The majority of "fused" people, those who view themselves as completely immersed in a group, are willing to commit extreme acts for the good of their compatriots, says research soon to appear in Psychological Science.
In the study, the researchers recruited 506 college students at the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia in Spain. Based on the students' answers in online questionnaires, the researchers identified 38 percent of the participants as "fused" as compared to "non-fused," with Spain. They then measured their self-sacrificial behaviors.
If you want to really get back to nature, it still involves meat. A team of researchers has discovered evidence that human ancestors were using stone tools and consuming the meat and marrow of large mammals 1 million years earlier than previously documented.
While working in the Afar region of Ethiopia, the Dikika Research Project (DRP) found bones bearing unambiguous evidence of stone tool use - cut marks made while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow. The bones date to roughly 3.4 million years ago and provide the first evidence that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools and consumed meat.
One solution to the heart risk caused by obesity, although an obtuse one, is to add things to the junk food industry instead of taking away some junk food.
Researchers at Imperial College London writing in the American Journal of Cardiology suggest fast food vendors provide statin drugs free of charge. Statins reduce the amount of unhealthy LDL cholesterol in the blood, and trial data has shown them to be highly effective at lowering a person's heart attack risk.
In the study, Dr. Darrel Francis and colleagues calculate that the reduction in cardiovascular risk offered by a statin is enough to offset the increase in heart attack risk from eating a cheeseburger and a milkshake.
The odd shape of NGC 4696, the largest galaxy in the Centaurus Cluster (galaxy cluster Abell 3526), leads to fundamental science questions. First, why is it such a strange shape? And what are the odd, capillary-like filaments that stretch out of it? What is the role of a large black hole in explaining its odd appearance?
Arctic Ice August 2010 - Update #2Since I last posted an update, many things have happened in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
In my last update -
Arctic Ice August 2010 - Update #1 - I noted that there were no floes in the main pack bigger than 35km2. I invited my readers to find a floe bigger than that anywhere in the main ice pack. Nobody did. Yes, there were a few bigger floes - even big enough to be called ice islands - but they were not in the main pack.
A multiplet is a simple thing to describe: it is a collection of several identical or nearly identical things. Here, however, a difficulty arises because a "multiplet" is a manifestation of symmetry groups, and symmetry groups are tough objects to discuss. So if in a scientific paper you write "the new hadron might belong to a SU(3) multiplet", you have the additional trouble that you need to avoid discussing group theory to an unwilling listener. What is SU(3) ? Do we actually care?
Thus wrote Tommaso Dorigo in
The Language Barrier on 26th May this year.
Petermann Glacier Calving 2010 - Update
Before I discuss the recent calving of the Petermann Glacier ice tongue, I want to give credit to the many scientists who were studying, predicting and observing this event. If I miss anyone out, please advise by email or comment and I will edit this article accordingly.
The scientists who deserve credit, in no particular order:
Humfrey Melling at DFO submitted a detailed science article to the Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans just a few weeks before the event, and so missed the chance of including the calving in his article.
This is a good year for summer meteor watching. The moon, just past new, will not interfere with observations of faint meteors. And the Perseid shower, originated from the dust left behind in the orbit of comet Swift-Tuttle, will produce a nice show.
Perseids are a rather stable stream, and they produce a detectable rate of meteors from late July to late August, with peaks in the nights of August 11th and 12th, depending on the exact trajectory that the Earth takes while plunging in the dust-ridden area of the solar system. The rate is usually encoded in the acronym "ZHR", for zenith-hourly-rate. ZHR values of 100 to 150 are common for the two highest-rate nights.
But what exactly should you expect to see ?
Growing up in the Midwest of the United States, and taking several trips over my lifetime to an Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico beach, I recall the vague consideration of the floating jellyfish.
RESTON, Virginia, August 11, 2010 -- comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a report on Twitter.com growth worldwide. The study found that in June, nearly 93 million Internet users visited Twitter.com, an increase of 109 percent from the previous year, as the social networking site achieved strong gains across all global regions. Indonesia reported the highest penetration, with 20.8 percent of Internet users in the country visiting Twitter.com that month, followed by Brazil and Venezuela, with Venezuela's growth fueled in large part by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's decision to join Twitter in late April.
