We're bombarded with information at all times, so much that if we had to try and process it all times, we'd be paralyzed. Our cerebellum does information damage control by filtering out what changes. Evolution made it possible for us to conserve energy while still processing anomalies quickly.
If you think you really made a difference by overlaying your Facebook profile with a French flag, take 10 seconds to sign an online petitition or retweet a celebrity who matches your beliefs about science, you are a "slacktivist" - an activist who doesn't really care enough to do anything worthwhile.
Policymakers dismiss you smf friends don't take you seriously as you flit from cause célèbre to cause célèbre, but you might be making a difference after all.
Young men's interest in babies is associated with their physiological reactivity to sexually explicit material, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The study showed that young men who reported more interest in babies showed a lower increase in testosterone in response to sexually explicit material than men who weren't as interested in babies.
A native Australian grass that plays dead during droughts and culls its own cells to survive could provide genetic keys to help food crops survive worldwide.
Like other so-called 'resurrection plants', Tripogon loliiformis has the ability to withstand desiccation (being dried out) for prolonged periods and can be revived by water but scientists have never known how these plants actually do it, or if the existing plant cells really do come alive again from a dormant state, or if its new growth is separate from the old cells. Professor Sagadevan Mundree of Queensland University have now proved sugar manipulation and the controlled sacrifice of cells are keys to the native grass's survival.
New research on how our immune system works shows how the body mobilizes a previously unknown defense against viruses and bacteria- and thus why we do not constantly get ill despite the viruses around us.
Fever, sore muscles and other influenza-like symptoms are typical signs that your immune system is fighting against viruses and bacteria. The unpleasant condition is, among other things, due to the body forming a substance called interferon, which must defeat the virus. For many years researchers and doctors have assumed that this was the body's earliest response when attacked by various infections.
Men commit over 85% of all homicides, 91% of all same-sex homicides and 97% of all same-sex homicides in which the victim and killer aren’t related to each other.
These startling statistics are driven home with each new mass shooting (though the most recent tragedy in San Bernardino, California is a bit unusual in that a married couple were the shooters).
In any event, politicians and the media are trotting out the usual suspects to explain the tragedy, whether it’s the lack of attention paid to mental illness or the easy availability of guns.
With public demonstrations banned at the COP21 conference on climate change in Paris, climate activists are taking to social media to get out their message on climate justice.
Before the official summit kicked off, activists held more than 2,300 events in over 175 countries in a Global Climate March, rallying around the shared goal, “Keep fossil fuels in the ground and finance a just transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050.”
Global activism is impressive in scale, but are activists reaching people on social media who are not already supporters of action on climate change?
Do you get alarmed when you see magazine, blog or television claims promoting the idea that the chicken you buy from a competitor has added hormones or steroids? Like much of the marketing done by organic and natural food companies, and enabled by bullying tactics from dark-money funded lobbying groups like SourceWatch and Natural Resources Defense Council, it is a complete lie - but there is no recourse for suggesting that is the case as long as organic companies don't name a competitor specifically. It is legal to claim your product does not have something without mentioning that neither does anyone else.
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
aren't trying to commit a microaggression when they note it's been well established that men perform better than women on specific spatial tasks.
The issue is how much of that is linked to sex hormones versus cultural conditioning and other factors. To test that factor they administered testosterone to women and tested how they performed in wayfinding tasks in a virtual environment.
Using fMRI, the researchers saw that men in the study took several shortcuts, oriented themselves more using cardinal directions and used a different part of the brain than the women in the study.
Most people don't know this, but the cucumbers we buy in the supermarket are purely female - grown from plants which were carefully cross-bred to produce female-only flowers. But while farmers have long known that "femaleness" factors into agricultural success - the greater the percentage of female flowers, the greater the yield of both seeds and fruit - it is only recently that scientists have revealed the molecular basis of plant sex determination.
Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), together with scientists from the universities of Stirling and Bristol (United Kingdom), have for the first time observed an increase in body temperature of between two and four degrees in zebrafish, when these are subjected to stressful situations. This phenomenon is known as emotional fever, as it is related to the emotions that animals feel in the face of an external stimulus and it has even been linked, not without some controversy, with their consciousness.
FORT PIERCE, FL - In citrus fruit, the color of the peel is a major factor in consumer selection; fresh oranges with a dark orange peel are favored. In order to appeal to consumer preferences, citrus that is picked when it hasn't reached peak color is often "degreened", and then may be treated with an emulsion containing Citrus Red No.2 (CR2) to improve peel color. A new study reveals three food grade colorants that are promising natural alternatives to CR2.
An international collaboration between scientists in Sweden, Russia, and the United States has resulted in the successful engineering of new diaphragm tissue in rats using a mixture of stem cells and a 3D scaffold. When transplanted, it has regrown with the same complex mechanical properties of diaphragm muscle. The study is published in the journal Biomaterials, and offers hope of a cure for a common birth defect and possible future heart muscle repairs.
