The remarkable “hair ice” – a type of ice that grows on dead wood under certain winter conditions
The post Researchers Identify the Fungus Responsible for Shaping the Peculiar “Hair Ice” has been published on Technology Org.
People who have faces that are judged as less trustworthy are given the death penalty more often than people viewed as trustworthy, according to recent research in the journal Psychological Science. The results “paint a somewhat alarming picture of how systems of legal punishment are vulnerable to the same biases in person perception that afflict everyday individuals,” write John Paul Wilson and Nicholas Rule, the authors of the paper.
This study builds on previous research suggesting that people judge the trustworthiness of faces with a high degree of consensus—we more or less agree on which faces count as trustworthy and which don’t.
People with less trustworthy faces are, unsurprisingly, less likely to be trusted by other people. Economic games played in psychology labs show that even children as young as five years old are less likely to trust these individuals, and that this effect holds even when there's information about the other person suggesting that they’re trustworthy.
Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments
An international team of neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, New York University and the
The post Scream if you have to has been published on Technology Org.
Tonight's Full Moon, the second Full Moon in July, could be called a blue moon according to modern folklore. But this sharp and detailed mosaic, recorded with telescope and digital camera just before July's first Full Moon, actually does show a colorful lunar surface. The colors have been enhanced in the processed image but are real nonetheless, corresponding to real differences in the chemical makeup of the lunar surface. Also easy to see especially when the Moon is near full phase, bright rays from 85 kilometer wide Tycho crater at the upper right extend far across the lunar surface. Against the southern lunar highlands above and right of Tycho is an amazingly detailed silhouette of the International Space Station. Seen from Byron Bay, NSW Australia on June 30, the ISS lunar transit lasted about 1/3 of a second, captured with a fast shutter speed in burst mode.In the war to keep food safe from bacteria, Cornell food scientists examine a class of weaponry called
The post Scientists bolster ‘phage’ weapons in food safety battle has been published on Technology Org.
Surgeons have traditionally relied on experience and judgment to shape the bones of people requiring jaw reconstruction. Often
The post Designing 3-D smiles for cancer survivors has been published on Technology Org.
Complex molecules that could be key building blocks of life, the daily rise and fall of temperature, and an assessment of the surface properties and internal structure of the comet are just some of the highlights of the first scientific analysis of the data returned by Rosetta’s lander Philae last November.
The majority of planets discovered outside our solar system orbit close to their parent stars because these planets are the easiest to find. But to fully understand how distant planetary systems are put together, astronomers must conduct a census of all the planets around a star. So they need to look farther away from the star-from about the distance of Jupiter is from our sun, and beyond.
While people with Type I and the less-severe Type II bipolar disorder share some of the same symptoms, there are significant differences in the physical structure of their brains. Type I sufferers have somewhat smaller brain volume, researchers report in the Journal of Affective Disorders, while those with Type II appear to have less robust white matter.
As brain imaging technologies have advanced and matured over the past few decades, there's been considerable interest in understanding whether and how there are differences between the brains of people with mental illness and those without. In particular, neuroscientists studying depression have been interested in structural variation, such as differences in total brain volume. Still, the various forms of bipolar disorder have received somewhat less attention than others, such as major depression, schizophrenia, or autism.
That led Jerome Maller and colleagues at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, to look into whether there were structural differences among the brains of people with different sorts of bipolar disorder. Using standard MRI scans — much the same as you would get if you'd had a concussion or bleeding in the brain — on 16 Type I and 15 Type II bipolar patients along with 31 healthy control subjects, the team examined whether there were differences in gray matter, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid. The team also used a relatively new technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to measure the integrity of the brains' white matter, the long nerves called axons that connect different brain regions to each other.
Overall, there was less total brain volume — gray and white matter volume added together — and more cerebrospinal fluid volume in bipolar patients than in healthy controls, consistent with other recent studies suggesting a connection between brain volume and depression. After controlling for total brain volume, however, Type II patients' brains were essentially the same as controls' brains, while Type I patients had relatively higher volume in the caudate nucleus and other areas associated with reward processing and decision making. DTI studies, meanwhile, revealed that while patients with Type I and II bipolar disorder had reduced white matter integrity relative to controls, the effect was stronger among those with Type II, particularly in the frontal and prefrontal cortex, suggesting that Type II bipolar disorder is in some way a cognitive dysfunction.
Though the results are intriguing, the authors point out that their study is just the start. The team didn't have access to data on how long patients had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, let alone how long they'd actually had the disease, which often goes undiagnosed for years or even decades. In addition to addressing those issues in future studies, the researchers also hope to improve sample sizes and gather additional data about factors such as medications, family history, and genetics.
Pacific Standard grapples with the nation's biggest issues by illuminating why we do what we do. For more on the science of society, sign up for its weekly email update or subscribe to its bimonthly print magazine.
More from Pacific Standard...
The exact process by which humanity introduced itself to the Americas has always been controversial. While there's general agreement on the most important migration—across the Bering land bridge at the end of the last ice age—there's a lot of arguing over the details. Now, two new papers clarify some of the bigger picture but also introduce a new wrinkle: there's DNA from the distant Pacific floating around in the genomes of Native Americans. And the two groups disagree about how it got there.
Prior to the advent of cheap DNA sequencing, there were all sorts of ideas regarding the peopling of the Americas. While migration across the Bering land bridge was the consensus opinion, it wasn't clear how many migrations took place—or even who, exactly, did the migrating. Because of the physical diversity of modern Native American populations, people have suggested additional migrations across the Pacific or even from Europe or Africa.
The Clovis people, who had what appears to have been the continents' first distinctive technology and culture, caused further confusion. Some argued that these represented the first humans in the Americas, while others argued they represented a distinct migration into a sparsely populated hemisphere. Language groups created their own confusion.
Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Three-dimensional structures of boron nitride might be the right stuff to keep small electronics cool, according to scientists
The post ‘White graphene’ structures can take the heat has been published on Technology Org.
(Image: SESAME)
Appropriately in the International Year of Light, SESAME, the first light source for the Middle East, is nearing completion in Amman in Jordan. In the latest edition of CERN Courier, the current president of the SESAME Council and former Director-General of CERN, Chris Llewellyn Smith, and Zehra Sayers, chair of the SESAME Scientific Advisory Committee, write about the project’s origins, the technical developments it has required, and the science it will support. A working example of Arab-Israeli-Iranian-Turkish-Cypriot-Pakistani collaboration, SESAME is on its way to becoming the region's first truly international centre of excellence.
Read more: "SESAME: a bright hope for the Middle East" – CERN Courier
The central regions of our Milky Way Galaxy rise above Uluru/Ayers Rock in this striking night skyscape. Recorded on July 13, a faint airglow along the horizon shows off central Australia's most recognizable landform in silhouette. Of course the Milky Way's own cosmic dust clouds appear in silhouette too, dark rifts along the galaxy's faint congeries of stars. Above the central bulge, rivers of cosmic dust converge on a bright yellowish supergiant star Antares. Left of Antares, wandering Saturn shines in the night.A new approach to self-assemble and tailor complex structures at the nanoscale, developed by an international collaboration led
The post New Technique to Synthesize Nanostructured Nanowires has been published on Technology Org.
Anyone who’s ever noticed a water puddle drying in the sun has seen an environment that may have
The post Finding the origins of life in a drying puddle has been published on Technology Org.
Researchers have developed a new method for growing ‘hybrid’ crystals at the nanoscale, in which quantum dots –
The post New technique to synthesise nanostructured nanowires has been published on Technology Org.
Ridges of glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds inhabit the turbulent, cosmic depths of the Lagoon Nebula. Also known as M8, The bright star forming region is about 5,000 light-years distant. But it still makes for a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius, toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Dominated by the telltale red emission of ionized hydrogen atoms recombining with stripped electrons, this stunning, deep view of the Lagoon's central reaches is about 40 light-years across. Near the center of the frame, the bright hourglass shape is gas ionized and sculpted by energetic radiation and extreme stellar winds from a massive young star.
