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Factoring Fear: What Scares Us and Why
Montag, 27. Oktober 2008, 08:00 Uhr - 1 Monat her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American What's scarier, a deadly snake slithering across your path during a hike or watching a 1,000-point drop in the stock market? Although both may instill fear, researchers disagree over the nature and cause of this very powerful emotion."When you see the stock market fall 1,000 points, that's the same as seeing a snake," says Joseph LeDoux, professor of neuroscience and psychology the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety based at New York University. "Fear is the response to the immediate stimuli. The empty feeling in your gut, the racing of your heart, palms sweating, the nervousness--that's your brain responding in a preprogrammed way to a very specific threat." [More] |
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Ghost Lusters: If You Want to See a Specter Bad Enough, Will You?
Montag, 27. Oktober 2008, 07:00 Uhr - 1 Monat her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Most scientists dismiss the vast majority of ghost sightings as hoaxes. But researchers in Canada, England and elsewhere are exploring what happens in the brain to create the illusion that something is "haunted." So far, they have found evidence that some apparitions may be brain benders caused by spiking EMFs (electromagnetic fields), and possibly even extremely low-–frequency sound waves (known as infrasound) so subtle that the ear does not register them as noise.EMFs emitted by power lines and towers, clock radios and other electrical sources may help debunk myths that people or things are haunted, says Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, who has conducted research on the topic. One such study, published in 2001 in Perceptual And Motor Skills chronicles the experiences of a teenager who in 1996 claimed to be receiving nocturnal visits--one sexual--from the Holy Spirit. The 17-year-old girl, who had sustained mild brain damage at birth, said she also felt the presence of an invisible baby perched on her left shoulder. [More] |
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Reaping a Sad Harvest: A "Narcotic Farm" That Tried to Grow Recovery [Slide Show]
Freitag, 24. Oktober 2008, 10:00 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American From 1935 to 1975, just about everyone busted for drugs in the U.S. was sent to the United States Narcotic Farm outside Lexington, Ky. Equal parts federal prison, treatment center, research laboratory and farm, this controversial institution was designed not only to rehabilitate addicts, but to discover a cure for drug addiction.Now a new documentary, The Narcotic Farm, reveals the lost world of this institution, based on rare film footage, numerous documents, dozens of interviews of former staff, inmates and volunteer patients, and more than 2,000 photographs unearthed from archives across the country. Premiering October 26 on public television in Philadelphia and Salisbury, Md., the film will appear on public television stations across the country throughout November. A book accompanying the documentary includes rare and previously unpublished pictures of "Narco," as the institution was called locally, a selection of which can be seen in this slide show. [More] |
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Updates: Whatever Happened to Virus-Built Batteries?
Freitag, 24. Oktober 2008, 05:00 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Targeting Troublesome T CellsIn type 1 diabetes, renegade Tcells of the immune system kill the insulin-making beta cells of the pancreas. New beta cells could, in theory, cure diabetes, but because the misguided autoreactive Tcells would eventually destroy them as well, stopping the wayward attack is important [see “Insights: Putting Up with Self”; SciAm, December 2006]. Previously, Denise L. Faustman of Harvard Medical School had shown in mice that activating a natural compound in the body called tumor necrosis factor (TNF) could selectively kill the autoreactive Tcells and permit restored beta cell function. The same process can happen with human cells, as she and her colleagues show in a paper published online August 28 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. [More] |
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Growing Prostates from Adult Stem Cells--But Who Would Want One?
Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2008, 16:00 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Researchers report today that they grew prostate glands--important for reproduction in male mammals--in mice using a single stem cell transplanted from the prostates of donor mice. The findings may pave the way to new therapies for prostate cancer, which strikes one in six men in the U.S. [More] |
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Eco-Commute: A Greener Way to Get to Work
Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2008, 12:00 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Dear EarthTalk: Are there any electric bicycles or scooters that make for a nice cheap, green-friendly commute?-- Sean Foley, Nashua, NH [More] |
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Today's Alternative Energy; and November Issue Topics, Including Computer-Brain Interfaces and DNA Computing
Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2008, 10:15 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned on this episode include snipurl.com/4LJ71; SciAm.com/sciammag> Related In-Depth Report: Today's Alternative Energy [More] |
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Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking Psychological Stages
Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2008, 04:00 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief--introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients--that they are regularly referenced without explication. [More] |
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Tapping Nature's Headache Remedies
Dienstag, 21. Oktober 2008, 14:00 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Dear EarthTalk: Are there natural headache remedies that can get me off of Tylenol, Advil and other medicines whose side effects can be as bad as or worse than the pain that led me to use them?-- Jan Levinson, Portland, ME [More] |
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SciAm Test Drives Two Street-Legal Fuel-Cell Cars
Dienstag, 21. Oktober 2008, 01:00 Uhr - 1 Monat, 1 Woche her - Presse spécialisée - Scientific American Amid many promises about futuristic automobiles, an unlikely one seems to be coming true: hydrogen fuel-cell cars.No, you can’t buy a hydrogen car from a local dealer. But General Motors (GM) and American Honda Motor are putting close to 300 street-legal, full-featured, hydrogen fuel-cell machines into the hands of individual American drivers for use in real-world conditions. Long-term, a fleet could help reduce dependence on oil and lessen greenhouse gas emissions because the cells produce no pollution, just water. [More] |
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News bereitgestellt von: Scientific American
