo, in Devon, where cameras are being trained on her paddock 24 hours a day.
The zoo said there was no existing footage of a black rhino being born in a zoo anywhere in the world.’
`Auckland University scientists have revealed that eruptions of supervolcanoes powerful enough to change the climate and cause mass-extinction can be worse than previously thought. [..]
Such large eruptions of greater than 100 cubic kilometres of magma are generally rare and random events worldwide.
But geologist Darren Gravley of Auckland University and his colleagues have shown that one of the largest supervolcano eruptions on record, at Taupo 250,000 years ago, was twice as big as previously thought.’
Maybe I’m a bit stupid, but I don’t see how much worse than mass-extinction it could get. [shrug] It’s not like we’re going to be thinking “Oh, I’m glad it wasn’t any worse” once we’re already dead. :)
`Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. [..]
A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen.’
There’s also a ball lightning video.
`The most spectacular comet in 40 years, named after the Australian astronomer who discovered it, will streak through the southern hemisphere over the next month.
Clear skies permitting, McNaught’s Comet will reveal itself against the western horizon at sunset, beginning on Saturday. [..]
It has already appeared in the northern hemisphere and will be visible for up to one month but will burn brightest on Monday evening, fellow ANU astronomer Paul Francis said.’
`Lifelong bilingualism can help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia in the elderly by an average of four years, according to a small study by Canadian researchers.
Patients who spoke more than one language reported memory loss or other dementia symptoms on average four years later than people who spoke only one language. [..]
Principal investigator Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist and associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, said the results were unusually clear.
“Rarely does a study give such clean results, so this was surprising to us,” she told CBC News Online.’
`British research suggests that up to 50 per cent of business managers could have psychopathic or similar tendencies.
The study carried out by the British Psychological Society says such managers are often articulate and confident, but can be unpredictable, self indulgent and lacking in empathy.
Psychology Professor Adrian Furnham says manipulative characteristics are often rewarded in the business world.
“Beware of the following individual, the good looking, educated, articulate and very bold and self confident leader,” he said.’
`NASA is investigating whether incorrect software commands may have doomed the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which abruptly fell silent last year after a decade of meticulously mapping the Red Planet.
The space agency said that theory is just one of several that may explain the probe’s failure. NASA on Wednesday announced the formation of an internal review board to investigate why the Global Surveyor lost contact with controllers during a routine adjustment of its solar array. [..]
The software was aimed at improving the spacecraft’s flight processors. Instead, bad commands may have overheated the battery and forced the spacecraft into safe mode [..]’
`You saw the stories that dominated the headlines in 2006: the war in Iraq, North Korea’s nuclear tests, and the U.S. midterm elections. But what about the news that remained under the radar? From the Bush administration’s post-Katrina power grab to a growing arms race in Latin America to the new hackable passports, FP delivers the Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006.’
