Science & Nature | Anthropology & Behavior | Smithsonian.com

Can Brain Scans Really Tell Us What Makes Something Beautiful?

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:21:56 GMT

It’s beautiful, but does it know art? Image courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA and Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH When art meets neuroscience, strange things happen. Consider the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art in Oregon which features rugs and knitting based on a brain scan motif. Or the neuroscientist at the University of Nevada-Reno who scanned the brain of a portrait artist while he drew a picture of a face. And then there’s the ongoing war of words between scientists who think it’s possible to use analysis of brain activity to define beauty–or even art–and their critics who argue that it’s abs

The World According to Twitter, in Maps

Fri, 10 May 2013 02:31:00 GMT

Tweets from around the world, plotted by location as part of a new study. Click to enlarge. Image via First Monday/Leetaru et. al. It’s hard to appreciate just how quickly and thoroughly Twitter has taken over the world. Just seven years ago, in 2006, it was an idea sketched out on a pad of paper. Now, the service is used by an estimated 554 million users—a number that amounts to nearly 8 percent of the all humans on the planet—and an estimated 170 billion tweets have been sent, with that number climbing by roughly 58 million every single day. All these tweets provide an invaluable source of news, entertainment, conversation and connection between people. But for sc

10 New Things Science Says About Moms

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:37:00 GMT

What makes a 21st century mom? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Robert Whitehead To be honest, I’ve never associated motherhood with science. I assume this has everything to do with the fact that I’m one of eight kids, and while I’m sure we were a study in chaos theory, my mother didn’t have much time to nail the concept and work it into bedtime stories. That said, moms remain a subject of scientific inquiry because, no matter how constant they may seem to us, they’re always changing to keep up with the times. Here then are 10 recent studies or surveys that give a bit more insight into the institution of 21st century moms. 1) Have I got a story for you: A

What Phone Companies Are Doing With All That Data From Your Phone

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:02:32 GMT

Cell phones have become prolific data engines. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon Cell phones are so many things now–computer, map, clock, calculator, camera, shopping device, concierge, and occasionally, a phone. But more than anything, that little device that never leaves your person is one amazingly prolific data engine. Which is why last October, Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S, carrier with almost 100 million customers, launched a new division called Precision Market Insights. And why, at about the same time, Madrid-based Telefonica, one of the world’s largest mobile network providers, opened its own new business unit, Telefonica Dynamic Insights. The poin

My Big Fat European Family: What Genomics Tell Us About Shared Ancestors

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:01:00 GMT

Thousands of Dutch fans celebrate a soccer match between Netherlands and Germany in the Ukranian city of Kharkiv in 2012. The fans and their German counterparts likely share hundreds of genetic ancestors from the past thousand years. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Aleksandr Osipov Last month, a trio of engineers debuted an app that allows Icelanders to determine if they’re actually related to a potential date. Why, you ask? Because the entire population of Iceland, roughly 320,000 people, derives from a single family tree, and it’s very possible to bump into a former flame at a family gathering. The case of Iceland is an extreme one, but the idea that we are all distant cousins, in the

The Secret to a Long Life May Be Deep Inside Your Brain

Fri, 03 May 2013 02:42:15 GMT

Scientists could be one step closer to slowing down aging. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Paolo Margari It may have been the word retrieval adventure I had the other night when I couldn’t remember the name of thinly sliced cured ham. (I nailed the “p,” but didn’t come close to conjuring up “prosciutto.”) Or it could have been the annoying pain I feel in a knuckle on my right hand these days. Probably both. All I know is that when I read about a recent study in which scientists were able to slow down the aging process in mice, I was more than a little intrigued. According to the researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, the

How Big Data Will Mean the End to Job Interviews

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:09:55 GMT

Who makes a good call center worker? Big Data knows. Photo courtesy of Flickr user State Farm I have good news and bad news for anyone who will be looking for a job in the coming years. The good news is that some time in the future, job interviews may go away. Okay, maybe some companies will still do them for the sake of tradition, but they won’t matter all that much. Which leads me to the bad news–Big Data is more likely to determine if you get a job. Your dazzling smile, charming personality and awesome resume may count for something, but it’s algorithms and predictive analysis that will probably seal your fate. Here’s why. Enormously powerful computers ar

Why Women Like Deep Voices and Men Prefer High Ones

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:01:26 GMT

We find different pitches attractive because of the body size they signal—and a touch of breathiness is crucial to take the edge off a man’s deep voice. Image via Flickr user linda Who you’re physically attracted to might seem like a frivolous, random preference. In recent years, though, science has told us that our seemingly arbitrary tastes often reflect unconscious choices that are based upon very relevant biological traits. In general, we find symmetric faces more attractive, likely because they reflect a healthy underlying genome. Women typically prefer men with more distinctively masculine facial features because they indicate high testosterone levels and physical st

Do Teachers Need Their Own “Bar Exam”?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:56:42 GMT

Do teachers need to train more like doctors? Photo courtesy of Flickr user WoodleyWonderworks Question: What’s needed to raise the quality of school teachers in America? Answer: A bar exam? So say the head of the country’s most powerful teachers’ union, the governor of New York and the U.S. secretary of education, among others. Their contention is that the only way teachers can truly elevate their profession–and with it the level of public education–is if they follow the lead of doctors, lawyers and engineers and are required to pass a test to prove mastery of their subject matter and how to teach it. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federat

Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 03:46:44 GMT

A new study shows that fathers and mothers are equally skilled at picking out their infant’s unique cry—if they spend the same amount of their time parenting. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Voiceboks After a baby orangutan is born, it’ll spend the first two years of its life completely dependent on its mother—maintaining direct physical contact with her for at least the first four months—and breastfeeding for up to five years in total. During that time, it will likely never meet its father. Polar bears are also born helpless, surviving on their mothers’ milk through the harsh Arctic winter, but polar bear fathers provide no parenting, and have even been known to eat thei

What’s in Century-Old ‘Snake Oil’ Medicines? Mercury and Lead

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 01:52:17 GMT

A chemical analysis of early 1900s medicines like Hollister’s Golden Nugget Tablets revealed vitamins and calcium, but also toxic compounds like mercury and lead. Image via Mark Benvenuto If you suffered from a medical ailment in the year 1900, your treatment options were varied: You could take everything from Dr. Tutt’s Liver Pills to Hollister’s Golden Nugget Tablets, Dr. Sawen’s Magic Nerving Pills or Dr. Comfort’s Candy-Covered Cathartic Compound. Of course, their titles notwithstanding, the creators of these pills weren’t always doctors, and the medicines certainly hadn’t gone through the controlled randomized trials we have today to ensu

Do Wind Turbines Need a Rethink?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:05:37 GMT

Imagine them without the blades. Photo courtesy of Flickr user “Caveman Chuck” Coker Bet you didn’t know that last year a record amount of wind power was installed around the planet. The U.S. set a record, too, and, once again, became the world leader in adding new wind power, pushing China into second place for the year. You’re not alone in being clueless about this. So was I. After all, this is a subject that gets about as much attention as 17-year-cicadas in a off year. What generally passes for energy coverage in the U.S. these days is the relentless cycle of gas-prices-up, gas-prices-down stories and the occasional foray into the natural-gas-fracking-is-a

Dave Brubeck’s Son, Darius, Reflects on His Father’s Legacy

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 02:33:48 GMT

Father and son: Darius and Dave Brubeck in Wilton, Connecticut, September 2011. Image courtesy of Darius Brubeck Joann Stevens of the American History Museum. She is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) and last wrote about the Aloha Boys. Dave Brubeck. The legendary jazz pianist, composer, and cultural diplomat’s name inspires awe and reverence. Call him the “quintessential American.” Reared in the West, born into a tight knit, musical family, by age 14 he was a cowboy working a 45,000 acre cattle ranch at the foothills of the Sierras with his father and brothers. A musical innovator, Brubeck captivated the world over six decades with his love fo

Free Online Courses Mean College Will Never Be the Same

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 02:12:28 GMT

Will going to class become quaint? Photo courtesy of Coursera. Depending on who you’re listening to, Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, are either the greatest boon to the spread of knowledge since Gutenberg cranked his first press or the biggest threat to learning on campus since the coming of cheap beer. No question that they are the most disruptive innovation to come out of universities in a very long time, although it’s still too soon to say if that’s “good” disruptive or bad. A quick refresher: Though free online courses, notably through Khan Academy, were already starting to build an audience, the first MOOC by a university professor popped up

Research Shows That True Fame Lasts Longer Than 15 Minutes

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 03:16:00 GMT

Natalie Portman was among the most often-mentioned names of the 2000s, according to a new study, reflecting the fact that true celebrity lasts longer than 15 minutes. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Real TV Films In 1968, Andy Warhol—already famous in his own right—further added to his celebrity by creating a lasting cliché: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Prescient as Warhol might have been, it seems we haven’t reached that future quite yet, at least according to science. A new study, published today in the American Sociological Review, finds that true fame lasts a good deal longer than 15 minutes. In an analysis of the

Warning: Living Alone May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 07:01:00 GMT

Being socially isolated increases your chance of death, but not simply because you’re feeling lonely. Image via Flickr user eflon One of the most unprecedented trends of modern society is the number of people who choose to live alone. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg observed in his 2012 book Going Solo, living alone was virtually unheard of in most world cultures throughout history prior to the 20th century, but an estimated 32.7 million people now live alone in the United States, accounting for about 28 percent of the country’s households today, compared with 17 percent in 1970. The medical and mental effects of this shift are complex. As Klinenberg notes, many people who

How Digital Devices Change the Rules of Etiquette

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:27:57 GMT

Smartphones are changing our notion of acceptable behavior. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jennifer Conley I committed my first texting heresy a few years ago when my son was away at college. I had asked him about a class he was taking and had needed three, maybe four sentences to express myself. He responded with bemusement. Or maybe it was disgust. Who could tell? But his message was clear: If I continued to be so lame as to send texts longer than two sentences–using complete words, no less–he would have little choice but to stop answering. I was reminded of this less-than-tender father-son moment recently by a post by Nick Bilton for The New York Times’ Bits bl

Prehistoric Human Skull Shows Signs of Inbreeding

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:30:00 GMT

The hole in the top of this 100,000-year-old skull from China, researchers say, reflects genetic mutations that result from inbreeding. Image via PLOS ONE/Wu et. al. In 2010, the surprising discovery that Neanderthals likely crossbred with our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago generated headlines around the world. Now, we have a new finding about the sex lives of early Homo sapiens: It looks like they engaged in some inbreeding as well. That is the conclusion of anthropologist Erik Trinkhaus of Washington University in St. Louis and Xiu-Jie Wu and Song Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, based on a fractur

The Bay Bridge Gets Its Glow On

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:42:28 GMT

Is the Bay Bridge now the cooler bridge in San Francisco? Photo courtesy of Leo Villareal Last week, for the first time in 75 years, the Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Oakland, made the Golden Gate seem like just another bridge. Kudos to Leo Villareal. He’s an artist who works with lights, but also with algorithms. And his latest project, The Bay Lights, is probably the most spectacular example of that mix of art and tech that most of us have ever seen. Under Villareal’s direction, teams of electricians spent the past five months stringing 25,000 LED lights a foot apart–from the top of the bridge’s towers down to the deck–for the full length (a

Are Babies Bigoted?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:00:00 GMT

An intriguing new study suggests that infants dislike those who are different from themselves. Image via Flickr user paparutzi In one of the fastest-growing areas in psychology, researchers are gaining insight into the mental processes of subjects that are barely able to communicate: babies. In recent years, innovative and playful experimental setups have suggested that infants as young as six months old have a sense of morality and fairness, and that 18-month-olds are capable of altruistically helping others. Some of this research, though, has also shed light on babies’ dark side. A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that 9- to 14-month-olds exhibit a partic

Science Shows Why You’re Smarter Than a Neanderthal

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:01:39 GMT

A Neanderthal’s skull (right) was larger than a human’s (left) and had a similar inner volume for mental capacity, but new research indicates less of it was devoted to higher-order thinking. Image via Wikimedia Commons/DrMikeBaxter Neanderthals never invented written language, developed agriculture or progressed past the Stone Age. At the same time, they had brains just as big in volume as modern humans’. The question of why we Homo sapiens are significantly more intelligent than the similarly big-brained Neanderthals—and why we survived and proliferated while they went extinct—has puzzled scientists for some time. Now, a new study by Oxford researchers provides evid

How a Computer Program Can Learn All About You From Just Your Facebook Likes

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:01:00 GMT

Your publicly available “likes” can tell others a lot you wouldn’t expect—including your political views, sexual orientation and religion. Image via Flickr user Kevin Krejci Odds are, when you decided to “like” a TV show, band, local business or product’s Facebook page, you didn’t imagine that that click would have much consequence. It might show your friends a bit about your interests, and occasionally cause status updates from the page to show up in your news feed. “Likes,” however, are publicly available for anyone to see on Facebook, even people you haven’t approved as friends. And for a new study published today i

Nitpicking the Lice Genome to Track Humanity’s Past Footsteps

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:01:00 GMT

A male human head louse. Photo by Flickr user Gilles San Martin Parasites have been around for more than 270 million years. Around 25 million years ago, lice joined the blood-sucking party and invaded the hair of ancient primates. When the first members of Homo arrived on the scene around 2.5 million years ago, lice took advantage of the new great ape on the block for better satisfying its digestive needs. As a new genetic analysis published today in PLoS One shows, mining these parasites’ genomes can lend clues for understanding the migration patterns of these early humans. The human louse, Pediculus humanus, is a single species yet members fall into two distinct camps: head a

10 Fresh Looks at Love

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:45:27 GMT

Scientists are still wrestling with how love works. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Hamed Masoumi It should probably tell us something that the most frequently asked question on Google last year was “What is love?” Clearly, most of us are clueless on the matter; otherwise we wouldn’t be turning to algorithms for an explanation. Which explains why scientific research on love continues unabated. We want answers. So, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, here are 10 recent studies or surveys trying to make sense of matters of the heart. 1) You light up my brain: Researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island say that based on brain scans, they may be able to predict if

Can Machines Learn Morality?

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:44:12 GMT

Can drones be taught the rules of war? Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense When John Brennan, President Obama’s choice to be the next head of the CIA, appeared before a Senate committee yesterday, one question supplanted all others at his confirmation hearing: How are the decisions made to send killer drones after suspected terrorists? The how and, for that matter, the why of ordering specific drone strikes remains largely a mystery, but at least one thing is clear–the decisions are being made by humans who, one would hope, wrestle with the thought of sending a deadly missile into an occupied building. But what if humans weren’t involved? What if one day

These Machines Will Be Able to Detect Smells Your Own Nose Cannot

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:17:45 GMT

A machine that sniffs out cancer. Photo courtesy of Metabolomx Admittedly, it’s a little hard to imagine smell scientists, but research published earlier this week has those who study the sense of smell taking sides. It comes down to how our noses detect odors. The long-standing explanation is that our noses have receptors that respond based on the shapes of odor molecules. Different molecules fit together with different receptors, the thinking goes, and when a match is made, the receptor tips off the brain that our nose has picked up a whiff of coffee or perhaps a very different smell emanating from the bottom of our shoe. But a conflicting and more exotic theory received a bo

Learning From Nature How to Deal With Nature

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 05:50:23 GMT

The greening of Lower Manhattan. Image courtesy of Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio During his inaugural speech Monday, President Barack Obama uttered a phrase that during last year’s presidential campaign were The-Words-That-Shall-Not-Be-Spoken. He mentioned climate change. In fact, President Obama didn’t just mention it, he declared that a failure to deal with climate change “would betray our children and future generations.” But ask any Washington pundit if Congress will do anything meaningful on the subject and they’ll tell you that that’s as likely as D.C. freezing over in July. Also this week, as it turns out, a study was releas

Are Babies Born Good?

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Arber Tasimi is a 23-year-old researcher at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center, where he studies the moral inclinations of babies—how the littlest children understand right and wrong, before language and culture exert their deep influence.“What are we at our core, before anything, before everything?” he asks. His experiments draw on the work of Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, his own undergraduate thesis at the University of Pennsylvania and what happened to him in New Haven, Connecticut, one Friday night last February. It was about 9:45 p.m., and Tasimi and a friend were strolling home from dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. Just a few hundred feet from his apartment

Do Humans Have a Biological Stopwatch?

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

When we witness the passage of time, according to noted physicist Paul Davies, we are actually observing how the “later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember.” In that sense time is like a movie: We are seeing slightly altered images playing in rapid succession. That might explain why we perceive time as moving forward, but it fails to account for why we often perceive time moving at varying speeds. Why does it speed up when we’re having fun, but slow down when we’re bored? Most of us are fairly good at measuring short time intervals—seconds, minutes—but neuroscientists aren’t sure how we do it. “There is no o

Your Alarm Clock May Be Hazardous to Your Health

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

One overlooked culprit in the world’s obesity epidemic may be the alarm clock, according to Till Roenneberg, a professor at the University of Munich’s Institute of Medical Psychology. He studies “social jet lag,” a term he coined, perhaps not surprisingly, on an airplane. But unlike the jet lag you get from shifting time zones, social jet lag is the chronic clash between what our bodies need (more sleep) and what our lives demand (being on time). And his research suggests that it’s playing havoc with our biological clocks. In a study, published in May, Roenneberg and colleagues analyzed the sleep habits of more than 65,000 adults. Two-thirds of them suffered

Why Time is a Social Construct

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

“What time is it?” is not a question that usually provokes a lot of soul-searching. It’s generally taken for granted that even if we don’t know the correct time, a correct time does exist and that everyone on the planet—whatever time zone they happen to be in—follows the same clock. University of Missouri management scholar Allen Bluedorn believes time itself is a social construction. “What any group of people think about time ends up being a result of them interacting with each other and socialization processes,” he says. We measure time not simply in terms of minutes and seconds, but in terms of concepts such as “early,” &ld

From the Editor

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

My 5-year-old daughter chose to dress up as an angel this year for Halloween. My 7-year-old girl went as a vampire, plastic fangs flashing. That contrast, the elemental pull between light and dark, is one of the most fascinating and enduring mysteries of the human condition. Are we born with an instinct to do good and slowly, inexorably taught to do otherwise? Or are we born, like most of our fellow animals, with a capacity for cruelty that is only fitfully tempered by the imperative of living with others? After millennia of saints and sinners, scientists think they may have finally gotten close to the answer, and it lies in the mouths (and minds) of babes. Researchers at Yale and Harvard

Are You Smarter Than Your Grandfather? Probably Not.

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:27:00 GMT

In the mid-1980s, James Flynn made a groundbreaking discovery in human intelligence. The political scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand found that over the last century, in every nation in the developing world where intelligence-test results are on record, IQ test scores had significantly risen from one generation to the next. “Psychologists faced a paradox: either the people of today were far brighter than their parents or, at least in some circumstances, IQ tests were not good measures of intelligence,” writes Flynn. Now, in a new book, Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, Flynn unpacks his original finding, explaining the causes f

The History of Boredom

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 05:13:27 GMT

This Sunday, 500 people will flock to a conference hall in East London to be bored. Over the course of seven hours, they will hear talks on, among other things, pylons, self-service checkouts, double-yellow lines – as in the ones on the road – shop fronts and gardening. “Quite why anyone else would want to go is a mystery,” says James Ward, 31, the conference’s organizer. Ward, a marketer for a major British retailer, says that the conference started by accident: In 2010, after learning that the Interesting Conference, a day of talks put on by Wired writer Russell Davies, was cancelled, he tweeted – jokingly – that he ought to put on a Boring Conf

Why Oliver Sacks is One of the Great Modern Adventurers

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

It’s easy to get the wrong impression about Dr. Oliver Sacks. It certainly is if all you do is look at the author photos on the succession of brainy best-selling neurology books he’s written since Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat made him famous. Cumulatively, they give the impression of a warm, fuzzy, virtually cherubic fellow at home in comfy-couched consultation rooms. A kind of fusion of Freud and Yoda. And indeed that’s how he looked when I spoke with him recently, in his comfy-couched consultation room. But Oliver Sacks is one of the great modern adventurers, a daring explorer of a different sort of unmapped territory than braved by Columbus or

Fire Good. Make Human Inspiration Happen.

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The next time you find yourself lost in thought while gazing at a fireplace ablaze or even a solitary candle flame, consider this: Being mesmerized by fire might have sparked the evolution of the human mind. It’s well-known that fire enabled the survival of early humans by providing warmth as well as a means to cook food and forge better weapons. Yet research into cognitive evolution—a field of study that brings together psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and genetics—suggests that fire’s most lasting impact was how our responses to it altered our brains, helping endow us with capabilities such as long-term memory and problem-solving. Archaeological evidence s

The Pros to Being a Psychopath

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 02:00:00 GMT

When most of us hear the word “psychopath,” we imagine Hannibal Lecter. Kevin Dutton would prefer that we think of brain surgeons, CEOs and Buddhist monks. In his new book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, the Oxford research psychologist argues that psychopathic personality traits—charm, confidence, ruthlessness, coolness under pressure—can, in the right doses, be a good thing. Not all psychopaths are violent, he says, and some of them are just the sort of people society can count on in a crisis. To further his psychopathic studies, Dutton is seeking participants for his Great American Psychopath Survey,

How Much is Being Attractive Worth?

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Beautiful people are indeed happier, a new study says, but not always for the same reasons. For handsome men, the extra kicks are more likely to come from economic benefits, like increased wages, while women are more apt to find joy just looking in the mirror. “Women feel that beauty is inherently important,” says Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas at Austin labor economist and the study’s lead author. “They just feel bad if they’re ugly.” Hamermesh is the acknowledged father of pulchronomics, or the economic study of beauty. It can be a perilous undertaking. He once enraged an audience of young Mormon women, many of whom aspired to stay home wi

How Does the Brain Process Art?

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In Michelangelo’s Expulsion from Paradise, a fresco panel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the fallen-from-grace Adam wards off a sword-wielding angel, his eyes averted from the blade and his wrist bent back defensively. It is a gesture both wretched and beautiful. But what is it that triggers the viewer’s aesthetic response—the sense that we’re right there with him, fending off blows? Recently, neuroscientists and an art historian asked ten subjects to examine the wrist detail from the painting, and—using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)—monitored what happened in their brains. The researchers found that the image e

Who Needs a Boss When You Have Your Co-Workers?

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 06:44:57 GMT

Steven Johnson is optimistic about the future. But, in order to ensure progress going forward, he insists that we harness the power of the peer network. In his new book, Future Perfect, Johnson highlights the success of collaborative efforts such as Wikipedia and Kickstarter and advises us to use similar decentralized networks of people to help solve problems in the coming years. He calls his worldview “peer progressivism.” What is flawed about the way we, as a society, think about progress? We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad—amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released,

Why Power Corrupts

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

“Power tends to corrupt,” said Lord Acton, the 19th-century British historian. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” His maxim has been vividly illustrated in psychological studies, notably the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which was halted when one group of students arbitrarily assigned to serve as “prison guards” over another group began to abuse their wards. But new scholarship is bringing fresh subtlety to psychologists’ understanding of when power leads people to take ethical shortcuts—and when it doesn’t. Indeed, for some people, power seems to bring out their best. After all, good people do win elective office, says Katherine

But Did You See the Gorilla? The Problem With Inattentional Blindness

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

For more than a decade, my colleagues and I have been studying a form of invisibility known as inattentional blindness. In our best-known demonstration, we showed people a video and asked them to count how many times three basketball players wearing white shirts passed a ball. After about 30 seconds, a woman in a gorilla suit sauntered into the scene, faced the camera, thumped her chest and walked away. Half the viewers missed her. In fact, some people looked right at the gorilla and did not see it. That video was an Internet sensation. So, in 2010, I decided to make a sequel. This time viewers were expecting the gorilla to make an appearance. And it did. But the viewers were so focused o

A Single Brain Structure May Give Winners That Extra Physical Edge

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 03:27:25 GMT

All elite athletes train hard, possess great skills and stay mentally sharp during competition. But what separates a gold medalist from an equally dedicated athlete who comes in 10th place? A small structure deep in the brain may give winners an extra edge. Recent studies indicate that the brain's insular cortex may help a sprinter drive his body forward just a little more efficiently than his competitors. This region may prepare a boxer to better fend off a punch his opponent is beginning to throw as well as assist a diver as she calculates her spinning body's position so she hits the water with barely a splash. The insula, as it is commonly called, may help a marksman retain a sharp foc

Why Procrastination is Good for You

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 03:59:42 GMT

Sometimes life seems to happen at warp speed. But, decisions, says Frank Partnoy, should not. When the financial market crashed in 2008, the former investment banker and corporate lawyer, now a professor of finance and law and co-director of the Center for Corporate and Securities Law at the University of San Diego, turned his attention to literature on decision-making. “Much recent research about decisions helps us understand what we should do or how we should do it, but it says little about when,” he says. In his new book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, Partnoy claims that when faced with a decision, we should assess how long we have to make it, and then wait until the

Nerd Love and Why It's Better For Everyone

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 03:14:56 GMT

According to evolutionary biologist Sergey Gavrilets, the modern family might look very different had some scrawny male hominids not found a clever workaround to having to physically compete against strong alpha males for mates. In his latest study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gavrilets suggests that weaker males, in lieu of being promiscuous, fawned over a single female. By providing her food, a male would earn that female’s trust and sexual fidelity. In this scenario, the pair’s offspring naturally benefited, as they were more likely to survive under the watchful gaze of two parents. So, let’s start by going back in time. Before mon

Your Brain, By the Numbers

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

100: Number, in billions, of neurons in a human brain 100: Estimated number, in terabytes, of information it can store 1: Number, in terabytes, of information a typical desktop computer can store 2: Percentage of the body’s weight represented by the brain 20: Percentage of the body’s energy used by the brain 95: Number of diagnoses in the 1952 DSM-I, the first edition of psychiatry’s manual for diagnosing mental illnesses 283: Number of diagnoses in the 2011 DSM-IV-TR, the most recent edition 303: Highest number of random digits memorized at the 2012 USA Memory Championship, a record 10: Approximate percentage drop, in one study, in the accurate recall of random l

The Science of Choking Under Pressure

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Thanks to Reebok commercials that aired before the 1992 Summer Olympics, America knew that Dan O’Brien could sprint 100 meters in 10.3 seconds and fling a discus 172 feet. But when the decathlete missed his three pole vault attempts at the trials, he became more famous for something else: choking. “For half an hour, I walked around with my hands on my head, saying, ‘What just happened? Was that really my third attempt?’” says O’Brien, author of the new book Clearing Hurdles. He searched for his mom in the stands; he cried. “Somebody had to explain it to me: ‘Dude, you’re not going to the Olympics.’” Sian Beilock, a Univers

Animal Brains, More Beautiful Than You Could Ever Imagine

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 06:25:20 GMT

More than just eye candy, these images are teaching scientists new insights into how the brain is organized

When Did the Human Mind Evolve to What It is Today?

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:33:16 GMT

Archaeologists excavating a cave on the coast of South Africa not long ago unearthed an unusual abalone shell. Inside was a rusty red substance. After analyzing the mixture and nearby stone grinding tools, the researchers realized they had found the world’s earliest known paint, made 100,000 years ago from charcoal, crushed animal bones, iron-rich rock and an unknown liquid. The abalone shell was a storage container—a prehistoric paint can. The find revealed more than just the fact that people used paints so long ago. It provided a peek into the minds of early humans. Combining materials to create a product that doesn’t resemble the original ingredients and saving the co

How Dogs Can Help Veterans Overcome PTSD

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 07:30:00 GMT

Going to the movies was the worst: the crowds, the dark, the whispering. “I would constantly be scanning for who was going to come stab me from behind,” says Robert Soliz, a 31-year-old former Army Specialist from San Joaquin, California. He was discharged in 2005 after serving in a heavy artillery quick-reaction force in South Baghdad. But fear, anxiety, depression and substance abuse swept into his life, and Soliz became one of 300,000 U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Isolated, his family deteriorating—“I couldn’t show affection, couldn’t hug my kids”—Soliz turned to the

What is So Good About Growing Old

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 06:19:18 GMT

Even as certain mental skills decline with age—what was that guy’s name again?—scientists are finding the mind gets sharper at a number of vitally important abilities. In a University of Illinois study, older air traffic controllers excelled at their cognitively taxing jobs, despite some losses in short-term memory and visual spatial processing. How so? They were expert at navigating, juggling multiple aircraft simultaneously and avoiding collisions. People also learn how to deal with social conflicts more effectively. For a 2010 study, researchers at the University of Michigan presented “Dear Abby” letters to 200 people and asked what advice they would give.

Let the Children Play, It's Good for Them!

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:06:18 GMT

Walk into any preschool and you’ll find toddling superheroes battling imaginary monsters. We take it for granted that young children play and, especially, pretend. Why do they spend so much time in fantasy worlds? People have suspected that play helps children learn, but until recently there was little research that showed this or explained why it might be true. In my lab at the University of California at Berkeley, we’ve been trying to explain how very young children can learn so much so quickly, and we’ve developed a new scientific approach to children’s learning. Where does pretending come in? It relates to what philosophers call “counterfactual” th

Temple Grandin on a New Approach for Thinking About Thinking

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:04:03 GMT

When I was young, I assumed that everybody thought in photo-realistic pictures the way I do. When I think about a church steeple, I see many specific steeples in my imagination. They pop into my mind like a series of slides projected on a screen. My concept of a church steeple is based on putting many examples in a file in my brain labeled “church steeples.” It was a mind-expanding experience for me to learn that other people process information in a different way. As a person with autism, I have the typical profile of an area of great skill and an area of difficulty. Algebra was impossible because there was nothing to visualize, but I excelled at art. Thinking in pictures h

How Humans Became Moral Beings

Fri, 04 May 2012 03:55:54 GMT

Why do people show kindness to others, even those outside their families, when they do not stand to benefit from it? Being generous without that generosity being reciprocated does not advance the basic evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce. Christopher Boehm, an evolutionary anthropologist, is the director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. For 40 years, he has observed primates and studied different human cultures to understand social and moral behavior. In his new book, Moral Origins, Boehm speculates that human morality emerged along with big game hunting. When hunter-gatherers formed groups, he explains, survival essentially boiled down

The Definition of Home

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:21:12 GMT

When did “home” become embedded in human consciousness? Is our sense of home instinctive? Are we denning animals or nest builders, or are we, at root, nomadic? For much of the earliest history of our species, home may have been nothing more than a small fire and the light it cast on a few familiar faces, surrounded perhaps by the ancient city-mounds of termites. But whatever else home is—and however it entered our consciousness—it’s a way of organizing space in our minds. Home is home, and everything else is not-home. That’s the way the world is constructed. Not that you can’t feel “at home” in other places. But there’s a big psy

What Does E.O. Wilson Mean By a "Social Conquest of the Earth"

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson explains his theory of everything—how hominids evolved, why war is common, how social insects became social, and why ants and bees and humans are so successful. Science writer Carl Zimmer spoke with Wilson. When you use the phrase “the social conquest of earth” in the title of your book, what do you mean by that? How have social animals conquered the earth? The most advanced social insects—ants, termites, many species of bees and wasp—make up only about 3 percent of the known species of animals on earth. But on the land they make up in most habitats upwards of 50 percent of the biomass. And of course

Who Would Live on Wall Street?

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

At the end of 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protesters took down their tents and dispersed. But another group of 60,000 occupiers remain behind. Most of these invaders have trickled quietly into Lower Manhattan over the past decade, taking over one office building after another. And they have no intention of ending their occupation. This is their home. The transformation of the once-desolate financial district into a chic residential enclave would have amazed the most prescient urban planners of the 20th century. But the demographic shift from the suburbs to the inner cities will define the coming decades, says journalist Alan Ehrenhalt in his new book, The Great Inversion and the Future o

Edward O. Wilson’s New Take on Human Nature

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University knows the terrifying power of the nest firsthand—and first-ankle, crook of the knee, any patch of skin that happened to be unsheathed as the eminent evolutionary biologist has crept through tropical rainforests studying some of the most aggressive ant species in the world. Ants are a wildly successful sector of nature’s bestiary, accounting for maybe a quarter of all terrestrial animal matter—the same percentage of biomass that we humans can claim. They’re found on every continent save Antarctica and in just about every possible setting, and though you may dislike ants at a picnic, you’d dislike even more a park that was

How to Become the Engineers of Our Own Evolution

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:46:39 GMT

The reports regularly come in from around the world: U.S. engineers unveil a prototype bionic eye, Swedish surgeons replace a man’s cancerous trachea with a body part grown in a lab, and a British woman augments her sense of touch by implanting self-made magnetic sensors in her fingertips. Adherents of “transhumanism”—a movement that seeks to transform Homo sapiens through tools like gene manipulation, “smart drugs” and nanomedicine—hail such developments as evidence that we are becoming the engineers of our own evolution. Enhanced humans might inject themselves with artificial, oxygen-carrying blood cells, enabling them to sprint for 15 minutes s

The Truth About Pheromones

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The sight of someone in tears might make you feel concerned. But the smell of tears, researchers say, has a different effect. “You might think—we did—that [smelling] tears might create empathy,” says Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He and his colleagues had women watch a sad movie scene, collected their tears and placed samples of the unidentified fluid under men’s noses. The tears did not elicit empathy in a standard lab test, but they did reduce the men’s sexual arousal and testosterone levels. Apparently the tears sent a message that romance was off the table. This study offers some of the most recent evi

Perception, Defined

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Our senses are beloved explorers who bring us news from the rich but dangerous world outside the citadel of the body. But, in their calmer hours, we also enjoy pampering and rewarding them, and that’s why I’ve come to a favorite refuge of mine, a garden designed for sensory delight. In the light quickening before dawn, a large pond lies still, its surface wrinkled like animal hide. In this phantom hour, no birds fly or sing. Standing on the knoll overlooking the pond is like pausing in a gallery before a canvas, absorbing its overall impression before measuring it with the eyes’ calipers or picking out details. Strolling through the fragrant pine grove, I pause to savor

Eric Klinenberg on Going Solo

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In his new book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, Eric Klinenberg argues that many people living on their own have richer social lives than other adults. He spoke with Joseph Stromberg. How did you first get involved in researching this topic? My first book was about a heat wave in Chicago where more than 700 people died, in 1995, and when I was doing research on the book I learned that one reason so many people died, and also died alone during that disaster, is that so many people were living alone in Chicago everyday. And I hadn’t really known that before. And during the research for that book, I got to spend some time learning about the ri

Music Playlists to Soothe Your Mind

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In their new book, Your Playlist Can Change Your Life, Galina Mindlin, director of the Brain Music Treatment Center, and co-authors Don DuRousseau and Joseph Cardillo advise that repeated listening to carefully selected songs on an iPod or other device can help train your mind and make you more productive, calmer or more affectionate. Mindlin spoke with Erica R. Hendry. Who should be doing this? I think playlists will benefit everybody, especially people who want to relieve their anxiety, sharpen memory, increase concentration, improve their mood or even relieve pain. Also, shift workers can use the playlist after a sleepless night to increase their alertness when they have to drive home

The Science of Sarcasm? Yeah, Right

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:06:19 GMT

In an episode of “The Simpsons,” mad scientist Professor Frink demonstrates his latest creation: a sarcasm detector. “Sarcasm detector? That’s a really useful invention,” says another character, the Comic Book Guy, causing the machine to explode. Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time t

How Technology Makes Us Better Social Beings

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 02:41:06 GMT

About a decade ago, Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, wrote a book called Bowling Alone. In it, he explained how Americans were more disconnected from each other than they were in the 1950s. They were less likely to be involved in civic organizations and entertained friends in their homes about half as often as they did just a few decades before. So what is the harm in fewer neighborhood poker nights? Well, Putnam feared that fewer get-togethers, formal or informal, meant fewer opportunities for people to talk about community issues. More than urban sprawl or the fact that more women were working outside the home, he attributed Americans’ increasingly isola

Top Ten Myths About the Brain

Fri, 20 May 2011 08:55:30 GMT

1. We use only 10 percent of our brains. This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception,

Beauty of the Brain

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Is the human brain, with all its problem-solving prowess and creative ability, powerful enough to understand itself? Nothing in the known universe (with the exception of the universe itself) is more complex; the brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, each of which can communicate with thousands of other brain cells. Because we primates are primarily visual creatures, perhaps the best way for us to make sense of the brain is to see it clearly. That has been the goal for 125 years, since the Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal began using a stain that marked individual neurons. He peered through a microscope at the stained cells and the branchlike projections

The Top Ten Daily Consequences of Having Evolved

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:26:04 GMT

Natural selection acts by winnowing the individuals of each generation, sometimes clumsily, as old parts and genes are co-opted for new roles. As a result, all species inhabit bodies imperfect for the lives they live. Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day. Here are ten. 1. Our cells are weird chimeras Perhaps a billion years ago, a single-celled organism arose that would ultimately give rise to all of the plants and animals on Earth, including us. This ancestor was the result of a merging: one cell swallowed, imperfectly, another

Reading in a Whole New Way

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible. The country’s success depended on high levels of literacy, freedom of the press, allegiance to the rule of law (found in books) and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing. But reading and writing, like all technologies, are dynamic. In ancient times, authors often dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of letters, so scribes wrote down the letters in one long continuous string, justastheyoccurinspeech. Text was written witho

Melvin Konner on the Evolution of Childhood

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

The anthropologist and physician Melvin Konner began his career in the late 1960s studying how hunter-gatherer people in southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert raised their children. His new book, The Evolution of Childhood, is an effort (960 pages, decades in the works) to explain why children everywhere develop, behave, mature and think as they do. Konner, a professor at Emory University, responded by e-mail to executive editor Terence Monmaney’s questions. How will our understanding of childhood change in the coming decades? The most impressive findings will come from genetics and brain imaging. Most traits we care about will be influenced by not one or a few but hundreds of ge

Greg Miller on “Making Memories”

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:13:23 GMT

Greg Miller took a career path not all that uncommon to science writers. “I thought I wanted to be a scientist,” he says. Miller earned his PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University. “But it turns out that although I love science, I don’t like being cooped up in a lab all day.” Now he writes about brains and behavior as a San Francisco-based correspondent for Science. I recently spoke with Miller about his experience reporting, “Making Memories,” a story about new research that suggests, somewhat disturbingly, that every time we remember something, that memory is altered. What drew you to this story, in particular, about memory? I’ve been

How Our Brains Make Memories

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Sitting at a sidewalk café in Montreal on a sunny morning, Karim Nader recalls the day eight years earlier when two planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He lights a cigarette and waves his hands in the air to sketch the scene. At the time of the attack, Nader was a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. He flipped the radio on while getting ready to go to work and heard the banter of the morning disc jockeys turn panicky as they related the events unfolding in Lower Manhattan. Nader ran to the roof of his apartment building, where he had a view of the towers less than two miles away. He stood there, stunned, as they burned and fell, thinking to hi

A Closer Look at Evolutionary Faces

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:16:28 GMT

John Gurche, a “paleo-artist,” has recreated strikingly realistic heads of our earliest human ancestors for a new exhibit

The Human Family's Earliest Ancestors

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Tim White is standing with a group of restless men atop a ridge in the Afar desert of Ethiopia. A few of them are pacing back and forth, straining to see if they can spot fragments of beige bone in the reddish-brown rubble below, as eager to start their search as children at an Easter egg hunt. At the bottom of the hill is a 25-foot-long cairn of black rocks erected in the style of an Afar grave, so large it looks like a monument to a fallen hero. And in a way it is. White and his colleagues assembled it to mark the place where they first found traces, in 1994, of “Ardi,” a female who lived 4.4 million years ago. Her skeleton has been described as one of the most important dis

Are Americans Stuck to their Cubicles?

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:50:23 GMT

Writer Mary Collins had long been haunted by a statistic: more than 65 percent of American adults are overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and most engage in moderate activity less than three times a week. To find out why we refuse to move, Collins embarked on a road trip that took her to an archeological dig in Kansas, the U.S. Olympic Center and the National Zoo, among other colorful destinations featured in her new book, “American Idle: A Journey Through our Sedentary Culture.” What she found changed her own approach to exercise and her understanding of how the rest of us live. How did a former college athlete like you tune into

Are Scientists or Moviemakers the Bigger Dodos?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:43:17 GMT

Randy Olson, a tenured marine biology professor-turned-Hollywood filmmaker, has caught some flack for allegedly “dumbing down” science in his two movies. In his new book, Don’t Be Such A Scientist, he challenges that claim and teaches others how to harness the power of arousal. You were a tenured professor at the University of New Hampshire and you left to pursue filmmaking in Hollywood. Why? Storytelling. As I look back on the past 30 years, I realize that the single biggest thing that drew me into science were great scientists who told great stories that caught my attention and enraptured me. I went off and did science for a long time and thoroughly enjoyed it, and th

The Culture of Being Rude

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:19:08 GMT

I have a confession. When I first moved to New England from Michigan, I said hi to everyone. I waved at police officers. I asked gas station attendants about the weather and talked to or greeted whomever I bumped into. Eventually though, I started to notice that such cordialities were not always returned. Sometimes I got a stare. It wasn’t quite a dirty look, but a kind of squirrel-faced wondering about whether I wasn't from “around here” or was just slow. Cultures differ in all sorts of ways—their greetings, clothing, expectations about how children should behave, coming-of-age rituals, expressions of sexuality, numbers of husbands or wives, beliefs in god, gods,

Brain Cells for Socializing

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

There was little chance of missing the elephant in the room. About a dozen years after Simba died at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, a half-inch slab of her yellowish, wrinkled, basketball-size brain was laid out before John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Preserved in formaldehyde, it looked like half a pancake, frozen solid on a misting bed of dry ice. Allman carefully sliced it using the laboratory equivalent of a deli meat cutter. Taking well over an hour, he carved off 136 paper-thin sections. Allman was searching for a peculiar kind of brain cell that he suspects is a key to how the African elephant—like a human being—manages to

From the Editor: Positive Thinking

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Ingfei Chen, who has been writing about science and medicine for the better part of two decades, likes stories about new ideas and new ways of thinking about old problems. So an article in a scientific journal about what she calls some "funny-looking" cells found in the brains of humans and great apes, but not in the brains of the lower primates, got her attention. "To anyone who's interested in why humans ended up with the unique brains we have—our unusual powers of language, speech, empathy and emotion—that is immediately intriguing," says Chen, who once anticipated a career as a molecular biologist. "That's long been a Holy Grail of science, to under

Dreading the Worst When it Comes to Epidemics

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:31:38 GMT

So far the swine flu has frightened far more people than it has infected, but fear of a disease can be just as potent as the sickness itself. Outbreaks of plague in medieval Europe led to the murder or exile of Jews who had nothing to do with its spread. In the 20th century, the specter of contagion was used to turn impoverished immigrants away from Ellis Island, demonize gay men and discourage women from getting jobs and even wearing shorter skirts. “So often epidemics end up as campaigns to capitalize on people’s fears or spread prejudice or encourage one or another kind of injustice,” says Philip Alcabes, a public health professor at Hunter College of the City Universi

Buckle Up Your Seatbelt and Behave

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In the middle of the last century, Volvo began seeking improvements to seat belts to protect drivers and passengers in its vehicles. When the Swedish automaker tried a single strap over the belly, the result was abdominal injuries in high-speed crashes. The engineers also experimented with a diagonal chest restraint. It decapitated crash-test dummies. Volvo then turned to a 38-year-old mechanical engineer named Nils Bohlin, who had developed pilot ejector seats for the Saab aircraft company. Bohlin knew it would not be easy to transfer aerospace technology to the automobile. "The pilots I worked with in the aerospace industry were willing to put on almost anything to keep them safe i

The Journey to Elsewhere, U.S.A.

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:30:08 GMT

What is this distracted, rootless place, where kids eschew stuffed animals in favor of online avatars, buzzing iPhones interrupt family dinners and the workday stretches late into the night? Dalton Conley, a social sciences professor at New York University, calls it, simply, “elsewhere,” and his new book tracks the social and economic changes of the last three decades that landed us here. Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety shows how the death of the old ways (auto workers’ unions, coal mines) and the birth of new (air conditioning, tip jars and the three-ba

History of the Hysterical Man

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:48:05 GMT

The term “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for “womb” and refers to a disease that was once diagnosed almost exclusively in women. Women’s asthma, widow’s melancholy, uterine epilepsy -- these were all synonyms for a strange complex of symptoms that included unexplained pains, mysterious convulsions, sudden loss of sensation in the limbs and dozens of other complaints without apparent physical cause. Particularly during the Victorian age, doctors thought hysteria demonstrated the general fragility of the fair sex. The best remedy was a good marriage. But all the while untold numbers of men were suffering from the same illness. In his new book, Hysteri

How to Be a Snoop

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 09:24:36 GMT

In his new book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling makes the case that maybe walls can talk. The personality psychologist and University of Texas at Austin professor studies bedrooms, offices, Web sites and iPod playlists for personality clues, and has found, among other trends, that inspirational posters signal a neurotic; an organized space with sports décor, a conservative; and a messy room with books, an eclectic music collection and maps, a liberal. I recently caught up with Gosling to talk about the “special brand of voyeurism” he calls snoopology. How did you get started snooping? At Berkeley, where I did my graduate work, my advisor was frustrat

The 'Secret Jews' of San Luis Valley

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:00:00 GMT

One September day in 2001, Teresa Castellano, Lisa Mullineaux, Jeffrey Shaw and Lisen Axell were having lunch in Denver. Genetic counselors from nearby hospitals and specialists in inherited cancers, the four would get together periodically to talk shop. That day they surprised one another: they'd each documented a case or two of Hispanic women with aggressive breast cancer linked to a particular genetic mutation. The women had roots in southern Colorado, near the New Mexico border. "I said, 'I have a patient with the mutation, and she's only in her 40s,'" Castellano recalls. "Then Lisa said that she had seen a couple of cases like that. And Jeff and Lisen had one or two als

The Truth About Traffic

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

While enduring yet another Labor Day weekend traffic jam, consider the bright side: gridlocked turnpikes present a chance to study the national character. Our hang-ups and bad habits reveal themselves whenever we get behind the wheel (especially in merge lanes and rest stop parking lots), and holidays and special occasions, it seems, bring out our worst. Traffic fatalities increase 41 percent in the hours after the Super Bowl, largely because of alcohol consumption (travel is even riskier in the losing team's home state). The most dangerous driving day of all is the Fourth of July. Statistics like these guide us like orange cones through Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Sa

On the Origin of a Theory

Tue, 27 May 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Leafing through the mail at his home outside London one June day 150 years ago, Charles Darwin came across an envelope sent from an island in what is now part of Indonesia. The writer was a young acquaintance, Alfred Russel Wallace, who eked out a living as a biological collector, sending butterflies, bird skins and other specimens back to England. This time, Wallace had sent along a 20-page manuscript, requesting that Darwin show it to other members of the British scientific community. As he read, Darwin saw with dawning horror that the author had arrived at the same evolutionary theory he had been working on, without publishing a word, for 20 years. "All my originality, whatever it

Thinking Like a Monkey

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:00:58 GMT

On a hot morning in early August, the primate census of Cayo Santiago, a 38-acre island just off the coast of Puerto Rico, numbers approximately 875. Of those, 861 are resident Macaca mulatta, commonly known as rhesus macaques, the descendants of a colony transported here from Calcutta in 1938 to provide a permanent breeding stock for medical researchers. The rest are Homo sapiens who have made the trip in a motorboat, including workers stocking the feeding bins with dun-colored biscuits of monkey chow, and researchers for whom the island provides a rare opportunity to study free-ranging primates without the drudgery of having to locate them deep in some remote forest. The researchers com

Blame the Rich

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:03:34 GMT

On a beautiful summer day in 1899, the fabulously wealthy Alva Vanderbilt Belmont sponsored a "motor carriage" parade on the lawn of her "cottage" in Newport, Rhode Island. The festivities included an obstacle course of dummy policemen, nursemaids and babies in carriages, with a prize going to the driver who "killed" the fewest of these innocent bystanders. Alva's son Willie K. went on to sponsor the first major trophy in American auto racing. (And at an early Vanderbilt Cup race, an innocent bystander was killed for real.) So let's add auto racing to the long list of great ideas brought to you by what Canadian archaeologist Brian Hayden calls "triple-A&

Meditate on It

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

A couple hundred-thousand years ago—sometime after our hominid ancestors had controlled fire, but long before they were telling ghost stories—early humans huddled around campfires to meditate and partake in shamanistic rituals. Today, when we slow down for a yellow light, recognize a dollar sign or do anything, really, that involves working memory, we have these ancient brainstorming sessions to thank. That's the somewhat controversial connection psychologist Matt J. Rossano is making. Ritualistic gatherings sharpened mental focus, he argues. Over time, this focus strengthened the mind's ability to connect symbols and meanings, eventually causing gene mutations that favored th

Walk This Way

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

A treadmill experiment is giving anthropologists runaway evidence about evolution: early human ancestors may have started walking upright because the process conserves energy compared with the four-limbed knuckle-walking of chimpanzees. Researchers have debated why hominids began walking with two legs sometime around six million years ago—when the key characteristic distinguishing them from their last ape ancestors emerged. Some have espoused the energy-conservation theory—in part because the cool, dry climate during the Miocene could have separated food patches by great distances. Others have argued postural reasons for the change, suggesting that an upright stance enabled an

Richard Lerner

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:00:00 GMT

WEB EXCLUSIVE - Extended Interview How did teenagers get such a bad rap? You can go back to the time of the Greeks and find teenagers causing problems. The scientific study of adolescence began in 1904, with G. Stanley Hall, one of the leading psychologists in the United States. Hall believed that all of our ancestral adult stages were compressed into a single life span, and that adolescence was the period when we went from being beast-like to civilized. He started adolescents off with this perception that they were biologically constrained to be in "storm and stress"—his phrase. For most of the 20th century, people used this model not only to study adolescents but descri

Interview: Daniel Gilbert

Tue, 01 May 2007 04:00:00 GMT

WEB EXCLUSIVE - Extended Interview In Stumbling on Happiness, just released in paperback, the Harvard psychologist explores why we human beings are poor "affective forecasters," or predictors of future emotion. Let's do a test: How do you think you'll feel at the end of this interview? Approximately the way I feel now. That's almost always a good guess about how you're going to feel in the future. Most events have a small impact that doesn't last very long. More than one person who's gotten married or moved to California to change their happiness has found that it stays about where it is. My research has made me care much less about which of my possible futures I end up in. Whe

Animal Insight

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 01:48:02 GMT

Like any other close relative at the family table, chimpanzees may throw vengeful fits, but they also lend a helping hand. A recent spate of experiments out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has revealed that chimpanzees exhibit some of the same traits—altruism and vengeance—displayed in human society. Spiteful motivations and sophisticated social learning skills, however, appear uniquely human. The new studies give insight into how and when such traits evolved. Most importantly they help answer the age-old question: What makes us lucky bipeds human? "The most important way to ask these really hard questions—is human altruis

Sound and Fury

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:01:57 GMT

Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times and Norman Mailer stood talking at Carl Bernstein's 50th birthday party. It was Valentine's Day, 1994. The room in Bernstein's apartment in the meatpacking district of Manhattan was illuminated with votive candles. They caused Mailer's backlit nimbus of wiry white hair to glow with an ecclesiastical radiance. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet in the boxer's way he had, a rhythmic motion meant to conjure menace, as if he wished to let you know that while he had one foot safely on the brake, the other was pressed on the accelerator, his motor surging...so that if he chose, he might release the brake and hurtle across the room and smash thro