Group items tagged

google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor

Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

In people it is called episodic memory, and it involves a sense of self. In animals, it’s called episodic-like memory, because it’s difficult to try to plumb something as elusive as self without the aid of language.

Dr. Fugazza and colleagues reported online in Current Biology that this showed that the dogs remembered an event they hadn’t been concentrating on, the trainer’s action. She said one aspect strengthened that conclusion: The dogs tended to lie down immediately when they got back to the mat, suggesting that their heads were in “lie down” mode, not “do it” mode.

He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.

Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett found, for the first time, that the neurotransmitter dopamine is involved in human bonding, bringing the brain's reward system into our understanding of how we form human attachments.

To conduct the study, the researchers turned to a novel technology: a machine capable of performing two types of brain scans simultaneously -- functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and positron emission tomography, or PET.

Barrett's team focused on the neurotransmitter dopamine, a chemical that acts in various brain systems to spark the motivation necessary to work for a reward.

Educators unveiled new guidelines on Tuesday that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the United States

The guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, are the first broad national recommendations for science instruction since 1996. They were developed by a consortium of 26 state governments and several groups representing scientists and teachers.

The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world.

His comments come as the pope, who earned a master's degree in chemistry before turning to the priesthood, becomes increasingly vocal about climate change. Pope Francis is preparing a groundbreaking encyclical to be released in the coming weeks that's expected to make the case that taking action to fight climate change is a moral and religious imperative.

Santorum has a history of rejecting established science. He denies that climate change is man-made and has dismissed global warming as a "hoax" despite the fact that 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that "climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities," according to NASA.

“The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality,” Santorum said. "When we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, I think the church is not as forceful and credible."

the evolutionary logic of relationships beyond rivalry

~98% of bacterial species don’t thrive outside mixed-species colonies.

Bacteria are not self-sufficient: They’ve co-evolved to depend on each other.

ACROSS cultures and industries, managers strongly prize “cultural fit” — the idea that the best employees are like-minded.

One recent survey found that more than 80 percent of employers worldwide named cultural fit as a top hiring priority.

When done carefully, selecting new workers this way can make organizations more productive and profitable.

Antibiotics: US discovery labelled 'game-changer' for medicine

The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists.

ielded 25 new antibiotics, with one deemed "very promising".

experimental psychologist

research on how social interactions affect biology in humans and animals.

t women living together in a Wellesley College dormitory tended to menstruate at the same time.

Who among us doesn’t thrill to catch a glimpse of a meteorite streaking across the night sky? Except for a few colorful cases — a living room in Connecticut, an explosion in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia — these beauties disappear into our atmosphere.

Now a new picture book, In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micro-Meteorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters, reveals that, really, it’s everywhere. 

The cosmic stuff is so ubiquitous that we probably eat it in our salads all the time.

Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.

Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.

it’s not even a good description of how the “hard” sciences work. It’s a high school textbook version of science, with everything messy and chaotic about scientific inquiry safely ignored.

In chemistry, reactivity is a measure of how readily a substance undergoes a chemical reaction. The reaction can involve the substance on its own or with other atoms or compounds, generally accompanied by a release of energy. The most reactive elements and compounds may ignite spontaneously or explosively. They generally burn in water as well as the oxygen in air. Reactivity is dependent upon temperature.

Reactivity Trend in the Periodic TableThe organization of elements on the periodic table allows for predictions concerning reactivity. Both highly electropositive and highly electronegative elements have a strong tendency to react. These elements are located in the upper right and lower left corners of the periodic table and in certain element groups. The halogens, alkali metals, and alkaline earth metals are highly reactive.

How Reactivity WorksA substance reacts when the products formed from a chemical reaction have a lower energy (higher stability) than the reactants. The energy difference can be predicted using valence bond theory, atomic orbital theory, and molecular orbital theory. Basically, it boils down to the stability of electrons in their orbitals. Unpaired electrons with no electrons in comparable orbitals are the most likely to interact with orbitals from other atoms, forming chemical bonds. Unpaired electrons with degenerate orbitals that are half-filled are more stable, but still reactive. The least reactive atoms are those with a filled set of orbitals (octet).

The fact is, we still don’t know what life is.

since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things.

If you say life consumes fuel to sustain itself with energy, you risk including fire; if you demand the ability to reproduce, you exclude mules. NASA hasn’t been able to do better than a working definition: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

Did you hope to combine chemistry and political philosophy in some way in your medical career?

Chemistry requires synthetic thinking. You have to bring disparate pieces of knowledge together in order to look for a chemical structure. Political philosophy, to some degree, also involves disparate aspects of knowledge: economics, sociology, history, pure philosophy

I found that in medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. You’re looking for clues that are often distributed in different places: family history, as there might be a genetic predisposition; social history, because the person smoked or was exposed to a toxin; the physical examination, where you find that an organ might be disordered. Add to that the blood test, the CAT scan, all of it, but most importantly, the person, the psychology of the person you’re dealing with. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.

the age of Skinnerian Marketing. Future applications making use of big data, location, maps, tracking of a browser's interests, and data streams coming from mobile and wearable devices, promise to usher in the era of unprecedented power in the hands of marketers, who are no longer merely appealing to our innate desires, but programming our behaviors.

In the 1930's, B. F. Skinner developed the concept of operant conditioning. He put pigeons and rats in Skinner boxes to study how he could modify their behavior using rewards and punishments.

Skinner's techniques of operant conditioning and his notorious theory of behavior modification were denounced by his critics 70 years ago as fascist, manipulative vehicles that could be used for government control.

blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.”

Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency.

Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. “Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development,” said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.

You, me, and even the most calming manatee are nothing but impurities in an otherwise beautifully simple universe.

Your existence wasn’t just predicated on amorousness and luck of your ancestors, but on an almost absurdly finely tuned universe. Had the universe opted to turn up the strength of the electromagnetic force by even a small factor, poof

if the universe were only minutely denser than the one we inhabit, it would have collapsed before it began.

Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will

Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading

Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.

It’s the invasion of the Can’t-Help-Yourself books. Unlike most pop self-help books, these are about life as we know it — the one you can change, but only a little, and with a ton of work. Professor Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economic science a decade ago, has synthesized a lifetime’s research in neurobiology, economics and psychology. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” goes to the heart of the matter: How aware are we of the invisible forces of brain chemistry, social cues and temperament that determine how we think and act?

The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.

Mr. Duhigg’s thesis is that we can’t change our habits, we can only acquire new ones. Alcoholics can’t stop drinking through willpower alone: they need to alter behavior — going to A.A. meetings instead of bars, for instance — that triggers the impulse to drink.