Researchers from North Carolina State University have found a way of binding peptides to the surface of gallium
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Not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, a Newsweek cover story famously purported to explain "why they hate us," they being militant Muslim extremists. But there might be a problem with that thinking. According to a new study, it's not hatred of outsiders that motivates opposing sides in a conflict. To some extent, it's love for each other.
Psychologists have known for quite a while now that we interpret others' actions rather differently than our own, even if they're the very same actions. There's a simple reason for that difference, variously called the fundamental attribution error and correspondence bias. While we experience our own internal responses to the situations we encounter, we can only see the external actions that others take. It's not that we're incapable of empathy — who hasn't heard the aphorism that you can't know someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes? — but it's harder when we don't know what others are thinking and feeling. It's harder still when political or military conflict is involved: That idea is often illustrated by the hostile media effect, in which both sides in a dispute view media coverage as biased against them.
That's all fairly well understood, but psychologists Adam Waytz, Liane Young, and Jeremy Ginges wondered whether they could get at the specific emotions that conflicting parties felt toward their comrades and their enemies. To do so, they first asked 285 Americans to rate, on seven-point scales, whether either their political party or the opposing one was motivated by love (empathy, compassion, and kindness) or hate (dislike, indifference, or hatred toward those in their own party). On average, study participants rated their own parties as being 23 percent more motivated by love than hate, while they rated those in other parties as being 29 percent more motivated by hate than love.
Things got a bit more interesting when the team asked similar questions of 497 Israelis and 1,266 Palestinians. Asked why some of their fellow citizens supported bombing in Gaza, Israelis reported they were 35 percent more motivated by love for fellow Israelis than hate, while they thought just about the reverse for Palestinians' motivations for firing rockets into Israel. Palestinians, meanwhile, ascribed more hate than love to Israelis, though they thought fellow Palestinians were about equally motivated by love and hate. An additional survey of 498 Israelis found that the more they perceived differences in the two parties' motivations, the less likely they were to support negotiations, vote for a peace deal, or believe that Palestinians would support such a deal.
Such perceptions are "a significant barrier to resolution of intergroup conflict," the authors write in a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From an additional study of Republicans and Democrats, the team concludes that monetary incentives might ameliorate the problem, though "the strength of this particular intervention might vary for conflicts of a more violent and volatile nature."
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Whether playing video games has negative effects is something that has been debated for 30 years, in much the same way that rock and roll, television, and even the novel faced much the same criticisms in their time.
Purported negative effects such as addiction, increased aggression, and various health consequences such as obesity and repetitive strain injuries tend to get far more media coverage than the positives. I know from my own research examining both sides that my papers on video game addiction receive far more publicity than my research into the social benefits of, for example, playing online role-playing games.
However there is now a wealth of research which shows that video games can be put to educational and therapeutic uses, as well as many studies which reveal how playing video games can improve reaction times and hand-eye co-ordination. For example, research has shown that spatial visualisation ability, such as mentally rotating and manipulating two- and three-dimensional objects, improves with video game playing.
To add to this long line of studies demonstrating the more positive effects of video games is a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Vikranth Bejjanki and colleagues. Their newly published paper demonstrates that the playing of action video games — the sort of fast-paced, 3D shoot-em-up beloved of doomsayers in the media — confirms what other studies have revealed, that players show improved performance in perception, attention, and cognition.
In a series of experiments on small numbers of gamers (10 to 14 people in each study), the researchers reported that gamers with previous experience of playing such action video games were better at perceptual tasks such as pattern discrimination than gamers with less experience.
In another experiment, they trained gamers that had little previous experience of playing action games, giving them 50 hours practice. It was showed that these gamers performed much better on perceptual tasks than they had prior to their training. The paper concludes:
The enhanced learning of the regularity and structure of environments may act as a core mechanism by which action video game play influences performance in perception, attention, and cognition.
In my own papers, I have pointed out many features and qualities that make video games potentially useful. For instance, in an educational context, video games can be fun and stimulating, which means it's easier to maintain a pupil's undivided attention for longer. Because of the excitement, video games may also be a more appealing way of learning than traditional methods for some.
Video games have an appeal that crosses many demographic boundaries, such as age, gender, ethnicity, or educational attainment. They can be used to help set goals and rehearse working towards them, provide feedback, reinforcement, self-esteem, and maintain a record of behavioural change.
Their interactivity can stimulate learning, allowing individuals to experience novelty, curiosity and challenge that stimulates learning. There is the opportunity to develop transferable skills, or practice challenging or extraordinary activities, such as flight simulators, or simulated operations.
Because video games can be so engaging, they can also be used therapeutically. For instance, they can be used as a form of physiotherapy as well as in more innovative contexts. A number of studies have shown that when children play video games following chemotherapy they need fewer painkillers than others.
Video games have great educational potential in addition to their entertainment value. Games specifically designed to address a specific problem or teach a specific skill have been very successful, precisely because they are motivating, engaging, interactive, and provide rewards and reinforcement to improve.
But the transferability of skills outside the game-playing context is an important factor. What's also clear from the scientific literature is that the negative consequences of playing almost always involve people that are excessive video game players. There is little evidence of serious acute adverse effects on health from moderate play.
Dr. Mark Griffiths has received research funding from a wide range of organizations including the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. He has also carried out consultancy for numerous gaming companies in the area of social responsibility and responsible gaming.
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If you read some of the projections about what could happen if carbon emissions are allowed to continue unabated, they sound pretty grim: a meter of sea level rise, average temperatures in some regions rising by 9 degrees Celsius, and changes continuing on into the next century. But if you look at most economic analyses of climate change, the costs don't seem to really reflect those sorts of changes.
A new paper in Nature Climate Change explains why that's the case, and it tries to suggest alternative ways of looking at the challenges. The study shows that, if the right corrections are applied to these models, then the cost of carbon set by the US government may be off by as much as a factor of 10.
The impacts of future climate change are usually estimated using what are called integrated assessment models. In these models, temperature changes have an immediate impact on economic activity, accounting for things like lost crops, increased demand for cooling, and the cost of infrastructure improvements. These models, however, assume there's no permanent damage to the GDP; worker productivity and capital available for investments remains just as it was before any climate upset, as does what economists term the total factor productivity. In fact, one of the leading integrated assessment models simply allows labor and total factor productivity to be specified separately from anything that happens within the economy, while capital availability is only influenced by investment decisions made within the model.
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Sweeping north in planet Earth's sky, Comet Lovejoy's greenish coma and blue tinted ion tail stretched across this field of stars in the constellation Taurus on January 13. The inset at the upper left shows the 1/2 degree angular size of the full moon for scale. So Lovejoy's coma appears only a little smaller (but much fainter) than a full moon on the sky, and its tail is visible for over 4 degrees across the frame. That corresponds to over 5 million kilometers at the comet's estimated distance of 75 million kilometers from Earth. Blown by the solar wind, the comet's tenuous, structured ion tail streams away from the Sun, growing as this Comet Lovejoy heads toward perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, on January 30. While diatomic carbon (C2) gas fluorescing in sunlight produces the coma's green color, the fainter bluish tail is tinted by emission from ionized carbon monoxide (CO+). Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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In the central Northern Pacific is an area that may be the size of Texas called the Great
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