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Can Local Governments Solve Global Warming?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Douglas Fischer - Nov. 12 (News Report) - The number of cities and regional governments undertaking this transition to a low-carbon economy is growing. These efforts, leaders vow, will continue whatever the outcome of political debates in Copenhagen, Brussels or Washington, D.C.

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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).

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How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Lone Frank - Nov. 09 (Special Report) - Neuromarketing is a young and growing field–some won’t even admit that it is a field yet–that is striving to reveal the inner mechanisms of our consumer behavior. You might say that this interest and the issues it raises are a natural extension or offshoot of neuroeconomics and the more general studies of how we make choices and decisions. Every so often, there is also a conspicuous overlap between neuroeconomists and researchers in neuromarketing. The studies in neuromarketing are just more specific and much more directed. And the Holy Grail lies in predicting what the brain wants.

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How You Learn More from Success Than Failure

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Frederik Joelving - Nov. 09 (News Report) - Have you ever bowled a string of strikes that seems like it came out of nowhere? There might be more to such streaks than pure luck, according to a study that offers new clues as to how the brain learns from positive and negative experiences.

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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.

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Putting Madness in Its Place: Can the Environment Explain Schizophrenia's Hereditary Patterns?

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By JR Minkel - Nov. 01 (Special Report) - preliminary work shows that of Kaiser cohort members born in Oakland County, those born into more densely populated neighborhoods are at twofold to threefold greater risk of schizophrenia than those born in less dense areas, irrespective of race. Residents of more run-down or overcrowded city neighborhoods could be more exposed to toxic chemicals and infections, she says, and may have less access to social capital that would blunt the effects of a predisposition to mental illness acquired early in life.

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Depression's Evolutionary Roots

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Paul W. Andrews, J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. - Oct. 27 (News Report) - Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression?

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Lard Lesson: Why Fat Lubricates Your Appetite

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Frederik Joelving - Oct. 20 (News Report) - When you've spent the weekend splurging on greasy fast foods, your bathroom scale isn't alone in reeling from the impact. Your brain does, too. New research shows just how saturated fat tricks us into eating more and elucidates the evolutionary basis for the propensity for poundage in developed nations. Our brain physiology, it seems, is glaringly out-of-date in the modern world.

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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!

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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.

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Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Frederik Joelving - Jul. 12 (Special Report) - Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain. The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.

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Pride: Deadly Sin or Social Lubricant?

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Siri Carpenter - Jul. 12 (Special Report) - Think back to the last time that you beat a friend at a card game or outdid your previous record in a 5K race. Did you try to suppress your satisfaction so that others wouldn’t think you were conceited? In fact, new research suggests that pride, as long as it stems from a real success and doesn’t slide into know-it-all obnoxiousness or narcissism, not only pushes us to keep trying hard but actually makes others like us more.

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The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Gary Stix - Jun. 25 (Special Report) - The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has prompted a reassessment of how financial markets work and how people make decisions about money

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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

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Why Aren't More Women Tenured Science Professors?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Katherine Harmon - Jun. 19 (News Report) - A new government study surveyed top-tier research universities to see how women were faring in the largely male-dominated fields of math and science

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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.

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Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: Scientific American

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - Apr. 29 (Research) - f you’ve ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device.

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Cancer Clues from Embryonic Development

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - Apr. 23 (News Report) - “This is a fundamentally different way of thinking. A cell that mutates looks for genes that can help it flourish” and finds them in the suites of developmental genes

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Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Lester R. Brown - Apr. 22 (News Report) - food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization. Our continuing failure to deal with the environmental declines that are undermining the world food economy—most important, falling water tables, eroding soils and rising temperatures—forces me to conclude that such a collapse is possible.

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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.

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Soldiers' Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By David Dobbs - Apr. 20 (News Report) - A growing number of experts insist that the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is itself disordered and that soldiers are suffering as a result.

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Urine test predicts smokers' lung cancer risk : Scientific American Blog

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Coco Ballantyne - Apr. 20 (Special Report) - Researchers have discovered that smokers who excrete high levels of two tobacco metabolites (chemicals produced when the body breaks down tobacco) in their urine are up to 8.5 times more likely than those who excrete low levels to develop lung cancer. "If we can identify a smoker with a high level of metabolites, and down the road they have a higher risk of lung cancer, public health workers can get them motivated to quit smoking,” lead researcher Jian-Min Yuan, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, told Bloomberg News.

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The Mind-Body Problem

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Moheb Costandi - Apr. 15 (Special Report) - If people told you that they wanted to have a perfectly good leg amputated, or that they have three arms, when they clearly do not, you would probably think that they are mentally disturbed. Psychiatrists, too, long considered such conditions to be psychological in origin. Voluntary amputation, for example, was regarded as a fetish, perhaps arising because an amputee's stump resembles a phallus, whereas imaginary extra limbs were likely to be dismissed as the products of delusions or hallucinations.

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Fact or Fiction: When It Comes to Intelligence, Does Brain Size Matter?

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Kayt Sukel - Apr. 14 (Special Report) - ...new scientific studies across several animal species, including humans, are challenging the notion that brain size alone is a measure of intelligence. Rather, scientists now argue, it is a brain's underlying organization and molecular activity at its synapses (the communication junctions between neurons through which nerve impulses pass) that dictate intelligence.

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Did an undergrad spot an LHC bug that the pros missed?: Scientific American Blog

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

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