Does cortisol, the stress hormone, cause risk aversion and 'irrational pessimism' in bankers and fund managers during financial crises?

The authors of a paper in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
correlate the fact that traders exhibit risk averse behavior during periods of extreme market volatility – when a crashing market most needs them to take risks, according to academics not responsible for billions of dollars of someone else's money – and that this change in their appetite for risk may be "physiologically-driven", specifically by the body's response to cortisol. They suggest that stress could be an "under-appreciated" cause of market instability.

I believe I am not alone in being fascinated by the ongoing debates about this or that physics experiment being on the verge of destroying the Earth. Microscopic black holes produced by mistake in particle physics experiments sinking down to the center of the Earth and slowly eating us out, small black holes used as "clean" bombs, antimatter weapons, strange-matter bits gradually engulfing everything around.

It is quite entertaining and it would be even good for physics outreach if spun the right way, but unfortunately we should not trust too much the sense of humour of our political leaders.

Older football veterans contend that modern equipment, and its ability to protect players from injury, ironically lead to more of it. Rugby players agree. 

They may be right. A new study finds that modern football helmets do little to protect against hits to the side of the head and the rotational force that is often a dangerous source of brain injury and encephalopathy. 

Policy makers are in constant discussion about a range of climate change mitigation possibilities and among the least understood are geoengineering methods.

The injection of sulfate particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and curb the effects of global warming could pose a severe threat if not maintained indefinitely and also supported by strict reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, write  University of Washington researchers in Environmental Research Letters.

A Washington state referendum to put warning labels on genetically modified foods, I-522, failed in the last election, but a new effort is more clever - they want to warn the public about Frankenfish and are couching it in an effort to simply make the public aware if it's farm-raised or caught in the wild or, oh yeah, a TRANSGENIC ABOMINATION OF NATURE.

If we want to see worldwide trends in public health, look to the South Pacific archipelago of Samoa and American Samoa.

About 75 percent of the U.S. territory's adult population is obese, the highest rate in the world. Rates of type 2 diabetes top 20 percent and a recent study found that the elevated obesity rates are now even present in newborns.

This obesity epidemic began there a few decades ago. Brown University epidemiologist Stephen McGarvey has investigated the obvious question: How did all this happen?

Tularemia, also called "rabbit fever",  is, unlike anthrax or smallpox, the bioweapon you are least likely to know about.

But it is common in the northeastern United States and because it has been weaponized in various parts of the world could be a significant risk to biosecurity.

At the Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in San Francisco, Geoffrey K. Feld, a Postdoctoral researcher in the Physical&Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), described the team's work to uncover the secrets of the bacterium Francisella tularensis, which causes tularemia.

Some people don't remember dreams at all while some remember them frequently. What separates them?

Images in brain scans, at least, though that may lead to a more meaningful answer also. 

Bruce Willis  heroically managed to save the world in the film 1998  Armageddon. He was able to deflect a huge Earth-bound asteroid with the expedient use of a well placed thermonuclear explosion.

But some have questioned whether Willis’s feat would actually have been possible – without breaking the laws of physics . . .

Gay marriage is rapidly becoming less and less controversial, at least in the Western world. Yes, the battle hasn’t been won just yet, both in Europe and in the US, but we are getting there at a pace that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
The next frontier, it seems, is adoptions by gay parents. When I talk to even some of my somewhat progressive friends and relatives, including those in the Old Country, they seem to resist the idea of gay couples adopting children much more than they resisted (if they ever did) the idea of gay marriage. Why?