Posts

Intelligence makes for better leaders—from undergraduates to executives to presidents—according to multiple studies. It certainly makes sense that handling a market shift or legislative logjam requires cognitive oomph. But new research on leadership suggests that, at a certain point, having a higher IQ can be viewed as harmful. Although previous research has shown that groups with smarter leaders perform better by objective measures, some studies have hinted that followers might subjectively view leaders with stratospheric intellect as less effective....

As any tech headline will tell you, 2016 is the Year of Virtual Reality. Every billion-dollar corporation and its brother are rushing into the VR-headset market (Sony, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, HTC). Ever since 2014, when Facebook bought Oculus, a fledgling VR company, for $2 billion, journalists and investors have become part of the hype machine. With this technology, image-filled goggles immerse you in a world. When you turn your head in any direction, your “camera angle” changes—an obvious tool for games....

President-elect Donald Trump and members of his proposed cabinet and transition team have taken aim at many of President Obama’s climate and clean-energy policies, programs and legacies — from the Paris Agreement to the Clean Power Plan. But there’s probably no more consequential and contentious a target for the incoming administration than an arcane metric called the “social cost of carbon.” This value is the government’s best estimate of how much society gains over the long haul by cutting each ton of the heat-trapping carbon-dioxide emissions scientists have linked to global warming....

OCTOBER 1959 FOUNDER OF KIDNEY TRANSPLANTS— “Identical-twin grafts have demonstrated that where an immunological barrier does not exist kidneys can be successfully transplanted to cure otherwise incurable kid­-ney and vascular disease. We transplanted a kidney from a healthy man to his criti­cally uremic brother. Though the men were probably not identical twins, we hoped that their relationship might make for some immunologic compatibility. The recipient was given a total dose of X-rays large enough to depress his reticuloendothelial tissues severely....

In Scientific American’s first issue, dated August 28, 1845, the editors marveled at what we now know to be the rise of telecommunications. Samuel Morse’s telegraph, “this wonder of the age,” was sending messages between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and they declared that “it appears likely to come into general use through the length and breadth of our land.” Of course, it was impossible to fully appreciate then how wired networks would one day connect so many facets of the world....

This is the second article in a new Mind Matters series on the neuroscience behind visual illusions. How could we have missed it? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visual scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, visual artists, architects, engineers and biologists all missed it—until now. The “it” in question is the Leaning Tower Illusion, discovered by Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi, and Elena Gheorghiu of McGill University. In this illusion, two identical side-by-side images of the same tilted and receding object appear to be leaning at two different angles [see slideshow]....

A couple of months ago beetles were demoted. Biologists had long thought these insects were life’s most diverse order, but according to a new study in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, that honor now goes to flies. The finding has led to tension within the taxonomy community—part of an ongoing debate about how to define a species. The fly’s new designation took place after scientists at the University of Guelph in Ontario analyzed more than one million insects using DNA bar coding, a computerized taxonomic method that identifies a genetic profile from a bit of an organism’s DNA....

Editor’s Note (10/01/19): This story was updated after publication to include comments from Raúl Paredes, director of the Juriquilla unit at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s National School of Higher Education. Female orgasm has long been a subject of fascination, dating back to Aristotle. Male orgasm is required for ejaculation and transporting sperm for fertilization—but sexual climax is not necessary for a woman to become pregnant. In addition, many women do not reliably experience an orgasm during intercourse....

The Cassini spacecraft has collected the first high-resolution spectra of Saturn’s sounds, astronomers report. The radio emissions, called kilometric radiation, vary widely in frequency and are closely related to the planet’s auroras. Cassini’s radio and plasma wave science instrument picked up the signal–which translates into spooky audio with rising and falling tones that call to mind howling winds–as it approached Saturn. William S. Kurth of the University of Iowa and his colleagues analyzed more than 347 hours of data collected since April 2002, starting from a distance of 374 million kilometers, and describe their findings in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters....

Red eyes, ringing ears, sensitivity to light, trouble hearing: although a loss of taste and smell have become well-known sensory symptoms of COVID, accumulating research suggests that vision and hearing are also frequent targets of SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes the disease. More than 10 percent of people who get COVID develop some type of eye or ear symptom, according to the latest data, and both categories are among the complaints that can end up persisting for a long time....

Today’s topic was proposed by Lisa, who called in on the Nutrition Diva Listener line with this great question: “Hey Monica, I have a question about whether too much fiber causes nutrient deficiencies. I read that an excessive amount of fiber binds with minerals including calcium, magnesium, zinc, and iron preventing them from being absorbed by the body. Is there validity to these claims? What can we consider to be excessive fiber?...

A California power plant likely will shut down for the first time ever because of low water during a prolonged drought, squeezing the state’s very tight electricity supplies, state officials said yesterday. The Edward Hyatt power plant, an underground facility next to Oroville Dam in Butte County, is expected to close in August or September, said John Yarbrough, California Department of Water Resources assistant deputy director of the State Water Project....

Elephant seals have surprisingly high levels of naturally produced carbon monoxide — a noxious gas that is deadly at high concentrations — in their blood, a new study finds. In fact, the amount of carbon monoxide found in the blood of these large mammals is roughly the same as that in people who smoke 40 or more cigarettes each day, researchers say. Carbon monoxide is an odorless and colorless gas that is naturally produced in small quantities in humans and animals....

ROVANIEMI, Finland—In one of this nation’s northernmost cities and at the close of a winter that citizens here have called unusually mild, foreign ambassadors spoke of their nations’ hope to do business in the Arctic, Finnish spokesmen outlined their plans to attract international money, and business owners burnished their cases for investment in the polar north. “Nordic lights is a good example of business actually nowadays,” Juha Mäkimattila, the chairman of the Lapland Chamber of Conference, said at a dinner for foreign guests Wednesday, with a slideshow of aurora borealis photographs thrumming behind him....

At a restaurant recently I faced many temptations: a heavy stout beer, a buttery escargot appetizer, a marbled steak, cheesecake. The neural networks in my brain that have evolved to produce the emotion of hunger for sweet and fatty foods, which in our ancestral environment were both rare and sustaining, were firing away to get me to make those selections. In competition were signals from other neural networks that have evolved to make me care about my future health, in particular how I view my body image for status among males and appeal to females and how sluggish I feel after a rich meal and the amount of exercise I will need to counter it....

Whether we are constantly checking the number of new infections, tracking the progress of vaccine trials or “anxiety scrolling” through Twitter, the news surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic can be overwhelming. Sorting the good information from the bad and putting each day’s developments into context are not easy. Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, is an expert on how information flows in science and society. He and his University of Washington colleague Jevin West teach a course on data reasoning in the digital world (its materials are available online)....

In the week since its release as a free smartphone app, Pokémon Go has sent millions of people worldwide on digital scavenger hunts to hunt down and collect cartoon characters. It uses the camera and GPS system on an Android or iPhone handset to digitally superimpose these animated creatures on top of whatever scenery appears on the smartphone’s screen when its camera scans one’s surroundings. That might sound a lot like augmented reality, but one pioneer in that field prefers to call Pokémon GO and games like it “location-based entertainment....

Key concepts Chemistry Molecules Surface tension Introduction Have you ever noticed on a rainy day how water forms droplets on a window? Why does it do that instead of spreading out evenly over the whole surface? You might not guess it but this property of water is also related to washing dishes and doing the laundry. How? It all has to do with something called surface tension. Try this activity to learn more!...

NASA and the military have pinned down exactly where and when a huge dead climate satellite fell to Earth on Saturday (Sept. 24). The defunct Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS) re-entered the atmosphere at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) on Saturday, falling into the Pacific at 14.1 degrees south latitude and 189.8 degrees east longitude (170.2 west longitude), according to the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California....

How useful is it, really, to know thyself? The idea that self-insight is good for us dates all the way back to the inscriptions on ancient Greece’s Temple of Apollo in Delphi. It is still popularly assumed that people with a clear view of themself and their abilities are better off—that they feel better, have more satisfying relationships and are more successful. But when psychologists have tested that premise, they haven’t found much strong empirical evidence of the benefits of self-insight for well-being....