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BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Carbon cost' of Google revealedTwo search requests on the internet website Google produce "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle", according to a Harvard University academic.
US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2.
However, these figures were disputed by Google, who say a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide.
A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.
Dr Wissner-Gross's study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.
Carbon emissions
The Harvard academic argues that these carbon emissions stem from the electricity used by the computer terminal and by the power consumed by the large data centres operated by Google around the world.
If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy
Dr Alex Wissner-Gross
Although the American search engine is renowned for returning fast results, Dr Wissner-Gross says it can only do so because it uses several data banks at the same time.
Speaking to the BBC, he said a combination of clients, networks, servers and people's home computers all added up to a lot of energy usage.
"Google isn't any worse than any other data centre operator. If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy to do so," he said.
Dr Wissner-Gross said he was working on a website called co2stats.com which helps companies identify "energy inefficient" aspects of their websites.
In a statement on its official blog, Google said that Dr Wissner-Gross' figures were "many times too high."
The firm said that a typical search returned a result in less than 0.2 seconds and that the search itself only used its servers for a few thousandths of a second. This, said Google, amounted to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search - equivalent to 0.2g of CO2.
"We've made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centres, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use," said Google in its statement.
"In 2007, we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 and so reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That's a lot of kettles."
INFO-PRIM-NEO2009-02-27/15:56 A representation of the Voievod International Federation of fighting in a Moldovan style was founded in Iran. A seminar on familiarizing Iranians with the traditions and princes of the Moldavian history unfolded in Tehran, on February, from 20 to 22, Nicolae Pascaru, the president on the Voievod National Federation of Moldova, stated on Friday, February 27, at a news conference.
The International Federation of fighting in Moldovan style was founded five years ago by businessman Gabriel Stati and has representations in 19 countries of the world, Info-Prim Neo reports.
39 owners of the black belt from different regions of Iran participated in the seminar. Nicolae Pascaru conducted a demonstration of the Moldovan fighting style. “Iranians are ready to practice this fight that seemed to them very interesting. We were surprised to find out from our Iranian friends that the first relationships of our peoples were made in the period of Stefan the Great,” Nicolae Pascaru said.
According to “The modern voievod’s doctrine,” each country prepares its voievods in conformity with the International Federation's Regulation, admitting the practice of the fighting elements in a local style.
Iran became the 19th country, where opening the Moldovan fighting representation “Voievod” took place. Representations are to be opened in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The Voievod National Federation has 3, 500 members, including from the left bank of the Nistru. At the end of March, the Voievod International Federation will hold its first edition of the European and Asian Championship of martial fights in Moldova, with the participation of about 600 young people from 10 countries.
How to survive the coming century - environment - 25 February 2009 - New ScientistExplore an interactive map of the world warmed by 4 °C
ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.
Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.
The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.
Four degrees may not sound like much - after all, it is less than a typical temperature change between night and day. It might sound quite pleasant, like moving to Florida from Boston, say, or retiring from the UK to southern Spain. An average warming of the entire globe by 4 °C is a very different matter, however, and would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Indeed, human activity has and will have such a great impact that some have proposed describing the time from the 18th century onward as a new geological era, marked by human activity. "It can be considered the Anthropocene," says Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
A 4 °C rise could easily occur. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions are generally accepted as conservative, predicted a rise of anywhere between 2 °C and 6.4 °C this century. And in August 2008, Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC, warned that the world should work on mitigation and adaptation strategies to "prepare for 4 °C of warming".
A key factor in how well we deal with a warmer world is how much time we have to adapt. When, and if, we get this hot depends not only on how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere and how quickly, but how sensitive the world's climate is to these gases. It also depends whether "tipping points" are reached, in which climate feedback mechanisms rapidly speed warming. According to models, we could cook the planet by 4 °C by 2100. Some scientists fear that we may get there as soon as 2050.
If this happens, the ramifications for life on Earth are so terrifying that many scientists contacted for this article preferred not to contemplate them, saying only that we should concentrate on reducing emissions to a level where such a rise is known only in nightmares.
"Climatologists tend to fall into two camps: there are the cautious ones who say we need to cut emissions and won't even think about high global temperatures; and there are the ones who tell us to run for the hills because we're all doomed," says Peter Cox, who studies the dynamics of climate systems at the University of Exeter, UK. "I prefer a middle ground. We have to accept that changes are inevitable and start to adapt now."
Bearing in mind that a generation alive today might experience the scary side of these climate predictions, let us head bravely into this hotter world and consider whether and how we could survive it with most of our population intact. What might this future hold?
The last time the world experienced temperature rises of this magnitude was 55 million years ago, after the so-called Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event. Then, the culprits were clathrates - large areas of frozen, chemically caged methane - which were released from the deep ocean in explosive belches that filled the atmosphere with around 5 gigatonnes of carbon. The already warm planet rocketed by 5 or 6 °C, tropical forests sprang up in ice-free polar regions, and the oceans turned so acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide that there was a vast die-off of sea life. Sea levels rose to 100 metres higher than today's and desert stretched from southern Africa into Europe.
While the exact changes would depend on how quickly the temperature rose and how much polar ice melted, we can expect similar scenarios to unfold this time around. The first problem would be that many of the places where people live and grow food would no longer be suitable for either. Rising sea levels - from thermal expansion of the oceans, melting glaciers and storm surges - would drown today's coastal regions in up to 2 metres of water initially, and possibly much more if the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica were to melt. "It's hard to see west Antarctica's ice sheets surviving the century, meaning a sea-level rise of at least 1 or 2 metres," says climatologist James Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "CO2 concentrations of 550 parts per million [compared with about 385 ppm now] would be disastrous," he adds, "certainly leading to an ice-free planet, with sea level about 80 metres higher... and the trip getting there would be horrendous."
Association for Psychological ScienceHow We Think Before We Speak: Making Sense of Sentences
We engage in numerous discussions throughout the day, about a variety of topics, from work assignments to the Super Bowl to what we are having for dinner that evening. We effortlessly move from conversation to conversation, probably not thinking twice about our brain's ability to understand everything that is being said to us. How does the brain turn seemingly random sounds and letters into sentences with clear meaning? In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Jos J.A. Van Berkum from the Max Planck Institute in The Netherlands describes recent experiments using brain waves to understand how we are able to make sense of sentences.
In these experiments, Van Berkum and his colleagues examined Event Related Potentials (or ERPs) as people read or heard critical sentences as part of a longer text, or placed in some other type of context. ERPs are changes in brain activity that occur when we hear a certain stimulus, such as a tone or a word. Due to their speed, ERPs are useful for detecting the incredibly fast processes involved in understanding language.
Analysis of the ERPs has consistently indicated just how quickly the brain is able to relate unfolding sentences to earlier ones. For example, Van Berkum and colleagues have shown that listeners only need a fraction of a second to determine that a word is out of place, given what the wider story is about. As soon as listeners hear an unexpected word, their brain generates a specific ERP, the N400 effect (so named because it is a negative deflection peaking around 400 milliseconds). And even more interesting, this ERP will usually occur before the word is even finished being spoken.
In addition to the words themselves, the person speaking them is a crucial component in understanding what is being said. Van Berkum also saw an N400 effect occurring very rapidly when the content of a statement being spoken did not match with the voice of the speaker (e.g. "I have a large tattoo on my back" in an upper-class accent or "I like olives" in a young child's voice). These findings suggest that the brain very quickly classifies someone based on what their voice sounds like and also makes use of social stereotypes to interpret the meaning of what is being said. Van Berkum speculates that "the linguistic brain seems much more 'messy' and opportunistic than originally believed, taking any partial cue that seems to bear on interpretation into account as soon as it can."
But how does the language brain act so fast? Recent findings suggest that, as we read or have a conversation, our brains are continuously trying to predict upcoming information. Van Berkum suggests that this anticipation is a combination of a detailed analysis about what has been said before with taking 'quick-and-dirty' shortcuts to figure out what, most likely, the next bit of information will be.
One important element in keeping up with a conversation is knowing what or whom speakers are actually referring to. For example, when we hear the statement, "David praised Linda because. . .," we expect to find out more about Linda, not David. Van Berkum and colleagues showed that when listeners heard "David praised Linda because he. . .," there was a very strong ERP effect occurring with the word "he," of the type that is also elicited by grammatical errors. Although the pronoun is grammatically correct in this statement, the ERP occurred because the brain was just not expecting it. This suggests that the brain will sometimes ignore the rules of grammar when trying to comprehend sentences.
These findings reveal that, as we make sense of an unfolding sentence, our brains very rapidly draw upon a wide range of information, including what was stated previously and who the speaker is, in helping us understand what is being said to us. Sentence understanding is not just about diligently combining stored word meanings. The brain rapidly throws in everything it knows, and it is always looking ahead.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The United States, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises in the past. On the contrary, it has used them, time and again, to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new. Throughout U.S. history, adaptability has been perhaps the best and most quintessential of American attributes. Over the course of the 19th century’s Long Depression, the country remade itself from an agricultural power into an industrial one. After the Great Depression, it discovered a new way of living, working, and producing, which contributed to an unprecedented period of mass prosperity. At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience. Can we do it again?
Honeybees under attack on all fronts - environment - 16 February 2009 - New ScientistTHE world's honeybees appear to be dying off in horrifying numbers, and now consensus is starting to emerge on the reason why: it seems there is no one cause. Infections, lack of food, pesticides and breeding - none catastrophic on their own - are having a synergistic effect, pushing bee survival to a lethal tipping point. A somewhat anti-climactic conclusion it may be, but appreciating this complexity - and realising there will be no magic bullet - may be the key to saving the insects.
A third of our food relies on bees for pollination. Both the US and UK report losing a third of their bees last year. Other European countries have seen major die-offs too: Italy, for example, said it lost nearly half its bees last year. The deaths are now spreading to Asia, with reports in India and suspected cases in China.
But while individual "sub-lethal stresses" such as infections are implicated, we know little about how they add together. The situation should become clearer in the next few years as the US government, the EU and others are pouring money into bee research. The UK, for example, has doubled its annual research budget, allocating £400,000 a year for the next five years.
On top of that, the UK National Bee Unit will get £2.3 million to map the problem. This money is urgently needed, says Peter Neumann of the Swiss Bee Research Centre in Berne, who runs COLLOSS, a network of researchers studying colony loss in 36 countries. "We don't have the data to assess the situation in Europe, never mind the world," he says.
The main stress facing bees is the varroa mite, a parasite from Siberia that has now spread everywhere but Australia. Mite infestations steeply reduce bees' resistance to viral infection. Worryingly, the mites are developing resistance to the pesticides used to control them, forcing beekeepers to use methods that are often less effective.
French and German beekeepers blame their losses on insecticides called neonicotinoids - but France banned them 10 years ago and its bees are still dying. Neumann suspects a wider problem, citing experiments showing that agricultural chemicals that are safe for bees when used alone are lethal in combination. "Farmers increasingly combine sprays," he says. They also leave few flowering weeds, depriving bees of essential nutrients from different kinds of pollen, he adds.
Meanwhile viruses may cause a syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) in the US, in which adult bees abandon their hive, leaving the healthy queen and young bees to die. Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State University in University Park, where the syndrome was first identified, says viruses, including one called IAPV, duplicate the symptoms of CCD in her greenhouse studies. There is no IAPV or CCD in the UK, says Mike Brown of the National Bee Unit, yet bees are still dying.
At the root of the vulnerability to these stresses could be the way breeding has affected the bees' genetic make-up. By being highly selected for calmness and honey production, honeybees have lost other useful characteristics, says Francis Ratnieks of the University of Sussex, UK. In research to be published in the journal Heredity, he describes a way to breed for "hygienic" bees that, unlike most commercial bees, clear out infected young and can resist varroa mites.
Perception of Being “In Control” Explored | Psych Central NewsThe underlying sense of being in control of our own actions is challenged by new research which demonstrates that the choices we make internally are weak and easily overridden compared to when we are told which choice to make.
The research, which is published in Cerebral Cortex, is one of the first neuroscientific studies to look at changing one’s mind in situations where the initial decision was one’s own ‘free choice.’
Free choices can be defined as actions occurring when external cues are largely absent — for example, deciding which dish to choose from a restaurant menu.
The researchers asked study participants to choose which of two buttons they would press in response to a subsequent signal, while their brain activity was recorded using EEG (electroencephalogram).
Some choices were made freely by the volunteers and other choices were instructed by arrows on a screen in front of them. The volunteers’ choices were occasionally interrupted by a symbol asking them to change their mind, after they had made their choice, but before they had actually pressed the button.
First author Stephen Fleming of University College London Institute of Neurology, said: “When people had chosen for themselves which action to make, we found that the brain activity involved in changing one’s mind, or reprogramming these ‘free’ choices was weak, relative to reprogramming of choices that were dictated by an external stimulus.
“This suggests that the brain is very flexible when changing a free choice – rather like a spinning coin, a small nudge can push it one way or the other very easily.
“The implication is that, despite our feelings of being in control, our own internal choices are flexible compared to those driven by external stimuli, such as braking in response to a traffic light. This flexibility might be important - in a dynamic world, we need to be able to change our plans when necessary.”
Professor Patrick Haggard, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, added: “Our study has two implications for our understanding of human volition. First, our brains contain a mechanism to go back and change our mind about our choices, after a choice is made but before the action itself.
“Our internal decisions are not set in stone, but can be re-evaluated right up to the last moment. Second, changing an internal choice in this way seems to be easier than changing a choice guided by external instructions.
“We often think about our own internal decisions as having the strength of conviction, but our results suggest that the brain is smart enough to make us flexible about what we want. The ability to flexibly adjust our decisions about what we do in the current situation is a major component of intelligence, and has a clear survival value.”
Economist.comDICTATORS and authoritarians will disagree, but democracies work better. It has long been held that decisions made collectively by large groups of people are more likely to turn out to be accurate than decisions made by individuals. The idea goes back to the “jury theorem” of Nicolas de Condorcet, an 18th-century French philosopher who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the social sciences. Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making.
Animals that live in groups make two sorts of choices: consensus decisions in which the group makes a single collective choice, as when house-hunting rock ants decide where to settle; and combined decisions, such as the allocation of jobs among worker bees.
Condorcet’s theory describes consensus decisions, outlining how democratic decisions tend to outperform dictatorial ones. If each member of a jury has only partial information, the majority decision is more likely to be correct than a decision arrived at by an individual juror. Moreover, the probability of a correct decision increases with the size of the jury. But things become more complicated when information is shared before a vote is taken. People then have to evaluate the information before making a collective decision. This is what bees do, and they do it rather well, according to Christian List of the London School of Economics, who has studied group decision-making in humans and animals along with Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex, in England.
The runaway queen
In a study reported in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, researchers led by Dr List looked at colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera), which in late spring or early summer divide once they reach a certain size. The queen goes off with about two-thirds of the worker bees to live in a new home leaving a daughter queen in the nest with the remaining worker bees. Among the bees that depart are scouts that search for the new nest site and report back using a waggle dance to advertise suitable locations. The longer the dance, the better the site. After a while, other scouts start to visit the sites advertised by their compatriots and, on their return, also perform more waggle dances. The process eventually leads to a consensus on the best site and the swarm migrates. The decision is remarkably reliable, with the bees choosing the best site even when there are only small differences between two alternatives.
But exactly how do bees reach such a robust consensus? To find out, Dr List and his colleagues made a computer model of the decision-making process. By tinkering around with it they found that computerised bees that were very good at finding nesting sites but did not share their information dramatically slowed down the migration, leaving the swarm homeless and vulnerable. Conversely, computerised bees that blindly followed the waggle dances of others without first checking whether the site was, in fact, as advertised, led to a swift but mistaken decision. The researchers concluded that the ability of bees to identify quickly the best site depends on the interplay of bees’ interdependence in communicating the whereabouts of the best site and their independence in confirming this information.
This is something members of the European Parliament should think about. In the same journal, Simon Hix, also of the London School of Economics, and his colleagues examined their voting and concluded that, as might be expected, it was along party-political lines even though the incentives to do so were far less than at national parliaments. Dr Hix and his colleagues reckon that European parliamentarians share the collection of information but, unlike the honeybees, they do not necessarily progress to investigating the issues for themselves before taking a vote.
There is danger in blindly following the party line, a danger that the honeybees seem to avoid. Condorcet’s theory fails to consider whether there is an inbuilt bias among a group that comes together to consider a problem. This “groupthink” occurs when people copy one another. According to Dr List: “The swarm manages to block and prevent the kind of groupthink that can bedevil good decision making.” Dr List adds that people demonstrate this kind of bad decision-making when investors pile into a stock and others follow, creating a bubble for which there is no good reason.
Another form of groupthink occurs when people are either isolated from crucial sources of information or dominated by other members of the group, some of whom may have malevolent intent. This too has now been demonstrated in animals. José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines. Could this form the basis of a new way of catching them?
The way animals make collective decisions can be complex. Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol, in England, and his colleagues studied how a species of ants called Temnothorax albipennis establish a new nest. In the Royal Society journal they report how the insects mitigate the disadvantages of making a swift choice. If the ants’ existing nest becomes threatened, the insects send out scouts to seek a new one. How quickly they accomplish this transfer depends not only on how soon the ants agree on the best available site but also on how quickly they can migrate there. When a suitable place is identified, the scouts begin to lead other scouts, which had remained behind to guard the old nest, to the new site. The problem is that if the decision is reached rapidly, as it might have to be in an emergency, then relatively few scouts know the route. It would then take much longer to train all the scouts needed to achieve the transfer, which involves carrying the queen, the workers and the brood to the new nest.
Dr Franks and his colleagues identified a type of behaviour called “reverse tandem runs” that makes the process more efficient. During the carrying phase of migration, the scouts lead other scouts back along the quickest route to the old nest so that more scouts become familiar with the route. Thus the dynamics of collective decision-making are closely entwined with the implementation of these decisions. How this might pertain to choices that people might make is, as yet, unclear. But it does indicate the importance of recruiting active leaders to a cause because, as the ants and bees have discovered, the most important thing about collective decision-making is to get others to follow.
Study: Babies Who Gesture Learn Words Sooner -- Printout -- TIMEChild psychologists — and kindergarten teachers — have long known that when children first show up for school, some of them speak a lot more fluently than others. Psychologists also know that children's socioeconomic status tends to correlate with their language facility. The better off and more educated a child's parents are, the more verbal that child tends to be by school age — and vocabulary skill is a key predictor for success in school. Children from low-income families, who may often start school knowing significantly fewer words than their better-off peers, will struggle for years to make up that ground. (Read about childhood obesity.)
Previous studies have shown that wealthier, educated parents talk to their young children more, using more complex vocabulary and syntax, than parents of lesser means. And these differences may help explain why richer kids start school with richer vocabularies. But what goes on before children can talk, during that phase — familiar to any parent — when communication takes the form of pointing, waving, grabbing and other kinds of baby sign language? Do well-off parents also gesture more to their kids?
Indeed they do, say psychologists Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe of the University of Chicago, who published a study in the Feb. 13 issue of Science. The researchers found that at 14 months of age, babies already showed a wide range of "speaking" ability through gestures, and that those differences were correlated with their socioeconomic background and how frequently their parents used gestures to communicate. High-income, better-educated parents gestured more frequently to their children to convey meaning and new concepts, and in turn, their kids gestured more to them. When researchers tested the same children at 54 months of age, those early gesturers turned out to have better vocabulary ability than other students. (See the top 10 children's books of 2008.)
"At 14 months, you can't see a difference with their speech, but you can already see a difference with their gestures," says Goldin-Meadow, a leading expert on gesture. "And children's gestures can be traced back to parents' gestures."
Goldin-Meadow and Rowe's study involved children from 50 Chicago-area families of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Annual incomes ranged from less than $15,000 to more than $100,000, and parents' educational level ranged from high school dropout to advanced degree. The researchers videotaped each child at 14 months with his or her primary caregiver (the mother, in 49 out of 50 kids) for 90 minutes while the pair engaged in everyday activities. Those tapes were then transcribed — all speech and gestures seen during the 90 minutes were noted and recorded in code. (See pictures of U.S. Presidents and their children.)
Researchers were interested less in the number of gestures a child or parent made than in their variety — for example, pointing at a doll 10 times would count as only one gesture, but pointing at a doll and then a bed might count as two. During the 90-minute session, 14-month-olds from well-off families used an average of 24 meaningfully different gestures, researchers found, while children from lower-income families used an average of just 13.
"As early as 14 months of age, children in different socioeconomic-status groups may be socialized to communicate more or fewer meanings via gesture," the authors wrote. And those early differences in gestures may help predict the later disparities in vocabulary ability when children show up for school. The current study found that at 54 months old, children from higher-income families understood about 117 words on a comprehension test, compared with 93 for children from lower-income families.
Although Goldin-Meadow is quick to point out that the study shows only an association, not a causation, among socioeconomic status, gestures and vocabulary ability, "we do think there is something going on here," she says. "When parents gesture around their children, the kids might be picking up the gestures and doing it themselves."
Here's how: at 14 months of age, pointing toward an object is the way most kids use gestures. If a parent responds to that gesture by verbally identifying the object — by saying, "That's a doll," for example — children get a head start on growing their nascent vocabularies. "That's a teachable moment, and mothers are teaching the kids the word for an object," says Goldin-Meadow. She also believes that lively gesturing (like clapping) could allow kids to better understand new concepts (like happiness) simply by giving them a visceral way to express them.
That last theory offers the possibility that teachers may be able to use gesture to help school-age kids solidify old ideas and learn new ones. In separate research, Goldin-Meadow found that when children were asked to solve and explain a series of math problems, those who were asked to gesture while they did so were more likely to learn new problem-solving strategies and perform better on future math problems than were kids who did not use gestures. Goldin-Meadow believes that prompting children to gesture gives them the ability to express ideas they had never been able to express before. "I'd recommend teachers encourage their kids to gesture, because it makes them more receptive to teaching," she says. "It allows teachers to have a better understanding of what their kids are understanding."
Visual Decline As We Age: Genetics Or Environment?ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2009) — Which has a larger impact on the "normal" decline of visual function as we age, genetic or environmental factors? This question is explored in the February issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Vision worsens for most of us as we age, even in the absence of eye diseases such as glaucoma or AMD. Elders who have good visual acuity (20/25 vision or better) may have trouble driving at night or adjusting when they move between indoor and outdoor light. Some declines are optic, such as presbyopia, reduced flexibility of the eye's lens, which causes poorer near vision for many people after age 40. Other declines are neuronal, related to the eye's ability to send images to the brain. Since crucial functions like reading and memory depend on vision, it is important to understand how "normal" aging occurs and discover what can be done to delay or prevent reduced function. In the first investigation of heredity's impact on neuronal visual decline, Ruth E. Hogg, PhD, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues used a classic twin study to explore genetic and environmental factors.
Study participants were a cohort of the AMD twin study by the University of Melbourne Centre for Eye Research, comprised of eighty-four twins (42 pairs, 21 identical and 21fraternal) between the ages of 57 and 75 who met study criteria for visual acuity and absence of eye disease. In each person the eye with the best visual acuity (or the right eye if acuity was equal in both eyes) was tested for adaptation to light level changes, for color detection, and for detection of gray tone gradations between image and background, termed contrast sensitivity. Taken together, these tests assess key visual functions needed in daily life. When test results showed that a visual ability declined at about the same age in identical twins, the trait was assumed to be under genetic control, and when the decline occurred at different ages, environmental factors were considered dominant. Results for identical twins and fraternal (non-identical) were compared, and when concordance between scores was higher for identical than for fraternal pairs, genetics was assumed to be the controlling factor.
Genetic factors appear to be strong determinants of sharp visual acuity and color discrimination, functions performed by cone cells pathways in the eye's retina, the tissue at the back of the eye that converts light into electronic images for relay to the brain. Genetic factors were not strongly correlated with night vision and the ability to adapt to light level changes, which are performed by retinal rod cells, implying that environmental influences are important to those functions. Autopsies and other studies have found that substantially more rod than cone cells are lost as eyes age. The flow of nutrients across the retinal membrane appears to be more important for rod cell than for cone cell function, and it is here that environmental factors—such as smoking, deficient nutrition, excessive sunlight exposure, and inflammation---may influence visual decline. Rod cell deterioration is accepted as a component of both general visual decline and age-related diseases like AMD, the most common cause of visual disability in elders.
"Our results support clinical and research efforts now underway to slow or stop age-related vision decline by modifying lifestyle factors and/or using specific medications," says Dr. Hogg.
Love Makes Kids Smarter | LiveScienceFor some odd reason, it takes constant reminders that we primates need nurturing.
In a recent study of 46 baby chimpanzee orphans, Kim Bard of the University of Portsmouth in England and her colleagues demonstrated that primate babies that have tight relationships with mother figures do much better on cognitive tests than babies who receive only the basics of food, shelter, and friendship with peers.
But this is not breaking news. In fact, it's old news.
In the 1950s, Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments with baby rhesus monkeys that showed, without a doubt, that lack of love and comfort makes for a crazy monkey.
Harlow constructed a cage that included a wire monkey "mother" topped with a plastic face. In this wire Mom he inserted a bottle. The cages also held an alternative to the wire mother, the same wire and plastic contraption but covered with terry cloth. The baby monkeys spent all their time clinging to the cloth mother and only went to the wire mother to feed, demonstrating that a soft touch beats something to eat any day.
But even more interesting, Harlow's experiments produced really nutty adult monkeys, females who were unable to mother themselves because they had no idea what mother love might be.
Further, Harlow and pals put little monkeys into contraptions that isolated them from others, visually, physically, and even out of hearing, and the babies became despondent. The good news was that the researchers were also pretty successful at reversing the psychological damage done to these animals by slowing introducing happy little touchy-feely peer monkeys into their cages as therapists.
Harlow's monkey work was important because, at the time, pediatricians, child care "experts," and everybody's grandmother had a "no touch, no comfort" policy toward children. They adamantly advised parents not to respond to crying babies, felt infants should sleep alone to grow up independent, and for God's sake put that kid down.
But Harlow's work changed all that. Mothers were soon permitted to have their newborns next to them in the hospital, and these days no one looks askance at a baby in a sling.
The current chimp research builds on Harlow's work by showing that mother love doesn't just make for a psychologically well-adjusted child, it also makes for a smart kid. Bard and colleagues evaluated the cognitive abilities of the chimps when they were 12 months old with standard human tests for children of that age, tests that ask little kids to imitate squiggles on paper and pick up a cup to find a rock.
The highly nurtured chimps did better than the ones without a history of attachment, and what do you know, the well-nurtured chimps did even better than human kids on this pint-sized IQ test.
And so we hear it once again. We are primates, social animals which need attachment and love. We need to be held and talked to and made to feel that at least one person wants to be with us all the time. And if we get that kind of connection, we are bound to be fine, even better than fine.
Can experiences be passed on to offspring? - life - 06 February 2009 - New ScientistWHAT was your mother up to before you were even a twinkle in her eye? You might not think it matters, but it seems that in mice at least, mothers that receive mental training before they become pregnant can pass on its cognitive benefits to their young.
Previous studies in both people and animals have shown that a mother's experiences while pregnant can affect her offspring's gene expression and health, even years later. However, it was not known if experiences prior to pregnancy had an effect.
Larry Feig at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and his colleagues bred "knockout" mice that lacked a gene called Ras-GRF-2, causing them to have a memory defect. Normally, if mice in a cage receive a shock to their feet, they freeze in fear if they are then placed back into the same cage. In contrast, Ras-GRF2 knockout mice did not associate the cage with fear.
Before they reached adolescence, the team kept these knockout mice in a cage filled with toys for two weeks. Such "enriched environments" are known to enhance learning and memory. In the knockout mice, the enriched cage was enough to compensate for their memory defect: when tested on the fear task, they associated the shock with the cage, like normal mice.
To see if this compensation could be passed on to young, the researchers waited for these enriched knockout mice to reach sexual maturity, bred them and tested their offspring on the fear task. Despite being reared by an "unenriched" knockout foster mother - to rule out the effects of spending time with a mouse they could learn directly from - the offspring associated the electric shock with the cage, just like their enriched mothers and those without the genetic defect.
In contrast, the offspring of knockout mice who did not receive the enrichment did not associate the shock with the cage (Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.5057-08.2009).
This effect was only seen in offspring whose knockout mothers had an enriched cage: having an enriched knockout father but a normal knockout mother was not enough to remedy the defect in the offspring.
As the offspring had the same genetic defect as their mothers, the researchers attribute the enhanced cognition in these mice to the time their mothers spent in the enriched cage prior to becoming pregnant.
The effect was not passed on to a third generation and was only inherited if the offspring were conceived within three months of enrichment. So the researchers suspect that the mother passes on this cognitive effect during gestation, perhaps by releasing hormones that prompt "epigenetic" chemical markers to appear on her unborn child's genes, regulating their expression after birth.
Moshe Szyf at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, calls the work "remarkable". "The mother can modulate the intellectual capacity of her young," he says. "If it happens in humans it has immense implications." But he wishes Feig had pinned down exactly how the cognitive effects are inherited. "It smells like epigenetics, but there's no proof."
Psychology Today: The 8½ Laws of Rumor SpreadIf I'm not gullible and you're not gullible, how come some improbable stories take a long time to die?
"The money it's cost me," said clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger. "It hurt my integrity."
"It" was the shocking story that had circulated for years on the Internet and through word of mouth: Hilfiger, known for his colorful, preppy styles, had supposedly appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to air a disturbing grievance. "If I had known that African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians would buy my clothes, I would not have made them so nice," Hilfiger complained. "I wish those people would not buy my clothes—they were made for upper-class whites." According to the tale, an outraged Winfrey immediately asked Hilfiger to leave her show—and when she came back from a commercial, he was gone.
Never mind that intentionally alienating your core market isn't exactly a shrewd business strategy. Never mind that Hilfiger had founded a philanthropic fund to benefit inner city youth long before the rumor even appeared, or that he donated over $5 million toward building a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Washington.
Of course, Hilfiger had never said anything of the sort. At the time the rumor surfaced and spread, Hilfiger had never been on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In fact, the two had never met until 2007, when Winfrey did invite him onto the show to try to squelch the rumor once and for all. "The next time somebody sends you an email or somebody mentions this rumor to you, you know what you're supposed say to them?" said Winfrey. "You're supposed to say, 'That's a big fat lie!'"
Nor did the president of Procter & Gamble appear on The Phil Donahue Show to "come out of the closet" about his company's ties to the Church of Satan. Nor did Liz Claiborne tell Oprah that black people shouldn't wear her clothes—which didn't stop director Spike Lee from telling Esquire magazine, "It definitely happened. Get the tape. Every black woman in America needs to go to her closet, throw that shit out, and never buy another stitch of clothes from Liz Claiborne."
Skeptical or gullible, we all buy into rumors sometimes. Even Barbara Mikkelson, who runs the popular myth-debunking Web site Snopes.com with her husband David, admits she's swallowed some whoppers. "A friend told me that when his friend's daughter was off on vacation, she had a whirlwind romance with this charismatic guy," Mikkelson says. "When it was time for her to come home, he gave her a package. Inside was a ceramic coffin with a message on it: 'Welcome to the world of AIDS.' I believed that one hook, line, and sinker."
Rumors have a way of slipping under our mental defenses before we think to question them. The best ones sidestep common sense entirely. "Think of the lawsuits parents filed over subliminal messages in heavy metal songs," says Martin Bourgeois, a rumor researcher at Florida Gulf Coast University. "People believed Judas Priest was planting messages to make teenagers commit suicide; no one thought to ask, 'Why would a rock band want its audience dead?'"
Most of us don't like to think of ourselves as gullible. But we're especially likely to accept as true—and do our best to spread—tales that have several specific characteristics that take aim at our best defenses.
At its core, a rumor is just an unverified scrap of information we pass among ourselves to make sense of the world. In one case study conducted at Ohio University by psychologist Mark Pezzo, students had heard that someone on campus had died of meningitis. The story spread because the anxious students were trying to find out what was going on: "Is the rumor true?" "How do you get meningitis?" "I heard that everyone on campus will need to have a painful spinal tap, did you hear that?" In the marketplace of misinformation, fit rumors survive and spread like epidemics, while unfit rumors die quick deaths. So what separates the fit from the unfit? What, in short, are the laws of effective rumors?
1: Successful rumors needle our anxieties and emotions.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, water wasn't the only thing that flooded the city. In the environment of intense anxiety and uncertainty, grim rumors flourished: Sharks have infested the water! Terrorists planted bombs in the levees! Murdered babies and piles of corpses filled the Superdome!
Unfortunately, the national media reported many of the rumors as fact—especially after a misinformed Mayor Ray Nagin told talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of armed gang members" were killing and raping at will inside the dome. Yet once the crisis began to abate, investigators found that almost all of the widely circulated stories were false. FEMA doctors even showed up at the Superdome with a refrigerated 18-wheeler to cart away the hundreds of dead bodies rumored. They found six—none of them a homicide victim.
So why did these stories pop up? Fear breeds rumor. The more collective anxiety a group has, the more inclined it will be to start up the rumor mill. As Rochester Institute of Technology rumor expert Nicholas DiFonzo explains, we pass rumors around primarily as a means of deciphering scary, uncertain situations: Exchanging information, even if it's ludicrously false, relieves our unease by giving us a sense that we at least know what's happening. "One major function of rumors is to figure out the facts and find what the appropriate, adaptive thing to do is. Look at 9/11. I don't ever remember feeling so threatened as I did after 9/11, and people used rumors to try to manage the threat."
Thus when 9/11 left people terrified and searching for answers, they heard a horde of alarming (and completely false) rumors—that terrorists had injected anthrax into one of every five cans of Pepsi, that no Jews showed up to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they knew about the attacks beforehand. (In fact, about 15 percent of those who died in the attacks were Jewish.)
Very few of the tales were positive, because we're naturally more inclined to pass on negative information. "As humans, we have a tendency to weight negative information more," says Helen Harton, a psychology professor at the University of Northern Iowa. "It makes evolutionary sense. It's more important to know how to avoid a tiger than to know where a field of nice flowers is."
Of course, most of us don't have to worry about tiger attacks anymore, but we do dread things like layoffs at work. So we toss rumors back and forth to figure out what's really up.
2: Rumors stick if they're somewhat surprising but still fit with our existing biases.
If you ever open endlessly forwarded e-mails, you're probably familiar with at least one notorious malapropism from President George W. Bush: "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur.'" Or this embarrassing gem from the pop starlet Mariah Carey: "When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean, I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff." Can you believe they actually said these things?
Well, don't. Both quips were made up by pranksters. Even so, they enjoyed viral spread for the simple reason that both are juicy enough to be shocking—yet not so far-fetched that we doubt the two parties could have uttered them. They confirm what many already believe—that Bush is, let's say, not quite firing on all cylinders, and that Carey is a vain diva—without setting off too many common-sense alarms.
In short, we're primed to accept them. As Mikkelson explains, "These stories get in under our radar because they click in with what we already believe, or want to believe." If you already think liberals are waging a war on religion, you'll be more likely to buy 2008's (untrue) rumor that the new dollar coins omit the customary "In God We Trust." (It's printed along the side.) If you buy the idea that too much money unhinges people from reality, you might believe the story that Tiger Woods rented a mansion for the 2007 U.S. Open, moved everything out, and flew in all of his own furniture so he would feel at home during the four-day tournament.
Even when presented with evidence refuting a rumor, we often stick to our biases. A 2007 University of Maryland study found that only 3 percent of Pakistanis believe Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. "It's difficult for them to accept that Al Qaeda, their fellow Muslims, could have perpetrated these acts," says DiFonzo.
3: Easily swayed people are more important than influential people in passing on a rumor.
In the mid-1970s, the Life Savers Company introduced a product that revolutionized the way kids chewed gum: Bubble Yum. Before it came along, you had to work on a piece of gum for ages to make it soft enough to blow bubbles. But Bubble Yum was squishy right out of the wrapper. It was the perfect gum… maybe a little too perfect, kids thought. What was making it so soft? Soon, the obvious answer presented itself: spider eggs. Bubble Yum was made with spider eggs.
This bit of schoolyard conjecture became ironclad truth with staggering speed, sending Bubble Yum's sky-high sales into a tailspin. Within 10 days of first getting wind of the rumor, Life Savers executives commissioned surveys that revealed "well over half" of New York area children had already heard it.
The spider egg story didn't zoom from kid to kid so quickly because of well-connected playground information magnates or influential adolescent gum mavens, but because kids are credulous, and credulous people make rumors go. "It's your willingness to pass things along that matters, not necessarily how much status or respect you have," says Duncan Watts, a sociologist who researches information spread for Yahoo. Kids will believe almost anything (another long-lived schoolyard rumor claimed the "Mikey likes it" Life cereal kid died after a mixture of soda and Pop Rocks made his stomach explode), and thus rumors run rampant in schools. But the same is true of gullible adults: They're the ones who really fuel rumors.
4: The more you hear a rumor, the more you'll buy it—even if you're hearing that it's false.
According to a poll, 11 percent of Americans believe the rumor that Barack Obama is secretly a radical Muslim who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance and was sworn into the Senate on the Qur'an (and probably hates mom and apple pie as well). The myth that he is a Muslim is so pervasive that The New Yorker could satirize it on a cover depicting a cheery new prez Obama hanging out in the White House in full Islamic garb—with an American flag burning in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall.
But if the hyper-liberal New Yorker was trying to expose the absurdity of the rumor, someone probably should have talked to Mark Pezzo first. Even hearing that a rumor is bunk, he observes, tends to plant it deeper in your mind. "No question, the more you hear something—even the same thing from the same person—the more you believe it," says Pezzo. "Politicians know all about this; the more I heard about weapons of mass destruction, the more believable they seemed to me. Even a denial can be a repetition of a rumor." (Just ask Senator John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential bid sunk thanks to whispers about his swift-boat service in Vietnam—even though most of the media stories were about how the rumors were false.)
What's more, repeating a rumor can also make people believe it came from a credible source. In one Stanford study, the more subjects heard a rumor about dried rat urine on Pepsi cans, the more likely they were to attribute the information to Consumer Reports rather than to The National Enquirer.
5: Rumors reflect the zeitgeist.
Every fall, right around mid-September, Barbara Mikkelson starts receiving urgent reports of a grisly new trend in gang initiations. Prospective gang members are driving around in the evening with their headlights intentionally turned off, the story says, and when a well-intentioned motorist flashes his brights at them, the would-be gang member has to follow the car home and kill everyone inside. SO NEVER FLASH YOUR LIGHTS THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE!
It's always in mid-September that the rumor resurfaces. "That's when you first have to start thinking about putting your headlights on when you're coming home from work," she explains. "Headlights are on people's minds. That's why you never hear it in the dead of winter or the height of summer."
Rumors have the greatest chance of multiplying when the topic is something people are already pondering. As University of British Columbia psychologist Mark Schaller points out, "What matters is a match between the nature of the information and the goals of the people who are trafficking that information." So what's on our minds lately?
The election of 2008, and the thousand plausible and implausible tales swirling around the candidates. Among the best ones: As a Navy pilot, John McCain executed a "wet start" (a maneuver that involves flooding your fighter plane's engine with fuel so that starting up unleashes a huge and macho burst of flame) so reckless that he actually set an aircraft carrier on fire. Then there's the one about how Barack Obama has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan—they're tricky, those Klansmen.
6: Sticky rumors are simple and concrete.
Examine your stockpile of offbeat conventional wisdom: It takes seven years for swallowed gum to pass through the body. We only use 10 percent of our brains. The Great Wall of China can be seen from space. People swallow eight spiders a year in their sleep.
These tidbits are all simple and specific, with a vivid detail that sticks in the mind. They're also false. But they illustrate the point that tangible, easily graspable tales have an excellent chance of catching on. "Complicated ideas are not that spreadable," says Duncan Watts. "Ideas with content, when they do spread, lose their content." Rumors work just like a game of telephone; after they've been transmitted a few times, the details get lost and the message grows simpler.
According to Mikkelson, the spider-swallowing rumor got its start when a columnist for PC Professional wrote a story bemoaning our tendency to believe every harebrained factoid in mass e-mails; the writer made up the statistic as an example of the kind of ludicrous thing credulous people will, um, swallow. In time, the fact that it was a joke got lost in transmission, and now millions live in fear of sleeping with their mouth open.
The principle of concreteness also helps spread urban legends (which are rumors presented in story form, usually as something that happened to a friend's ex-girlfriend's mechanic's second cousin). Ever heard the tale of the guy who accepts a drink from a stranger at a bar, then wakes up in a tub full of ice, one kidney poorer? How about the one where the woman tries to dry out her wet lap dog by putting it in the microwave? Chances are, you remembered those tall tales because a visceral image—fingering your stitches in an ice-filled tub, watching a live dog sizzle in a microwave—got lodged in your mind.
"Urban legends survive only if they conjure up very visual or very tactile images," says Chip Heath, a Stanford business professor who studies idea spread. "Our brains are wired to remember concrete, sensory things better than abstract things." For example, if researchers give people lists of words to memorize and then recall later, the tangible ones ("apple," "pencil") will spring to mind more often than the conceptual ones ("truth," "justice").
7: Rumors that last are difficult to disprove.
Ever wonder why even the craziest legends and conspiracy theories never seem to die? Why do people still believe there's a giant prehistoric reptile prowling Loch Ness, even though innumerable hours of investigation have produced zero proof of such a creature? Well, it's a pretty big lake: How can we be sure she's not in there? It's tough to disprove the idea definitively.
As DiFonzo explains, a rumor like "On Thursday's Late Show, David Letterman's hairpiece fell off!" doesn't work, because people can check it out and easily find evidence it didn't happen. But a rumor like "I heard David Letterman's hairpiece fell off during a show, but they destroyed all the tapes!"—that's more like it.
Persistent rumors tend to have what Chip Heath calls a "testable credential," some element that can be misconstrued to give the story a whiff of credibility. "Rumors very often have a little truth test that people can run," he explains. "There was a rumor in the San Francisco Bay Area in the '90s that Snapple supports the KKK. You turned the label around, and you saw a capital letter K with a circle around it. People were doing that test, and then all of a sudden this seemingly preposterous rumor becomes more plausible." (For the record, Snapple bottles do bear the K—the symbol for "kosher"—as do thousands of other drinks and food products.)
8: We are eager to believe bad things about people we envy.
Is there anyone in America who hasn't heard about Richard Gere and the gerbil? The story goes something like this. Gere checked himself into Cedars-Sinai Hospital in California complaining of intestinal pain and rectal bleeding. When doctors investigated, they found Gere's beloved pet gerbil Tibet, shaved, declawed, and dead, lodged in Gere's rectum—the result of "gerbilling," a sexual practice common among gay men. So doctors performed an emergency gerbilectomy on Gere. The gerbil was removed—but the story stuck.
Needless to say, none of this ever happened. Gere was never admitted to the hospital for rectal bleeding, and "gerbilling" is not a sexual practice at all, among gay men or anyone else. Gerbils aren't even legal in California (for agricultural reasons, not sexual ones). Like most rumors about celebrities, its origin is unknown, but we do know the rumor hit a tipping point in the 1980s after a hoaxster, claiming to be from the ASPCA, flooded Hollywood fax machines with a bogus press alert about Gere's putative "gerbil abuse."
Celebrities are easy targets for sordid tales. An almost equally widespread rumor is the one about the lead singer of New Kids on the Block being rushed to the emergency room, where doctors pumped his stomach and removed more than a gallon of semen he'd swallowed during an orgy of oral sex. The details vary: Sometimes the quantity of ejaculate is reported as one gallon, sometimes 10. Sometimes the substance removed is human semen; other times it's dog semen. The rumor has variously featured Rod Stewart, Elton John, David Bowie, Marc Almond, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Jeff Beck, Jon Bon Jovi, Alanis Morrissette, Li'l Kim, Foxy Brown, Britney Spears, and Fiona Apple. But the basic story stays the same.
Once someone hits a certain level of celebrity and adulation, it seems, the mill starts to churn automatically—and the more beautiful and successful the star, the more depraved the rumors. Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite. Cher (or Janet Jackson) had a rib removed so she'd look skinnier. Catherine the Great died trying to make love to a horse.
What is it about celebrity rumors that makes them spread so widely and stick so hard? Part of it is good old-fashioned schadenfreude. "People pass along rumors that they, on some level, tend to agree with, if there's something in the story that they identify with, that they want to be true," says Mikkelson. "We envy celebrities, and it's just human nature to pull down what has been raised so high."
Richard Gere is so annoyingly handsome that we want to believe he's really a sicko or otherwise flawed. Girls were so taken by the New Kids on the Block that men longed to believe they were actually secret gay dog fellators.
The easiest way to tarnish the reputation of a male heartthrob is to undermine his masculinity and suggest he's not interested in women at all—but rather, men, gerbils, or dogs. Which is why gay rumors have plagued so many handsome Hollywood leading men, from Tom Cruise to Johnny Depp to Orlando Bloom. "Saying that so-and-so good-looking male actor is gay is seen as pulling him down a peg or two," explains Mikkelson. "It's like, well, he may be attractive to women, but he's not attracted to women—so there!"
The Ninth Law
We might also postulate a final law of rumor survival: Sometimes, there is no "why." Often, we tell remarkable tales to build relationships or show off our yarn-spinning prowess—not necessarily because we think they're true.
And hey, sometimes they are true. Research by DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, of the University of South Australia, has found that in groups with an established hierarchy—like large offices—the scuttlebutt you hear about company affairs is around 95 percent accurate.
"Every Halloween, you hear the rumors about people putting razors in apples and giving them to trick-or-treaters," DiFonzo says. "Actually, my own family had an experience where my wife found a sewing needle embedded in a piece of our kids' Halloween candy. I know, it sounds crazy—the rumor expert believes a rumor. Don't tell anyone."
Study Suggests Why Gut Instincts Work | LiveScienceSometimes when you think you're guessing, your brain may actually know better.
After conducting some unique memory and recognition tests, while also recording subjects' brain waves, scientists conclude that some gut feelings are not just guesswork after all. Rather, we access memories we aren't even aware we have.
"We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too," said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and co-researcher on the study. "Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test. Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level."
The findings were published online Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The research, done with only a couple dozen participants, adds to a growing body of conflicting evidence about decision-making. In one study done in 2007, researchers found that quick decisions were better than those given lots of thought. But a study last year suggested neither snap judgments nor "sleeping on it" trump good old-fashioned conscious thought.
The new study
During the first part of the memory test in the new study, participants were shown a series of colorful kaleidoscope images that flashed on a computer screen. Half of the images were viewed with full attention as participants tried to memorize them. While viewing the other half, the participants were distracted: They heard a spoken number that they had to keep in mind until the next trial, when they indicated whether it was odd or even.
In other words, they could focus on memorizing half of the images but were greatly distracted from memorizing the others.
A bit later, they viewed pairs of similar kaleidoscope images in a recognition test.
"Remarkably, people were more accurate in selecting the old image when they had been distracted than when they had paid full attention," Paller said. "They also were more accurate when they claimed to be guessing than when they registered some familiarity for the image."
Splitting attention during a memory test usually makes memory worse.
"But our research showed that even when people weren't paying as much attention, their visual system was storing information quite well," Paller said.
The brain's role
During the tests, electrical signals in the brain were recorded from a set of electrodes placed on each person's head. The brain waves during implicit recognition were distinct from those associated with conscious memory experiences. A unique signal of implicit recognition was seen a quarter of a second after study participants saw each old image.
Other related research has shown that amnesia victims with severe memory problems often have strong implicit memories, Paller and his colleague, Joel L. Voss of the Beckman Institute, said in a statement.
"Intuition may have an import
RIA Novosti - Opinions - Engins volants de tous typesSans qu'ils soient capables d'expliquer ce phénomène, des chercheurs russes estiment que de très vieilles bactéries conservées dans la merzlota pourraient avoir la capacité de prolonger la vie, rapporte le site nkj.ru.
Les scientifiques s'intéressent depuis longtemps aux micro-organismes "fossiles" qui se trouvent dans les sols éternellement gelés et dont l'âge est estimé à plusieurs millions d'années. La capacité de vie exceptionnelle de ces bactéries demeure pour l'instant inexpliquée. Selon les chercheurs de l'Université pétrogazière d'Etat de Tioumen et de l'Institut de biologie chimique et de médecine fondamentale de la Section sibérienne de l'Académie des sciences russe, des fragments d'ADN, même de petite taille, ne peuvent se conserver plus d'une dizaine de milliers d'années dans des conditions climatiques "normales", et pas plus d'une centaine de milliers d'années dans les régions froides. Et la capacité de la chaîne ADN à transmettre des informations ne se maintient, au mieux, que pendant quelques centaines d'années. Autrement dit, les micro-organismes "fossiles" conservent leur capacité vitale grâce à des mécanismes inconnus à ce jour.
Les chercheurs sibériens ont décidé d'étudier l'influence de ces très vieilles bactéries sur les organismes supérieurs, et notamment sur leur système immunitaire et leur longévité. Pour ce faire, ils ont prélevé sur le Mont des mammouths (région de Verkhoïano-Tchoukotka, Yakoutie) des échantillons de micro-organismes de la variété Bacillus dans des couches de sol gelé vieilles d'environ 3,5 millions d'années. Cette culture possède une résistance élevée aux facteurs défavorables du milieu environnant. Les auteurs de cette étude ont testé l'activité biologique de cette culture sur une cible classique - la mouche drosophile (Drosophila melanogaster). Il s'est avéré, au cours de ces expériences, que la fertilité de ces mouches baissait, mais que leur durée de vie s'allongeait : le pourcentage de mouches ayant survécu plus de 24 jours (jusqu'à 42 jours pour certaines) a augmenté par rapport aux individus de contrôle. (Les auteurs de l'expérience n'ont pas dévoilé le procédé utilisé pour "traiter" les mouches drosophiles avec les bactéries.)
Les chercheurs en ont tiré la conclusion que la culture bactérienne possédait des propriétés géroprotectrices, autrement dit qu'elle était capable de freiner les processus du vieillissement. Les chercheurs soulignent, toutefois, que ces investigations ne peuvent être considérées que comme préalables et requièrent d'être poursuivies. Ils estiment, par ailleurs, que cette aptitude des micro-organismes provenant de la merzlota à conserver leurs capacités vitales pendant des millions d'années ne saurait être exploitée sans que le mécanisme de cette conservation ne soit élucidé.
