How bad moods make us careful

Like so many writing teachers, I’ve been told I sometimes drive my students to depression or binge-drinking. Once, an online student who was about to meet me in person told a colleague that she needed to “face her fear”—that face of fear being yours truly. Yes, I can be that delightful.

Well, maybe my reign of misery isn’t all bad: It turns out that “low-intensity” negative moods are linked to better writing…

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That’s an ear implant. It’s getting seeded with cartilage cells at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which is “part a consortium of researchers working to apply the science of regenerative medicine to battlefield injuries.” Gizmodo has a fascinating (if brief) interview with Dr. Anthony Atala, who’s grown human organs and tissue in a lab for about 20 years. Ideas like “tissue engineering” and “regenerative medicine” sound like science fiction to me, but apparently they’re…

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Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s…

Read & Discuss

Algae-based fuel is a massive leap from corn ethanol, and could already be working within our existing transportation infrastructure—if only its development hadn’t been scrapped by the Clinton Administration.

In the first two editions of this series, we’ve talked about the shortcomings of petroleum as a transportation energy source, as well as the limitations of first generation biofuels, like ethanol and biodiesel, which suffer from the inescapable flaw of directly competing with our food supplies.

Although I believe…

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The Pentagon has unveiled a new robot that looks like a blob of goo. Called the “chemical robot,” or ChemBot, it moves by changing its shape, by inflating and deflating different areas. Researchers say the research could lead to robots that can seep through cracks, and help rescue people trapped in collapsed buildings.

…
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The Whole Brain Catalog is a project aimed at creating a comprehensive, detailed 3-D model of the brain of Mus musculus, the common house mouse. Here’s a tour.

It’s basically the same stuff going on inside your skull: Lots of Philip Glass music and purple thunderstorms.

…
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Sigh. Apparently there’s still some confusion about whether the planet is getting warmer or cooler. Now only 57 percent of Americans believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming. That’s down from 77 percent in 2006 (you Freakonomics guys are not helping).

To help settle the question—again—the Associated Press gave climate data to four independent statisticians, without telling them what the data represented, and asked them to look for trends.

The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA’s…

Read & Discuss

What do kids need to do well in school? Lots of well-meaning teachers and parents think praise is important. And they’re right. Sort of.

Ashley Merryman, speaking at Pop!Tech, just explained how the type of praise matters a lot. She reported on a study that took two random groups of students and, after a test, gave them each a different line of praise. One group of students was told “You did really well. You must be really…

Read & Discuss

Fake Plastic Trees

Some 2.4 billion years ago, tiny blue-green algae figured out a neat trick. Using sunshine, water, and carbon dioxide, they produced plant food as well as the oxygen that makes our existence possible. We’re still driving around on the fruits of their labor all these eons later—not to mention turning on the lights, flying into space, and everything else we do with the energy embedded in the fossilized sunshine that is coal, oil, and…

Read & Discuss

It might sound far-fetched, but so does smashing protons together at light speed to recreate the conditions of the start of the universe. According to the Times, two physicists posit that the reason that the Large Hadron Collider (and, previously, its unbuilt American counterpart) keeps running into problems isn’t bad luck or shoddy workmanship. It’s that the LHC’s quest to discover the Higgs boson—a heretofore only theorized particle that scientists believe is what gives objects mass—is creating…

Read & Discuss

How bad moods make us careful

Like so many writing teachers, I’ve been told I sometimes drive my students to depression or binge-drinking. Once, an online student who was about to meet me in person told a colleague that she needed to “face her fear”—that face of fear being yours truly. Yes, I can be that delightful.

Well, maybe my reign of misery isn’t all bad: It turns out that “low-intensity” negative moods are linked to better writing…

Read & Discuss

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s…

Read & Discuss

Algae-based fuel is a massive leap from corn ethanol, and could already be working within our existing transportation infrastructure—if only its development hadn’t been scrapped by the Clinton Administration.

In the first two editions of this series, we’ve talked about the shortcomings of petroleum as a transportation energy source, as well as the limitations of first generation biofuels, like ethanol and biodiesel, which suffer from the inescapable flaw of directly competing with our food supplies.

Although I believe…

Read & Discuss

The Pentagon has unveiled a new robot that looks like a blob of goo. Called the “chemical robot,” or ChemBot, it moves by changing its shape, by inflating and deflating different areas. Researchers say the research could lead to robots that can seep through cracks, and help rescue people trapped in collapsed buildings.

…
Read & Discuss

The Whole Brain Catalog is a project aimed at creating a comprehensive, detailed 3-D model of the brain of Mus musculus, the common house mouse. Here’s a tour.

It’s basically the same stuff going on inside your skull: Lots of Philip Glass music and purple thunderstorms.

…
Read & Discuss

Sigh. Apparently there’s still some confusion about whether the planet is getting warmer or cooler. Now only 57 percent of Americans believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming. That’s down from 77 percent in 2006 (you Freakonomics guys are not helping).

To help settle the question—again—the Associated Press gave climate data to four independent statisticians, without telling them what the data represented, and asked them to look for trends.

The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA’s…

Read & Discuss

What do kids need to do well in school? Lots of well-meaning teachers and parents think praise is important. And they’re right. Sort of.

Ashley Merryman, speaking at Pop!Tech, just explained how the type of praise matters a lot. She reported on a study that took two random groups of students and, after a test, gave them each a different line of praise. One group of students was told “You did really well. You must be really…

Read & Discuss

It might sound far-fetched, but so does smashing protons together at light speed to recreate the conditions of the start of the universe. According to the Times, two physicists posit that the reason that the Large Hadron Collider (and, previously, its unbuilt American counterpart) keeps running into problems isn’t bad luck or shoddy workmanship. It’s that the LHC’s quest to discover the Higgs boson—a heretofore only theorized particle that scientists believe is what gives objects mass—is creating…

Read & Discuss

The Nobel Prize for medicine was announced today, marking the beginning of another exciting Nobel week, with prizes given out every day from now until Friday, when the Peace prize will be presented. This year, the Nobel committee received more peace prize nominations than it ever has before, and those nominations, according to this site, are rumored to include:

Barack Obama, Nicholas Sarkozy, Ingrid Betancourt, Pete Seeger, Chinese dissident Hu Jia, the Cluster Munitions Coalition, Macedonian…

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A new study by two psychologists, Malte Klar and Tim Kasser, has shown that political activism can do more than save the whales. It can save your psyche itself from ennui:

Klar and Kasser recruited hundreds of college students and found that those who identified themselves as activists and who said they were planning some activism were happier and more fulfilled than non-activists.

They then tried to nail down the direction of causation to make sure it…

Read & Discuss

Fake Plastic Trees

Some 2.4 billion years ago, tiny blue-green algae figured out a neat trick. Using sunshine, water, and carbon dioxide, they produced plant food as well as the oxygen that makes our existence possible. We’re still driving around on the fruits of their labor all these eons later—not to mention turning on the lights, flying into space, and everything else we do with the energy embedded in the fossilized sunshine that is coal, oil, and…

Read & Discuss

Moothane Reduction

Cow farts—and the contributions of the methane therein to climate change—have long been a favorite bogeyman for critics of the cattle industry. (Their burps are a bigger problem, in fact, but who’s counting when it comes to cow effluvia?) What no one thought to ask until now is, why are the cows burping so much? The answer, unsurprisingly, turns out to be their diets. When cows are fed plants like alfalfa—plants more closely related…

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Brain Mapping

Jeff Hawkins built his career (and his fortune) as the inventor of the Palm Pilot and the Treo. In 2005, he co-founded the company Numenta to pursue his lifelong goal: understanding and modeling the human brain, so as to make artificial intelligence smarter. Hawkins believes that the essence of human intelligence is recognizing regular patterns—in sounds, or images, or ideas—and using them to predict the future. This understanding of the brain as a pattern-recognition machine…

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Is Anybody out There?

This has been a good year for space: We celebrated the 40th anniversary of the moon landing and a backyard astronomer spotted an Earth-sized hole in Jupiter’s atmosphere. In all of this, we’re reminded of our boundless curiosity about the cosmos, and about that nagging question, “Are we alone?” NASA’s Kepler Mission will address just that. A space-based telescope, launched in March, will tell us how commonplace (or not) Earth-like planets are, thus…

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Astronomies of Scale

The scientists behind the Allen Telescope Array (Microsoft co-founder and alien enthusiast Paul Allen is backing the venture) are fairly confident that by 2025 they will have found definitive proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. If they don’t, it certainly won’t be for lack of trying. They’re positioning 350 20-foot dish antennas—mass-produced using off-the-shelf components—at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, and linking them to work in unison. The digital image…

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From cicadas who hibernate for 17 years to checkerboard-camouflaged cuttlefish, some animals have powers that border on the super. Artists Kenichi Okada and Chris Woebken have created three devices designed to give children a chance to experience heightened animal senses. For example, their Bird Device..
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There are more than 3,000 satellites orbiting earth. While we go about our daily lives, these contraptions are hard at work in our stratosphere, beaming the latest episodes of American Idol, snapping photos of black holes, and enabling governments to spy on obscure regions of Afghanistan. Leroy Chiao,..
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You’ve seen the pink ribbons, but do you know how many American women actually get breast cancer? One in eight. While America may have the highest rates of breast cancer in the world, other countries are catching up, thanks to changes in diet, lifestyle, and exposure to carcinogens. We don’t have a cure, but this is our video version of the awareness ribbon. We hope it helps.

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Scientists in Denmark have developed a plant that turns red when it comes into contact with trace amounts of TNT. If sowed over an area contaminated by landmines, these plants would form a botanical, color-coded map that would keep civilians out of harm’s way.

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