Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.
Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing
from the New York Times (Registration Required): NEW ORLEANS - Are movies like "Hannibal" and the remake of "Halloween," which serve up murder and mutilation as routine fare, actually making the nation safer? A paper presented by two researchers over the weekend to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association here challenges the conventional wisdom, concluding that violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs. Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.
Gates Hails Age of Digital Senses
from BBC News Online: The way people interact with computers is going to dramatically change in the next five years, Microsoft chief Bill Gates has told BBC News. He predicted that the keyboard and mouse would gradually give way to more intuitive and natural technologies. In particular, he said, touch, vision and speech interfaces would become increasingly important. Mr Gates made his comments whilst answering questions from BBC News website readers. "This whole idea of what I call natural user interface is really redefining the experience," he said. "We're adding the ability to touch and directly manipulate, we're adding vision so the computer can see what you're doing, we're adding the pen, we're adding speech..."
Ice Pioneer Eyes Farthest Glaciers
from the San Francisco Examiner: PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea (Associated Press) - For 5,000 years, great tongues of ice have spread over the 3-mile-high slopes of Puncak Jaya, in the remotest reaches of this remote tropical island. Now those glaciers are melting, and Lonnie Thompson must get there before they're gone. To the American glaciologist, the ancient ice is a vanishing "archive" of the story of El Nino, the equatorial phenomenon driving much of the world's climate. More than that, the little-explored glaciers are a last unknown for a mountaineering scientist who for three decades has circled the planet pioneering the deep-drilling of ice cores, both to chronicle the history of climate and to bear witness to the death of tropical glaciers from global warming.
How the U.S. Seeks to Avert Nuclear Terror
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): About every three days, unknown to most Americans, an elite team of federal scientists hits the streets in the fight against nuclear terrorism. The deployments are part of an effort since 2001 to ratchet up the nation's defenses. More than two dozen specialized teams have been positioned across the nation to respond to threats of nuclear terrorism, and as many as 2,000 scientists and bomb experts participate in the effort. Spending on the program has more than doubled since it was launched. And an evolving national policy aims to create a system of nuclear forensics, in which scientific analysis could quickly identify the source of a nuclear attack or attempted attack. A key report on nuclear forensics is due next month.
Medical Tourists Seek Miracles in China
from the Baltimore Sun: BEIJING (Associated Press) - They're paralyzed from diving accidents and car crashes, disabled by Parkinson's, or blind. With few options available at home in America, they search the Internet for experimental treatments -- and often land on Web sites promoting stem cell treatments in China. They mortgage their houses, and their hometowns hold fundraisers as they scrape together the tens of thousands of dollars needed for travel and the hope for a miracle cure. A number of these medical tourists claim some success when they return home ... But documentation is mostly lacking, and Western doctors warn that patients are serving as guinea pigs in a country that isn't doing the rigorous lab and human tests that are needed to prove a treatment is safe and effective.
C'mon, Get Happy? It's Easier Said Than Done.
from the Washington Post (Registration Required): It's the start of a new year, so think ahead, if you will, to Dec. 31, 2008. What are your hopes for the next 12 months? Maybe you want to be richer or slimmer, get married or get divorced, become gainfully employed or be thankfully retired. There is a single word that describes the goal of all these dreams and aspirations. They are all ways, ultimately, to make you happy. Some of us will get the things we want, and others won't. The more interesting question is: Why do people who get what they want rarely end up as happy as they expected, while people who fail to achieve dreams rarely end up as unhappy as they feared? Systematic experiments show that as strongly as we hold onto our dreams and fear setbacks, we are poor judges of what will make us happy and unhappy. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has made it his life's work to understand why people not only make errors in predicting what will make them happy, but also why they make the same errors over and over again.
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): KUELAP, Peru -- The broken skeletons were scattered like random pottery shards, rediscovered where they had fallen centuries ago. Were these ancient people cut down in some long-forgotten battle? Did European-introduced diseases cause their demise? Were they casualties of some apocalyptic reckoning at this great walled citadel? The "cloud warriors" of ancient Peru are slowly offering up their secrets -- and more questions. Recent digs at this majestic site, once a stronghold of the Chachapoya civilization, have turned up scores of skeletons and thousands of artifacts, shedding new light on these myth-shrouded early Americans and one of the most remarkable, if least understood, of Peru's pre-Columbian cultures.
from Science News: The mice in Jan-Ake Gustafsson's lab are obese, their bones are brittle, and their spleens are unusually big. The female mice produce fewer and smaller litters than normal mice. They also are more likely to develop high blood pressure and a disease that resembles human leukemia. In fact, problems of one sort or another afflict almost every major organ system in their fragile, overweight bodies. What these mice lack is the gene for an important molecule needed to fully respond to the hormone estrogen. Known as estrogen receptor beta (ERb), this molecule mediates most of the effects of estrogen not traditionally associated with the hormone. By genetically engineering both male and female mice without the receptor, researchers are digging up clues to its many important roles in people.
States Eye Stricter Curbs on Great Lakes Water
from the Christian Science Monitor: WAUKESHA, Wis. - New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson created a stir in October when, campaigning for president in water-hungry Las Vegas, he called for a national water policy and remarked that states like Wisconsin were "awash in water." No one has seriously proposed that parched western states sip from the Midwest. And Mr. Richardson's office swiftly declared he had no such intention. But his remark tapped a growing sensitivity here over the Great Lakes and has given new urgency to a regional initiative to protect them from outsiders. ... Several recent trends have heightened the concern of those in the Great Lakes Basin: Lake levels fell to near record lows last year, drought struck the Southeast, and climate-change studies have cast new uncertainty over water supplies in the Great Lakes region. Meanwhile, population shifts are slowly draining the region of its political power. Great Lakes states lost congressional seats after the 2000 census and expect to lose more after 2010.
Airline to Test Anti-Missile System
from the Miami Herald (Registration Required): DALLAS (Associated Press) -- Up to three American Airlines jets will be outfitted this spring with laser technology being developed to protect planes from missiles fired by terrorists. Officials said Friday the anti-missile systems won't be tested on passenger flights. But the tests, which could involve more than 1,000 flights, will determine how well the technology holds up under the rigors of flight, they said. The first Boeing 767-200 will be equipped in April or later, American spokesman Tim Wagner said. American operates that Boeing model mostly between New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles. American said it is "not in favor" of putting anti-missile systems on commercial planes but agreed to take part in the tests to understand technologies that might be available in the future.
Sign up for Sigma Xi's daily Science in the News e-mail to get these headlines delivered to your inbox.
Add a comment