NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

Are there asexuals among us?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Jesse Bering - Nov. 11 (Opinion) - some scientists believe that there may be a fourth sexual orientation in our species, one characterized by the absence of desire and no sexual interest in males or females, only a complete and lifelong lacuna of sexual attraction toward any human being (or non-human being).

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The New Science of Temptation

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Piercarlo Valdesolo - Nov. 03 (News Report) - The power to resist temptation has been extolled by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, coaches, and mothers. Anyone with advice on how you should live your life has surely spoken to you of its benefits. It is the path to the good life, professional and personal satisfaction, social adjustment and success, performance under pressure, and the best way for any child to avoid a penetrating stare and a cold dinner. Of course, this assumes that our natural urges are a thing to be resisted – that there is a devil inside, luring you to cheat, offend, err, and annoy. New research has begun to question this assumption.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Birth of a Notion: Implicit Social Cognition and the "Birther" Movement

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Steve Mirsky - Oct. 01 (News Report) - A black president, however, causes great cognitive dissonance in some. But members of the “birther” movement have found a clever solution: Obama isn’t really president! Because he wasn’t really born in the USA!

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Europe Eyes Africa for Solar Power

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Paul Voosen - Jul. 24 (Special Report) - European government and industry have been eyeing tracts of sun-drenched, vacant land in North Africa and the Middle East for some time. And now, officials and business executives are beginning to sweat out the details that could see renewable power sprouting in the desert.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Did China's Nuclear Tests Kill Thousands and Doom Future Generations?

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Zeeya Merali - Jun. 22 (News Report) - Three decades on, Tohti, now a medical doctor, is launching an investigation into the toll still being taken—and one that the Chinese government steadfastly refuses to acknowledge. A few hundred thousand people may have died as a result of radiation from at least 40 nuclear explosions carried out between 1964 and 1996 at the Lop Nur site in Xinjiang

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Meditation on Demand

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Peter B. Reiner - May. 31 (Special Report) - In the fall of 2005, the Dalai Lama gave the inaugural Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. There were over 30,000 neuroscientists registered for the meeting, and it seemed as if most of them attended the talk. The Dalai Lama’s address was designed to highlight the areas of convergence between neuroscience and Buddhist thought about the mind, and to many in the audience he clearly achieved his objective. There was some controversy over his being invited to deliver this lecture insofar as he is both a head of state and a religious leader, and for that reason he largely stuck to his prepared text. But he strayed from the text at least once, reminding the audience that not only was he a Buddhist monk but also an enthusiastic proponent of modern technology.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Next Generation of Biofuels

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Melinda Wenner - Apr. 21 (Special Report) - Once the next generation of biofuels becomes available, you could swing by the local energy station and fill up on a liquid that is virtually identical to gasoline. It would be made by U.S. companies, not shipped from the Middle East. And even though biofuels release carbon dioxide when they are burned, the organisms they are made from draw an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the air—making biofuels essentially carbon-neutral.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Brian Vastag - Apr. 09 (Special Report) - In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Giving the Power Grid Some Backbone

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Matthew L. Wald - Apr. 07 (Special Report) - A stiff wind blows year-round in North Dakota. In Arizona the sun beats down virtually every day. The U.S. has vast quantities of renewable electricity sources waiting to be tapped in these regions, but what it does not have there are power lines—big power lines that can carry the bountiful energy to distant cities and industries where it is needed.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 9 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Cruel irony: Do renewable power plants threaten their surrounding environment?

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Larry Greenemeier - Mar. 26 (News Analysis) - Do the potential benefits of plants that use renewable sources such as wind and solar to generate energy outweigh the environmental damage that could be caused to make way for them? Californians are grappling with that very question as the state moves ahead with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to have utility companies generate one-third of the state's energy from renewable sources by 2020; today renewables account for 12 percent of their output.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Drilling the Arctic for Energy

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Adam Hadhazy - Mar. 25 (Interview) - On a day marking the 20th anniversary of the notorious Exxon Valdez oil spill, environmentalists urged lawmakers to reinstate a ban on new offshore drilling for oil and gas in vast expanses of the outer continental shelf—the land that extends off of North America's coasts under relatively shallow waters.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama's Climate Challenge: Winning the Carbon Game

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Chris Mooney - Mar. 23 (News Analysis) - When it comes to perhaps the largest and most complex policy challenge facing the Obama administration—finally slowing the pace of global warming before dangerous changes become unstoppable—the new president stares down a Dickensian paradox.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.1 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Creationism Feels Right, but That Doesn't Make it So

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Jesse Bering - Mar. 22 (Review) - Presently I’m attending a small symposium on “Belief and Reason” at Trinity College, Cambridge, being sponsored by the Perrott-Warrick Fund. It’s a rather intimate affair with mostly cognitive scientists discussing the latest research and theory on everything from paranormal beliefs to free will to the placebo effect. One of the standout talks Monday was by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who gave a presentation titled “Is Religion Natural?” He focused on the puzzling case of creationist beliefs.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Art of the Con--Learning from Bernard Madoff

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Michael Shermer - Mar. 04 (Special Report) - "The basic mechanism explaining the success of Ponzi schemes is the tendency of humans to model their actions, especially when dealing with matters they don't fully understand, on the behavior of other humans,"

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Father Factor

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Paul Raeburn - Jan. 30 (Research) - It is widely recognized that a 40-year-old woman has an increased risk of bearing a child with Down syndrome. What is not known is that a 40-year-old man has the same risk of fathering a child with schizophrenia—and even higher odds of his offspring having autism. The risk of bipolar disorder appears to rise as well. In the past couple of decades, the number of older fathers has increased. Birth rates for men older than 40 have jumped as much as 40 percent since 1980. The mechanisms behind the higher risks are still being investigated, although scientists have several hypotheses that could someday lead to better therapies or possibly even cures for these mental illnesses.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Workings of an Ancient Nuclear Reactor

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - Jan. 27 (Research) - In May 1972 a worker at a nuclear fuel–processing plant in France noticed something suspicious. He had been conducting a routine analysis of uranium derived from a seemingly ordinary source of ore.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Crops absorb livestock antibiotics, science shows

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

environmentalhealthnews.org - By Matthew Cimitile - Jan. 06 (News Report) - “Around 90 percent of these drugs that are administered to animals end up being excreted either as urine or manure,” said Holly Dolliver, a member of the Minnesota research team and now a professor of crop and soil sciences at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. “A vast majority of that manure is then used as an important input for 9.2 million hectares of (U.S.) agricultural land.” Manure, widely used as a substitute for chemical fertilizer, adds nutrients that help plants grow. It is often used in organic farming.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.0 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By David J. Buller - Dec. 21 (Special Report) - Among Charles Darwin’s lasting legacies is our knowledge that the human mind evolved by some adaptive process. A major, widely discussed branch of evolutionary psychology—Pop EP—holds that the human brain has many specialized mechanisms that evolved to solve the adaptive problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The author and several other scholars suggest that some assumptions of Pop EP are flawed: that we can know the psychology of our Stone Age ancestors, that we can thereby figure out how distinctively human traits evolved, that our minds have not evolved much since the Stone Age, and that standard psychological questionnaires yield clear evidence of the adaptations.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.5 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why Do Men Buy Sex?

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Nikolas Westerhoff - Dec. 07 (Research) - * In the U.S., police officers detained about 78,000 people in 2007 for prostitution-related crimes, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Only about 10 percent of these arrests are of the sex patrons, who almost exclusively are men. * A considerable proportion of men worldwide buy sex from female prostitutes, with most estimates of lifetime prevalence ranging from 7 to 39 percent, depending on the country and study. Many experts argue that it is a male appetite—and not the choices of prostitutes—that fundamentally drives the sex trade. * Men’s motives for buying sex are hotly contested among researchers. Some believe the practice serves as a salve for common psychological afflictions, such as an unfulfilled craving for sex or romance. Others, meanwhile, paint a dimmer portrait of johns, believing they are driven by chauvinistic motives, such as a desire to dominate and control women.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Black Friday warning: video games waste energy and contribute to global warming

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Larry Greenemeier - Nov. 29 (Special Report) - If you're planning this holiday season (perhaps even today) to become one of the tens of millions of people in the U.S. to buy a video game system, you may want to consider how the purchase of a Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation or Microsoft Xbox will impact your carbon footprint (or, at very least, your electric bill).

NewsTrust Rating: 2.8 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why Do We Panic?

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Hal Arkowitz, Scott O. Lilienfeld - Nov. 16 (Review) - “I was driving home after work,” David reported. “Things had been very stressful there lately. I was tense but looking forward to getting home and relaxing. And then, all of a sudden—boom! My heart started racing, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was sweating and shaking. My thoughts were racing, and I was afraid that I was going crazy or having a heart attack. I pulled over and called my wife to take me to the emergency room.” David’s fears turned out to be unjustified. An emergency room doctor told David, a composite of several therapy patients seen by one of us (Arkowitz), that he was suffering from a panic attack.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.6 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Are We Hardwired with a Sense of Irony?

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Wray Herbert - Nov. 09 (Special Report) - “Well, that’s just great.” Quick, what does that sentence mean? Is the speaker acknowledging some good news, celebrating a joyful event that just took place? Do we take the statement at face value? Or could the person who said it mean something quite different, maybe even the opposite? Perhaps his pleasure is not genuine. The fact is we do not know. The words are ambiguous. The comment could be kind and authentic: imagine his daughter has just announced that she made the school honor roll for the first time. But he could just as well be stuck in rush-hour traffic, late for an important meeting. His comment in that case is probably not genuine at all but sarcastic.

NewsTrust Rating: 2.7 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Warmer Antarctica Shows Climate Changing on Every Continent

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By David Biello - Oct. 31 (News Report) - Humanity's impact on climate has been detected on every continent except Antarctica, or so said the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 2007. No longer: scientists, comparing decades of records from 17 Antarctic weather stations with computer simulations of Earth's climate, found that human-induced global warming has been heating up the continent that is home to the South Pole, as well.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.4 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Turning the Tide on Harnessing the Ocean's Abundant Energy

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Larry Greenemeier - Oct. 21 (News Report) - Earth's oceans and rivers, pushed by wind and tugged by the moon and sun, ebb and flow over more than 70 percent of the planet, but only recently have researchers and scientists developed the materials and methods to finally harness some of that kinetic energy. There may not yet be a market for underwater turbines or wave-riding electrical generators designed to use ocean turbulence as a source of renewable energy, but that has not stopped a handful of entrepreneurs from trying to create one.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Jonah Lehrer - Oct. 12 (Interview) - Robert Burton is the former chief of neurology at the University of California at San Francisco-Mt. Zion hospital. He recently wrote a book, On Being Certain, that explored the neuroscience behind the feeling of certainty, or why we are so convinced we’re right even when we’re wrong. He and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discussed the science of certainty.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer