Search Content

Displaying results 65401 - 65450 of 87947

Do you get the one about Abe Lincoln and the beaver?

Direct-to-consumer drug advertising is an unusual art form, even for those who consider advertising to be art. So why is Abe Lincoln in the kitchen with a talking beaver and a chessboard?? This imagery is the latest in the fight among prescription sleep-aids, brought to you in this case by Rozerem (ramelteon, Takeda). John Mack's Pharma Marketing Blog first took on this unusual ad campaign over the summer, but it was this morning's Wall Street Journal piece (subscription req'd, but I'll quote heavily) by Brian Steinberg that got my attention since he attempted to answer the question, "Why…

Problems in identifying people of other races: Are kids as bad as grown-ups?

When adults are asked if they remember pictures of faces, they're more accurate when the faces are the same race as they are. It makes some sense -- people are likely to spend more time with and have more same-race friends, so they may become better attuned to the differences in individuals in their own racial group. This finding can be especially important in eyewitness testimony: If a crime victim identifies his assailant as someone of a different race, then the research suggests that this identification is more likely to be problematic than an identification of a same-race suspect. But…

What expert hikers can tell us about memory

Which of these two pictures is more memorable? The shot on the left is interesting primarily because Nora's in it -- if it was just a picture of a muddy trail, it wouldn't be notable at all to most people. The shot on the right is a dramatic mountain scene that you might remember even though (or perhaps because) there's not a human in sight. But a seasoned hiker might be more interested in the photo of the muddy trail, which gives more information about the difficulty of the hike than a panoramic shot. Just as expert chess players are good at remembering the position of chess pieces on the…

Casual Fridays: More New Years' resolutions = Less success

Last week we asked our readers about New Years' resolutions. We said we wanted to know whether resolutions made on New Years' Day were any more effective than commitments made at other times of the year. We are interested in that question, but we didn't tell you about the question that interested us the most: How many different resolutions should you make? Our son Jim made so many resolutions this year that he actually organized them into subcategories. This struck us as not a very good idea -- if you make lots and lots of resolutions, then you may not be as committed to each one. At the time…

Thumbnail book review: Proust was a Neuroscientist

I just finished reading Jonah Lehrer's book Proust was a Neuroscientist. Quick review: good book, very fun read, and I'm happy to recommend it to almost everyone. I just have one small quibble. For the quibble to make any sense, you need to know something about my teaching. Students in all my psychology classes have to write a few paragraphs to earn "culture points." They must consider how psychology connects to art, though the social context surrounding the event is also fair game for analysis. So my students attend a concert, visit a museum, or go to a play or dance performance and then…

Want someone to remember your face? Smile.

This past weekend, I went to two different holiday parties. While many of the people at the parties were friends, I was also introduced to a couple dozen new people -- out of town guests of the hosts, friends of friends, or people from our small town that I somehow had never met. If I run into one of these people at the coffee shop tomorrow, how likely will I be to remember that I've met them before? One possibly relevant factor is that I was a designated driver at just one of the two parties. There's another factor that has been demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether a face is…

My review of "The Body Has a Mind of Its Own"

I've reviewed Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee's recent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own over at The Quarterly Conversation. So, is this the science book that should have made the New York Times' Notable Books list? (Several ScienceBloggers have complained that the list includes no science books). As I point out in my review, the book does have some great highlights: The Blakeslees ... describe some truly fascinating phenomena. You know about visual illusions, but did you realize there's also such a thing as a sensorimotor illusion? One of the most astounding is the "Pinocchio illusion,"…

Using international adoptions to understand how kids learn language

Children follow a consistent pattern when they acquire language. Instead of learning the most common words first, they start by learning a disproportionate number of nouns. In the youngest talkers nouns form up to 60 percent of their vocabulary, compared to just 40 percent of the vocabulary of a typical 2 and a half year-old (who now knows over 600 words). This pattern applies in many different languages, even Mandarin and Korean, where verbs appear in more prominent positions in sentences. The phenomenon is so universal that it has led some theorists to speculate that acquisition of non-noun…

Can you "use the force" to find things faster?

Does this ever happen to you? You're preparing green beans to be cooked, putting the stems in the trash and the beans in a bowl. Suddenly you realize you've started putting the stems in the bowl. The dinner guests will be arriving soon, and now you have to search through the beans to pull out the stems, in order to avoid an embarrassing incident later that evening. Okay, maybe it's just me. But what's the best way to find the stems? Is it faster to pore over the bowl, methodically scanning for each remnant? Or is it better to step back and take a holistic view of the bowl, letting the stems…

Research ethics, bloggers, and "the public"

At the ScienceBlogging conference last weekend, speaker Hunt Willard brought up an interesting dilemma, discussed by ScienceBlogger Suzanne Franks (aka Zuska): At some point, Willard said, cloning will be so straightforward we'll be able to clone a Neanderthal. He asked, "Can you really believe no one will want to do it? Just to see?" And then...what do we do when the "experiment" is over? With research dogs - we euthanize them at the end of experiments. With chimpanzees - at the end of experiments they are sent off to sanctuaries where they are well taken care of for life (and Willard said…

What is it worth to become taller?

At 15, our son Jim is taller than average for his age. Indeed, he's as tall as me, as this photo illustrates. Our daughter Nora is below average height, 4' 11" at 13 years old, but still squarely in the normal range. But what happens when a child is well below normal -- when, say, a boy's growth puts him on track to be less than five feet tall as an adult? Some studies have suggested that shorter men are likely to earn less and be at greater risk for psychological problems. As a recent L.A. Times article suggests, conventional wisdom has it that short women are treated condescendingly, and…

"I'm not a racist, but...", or why automatic stereotyping happens: Part 2

Keith Payne's work on racial stereotyping brings up an intriguing possibility. During the weapons identification task, viewers are more likely to erroneously identify a harmless object as a weapon if it was preceded by a black face compared to a white face. They are also more accurate identifying weapons after seeing black faces compared with white faces. It's possible that both of these results are due to the same underlying mental process, but Payne's research also invites another possible assessment: that separate processes are responsible for the two different behaviors. One behavior:…

Why are people with "tone-deafness" bad dancers?

One of the unanswered questions in Krista Hyde and Isabelle Peretz's research on amusia ("tone-deafness") is why amusics frequently say they are unable to clap to the rhythm of a song, or to dance well. In Hyde and Peretz's study, amusics could detect rhythm changes as well as normal individuals, even while being unable to detect changes in musical pitch. Hyde and Peretz speculated that amusics might not be able to detect rhythm changes when the pitch of the notes change -- that their problems with rhythm might be directly related to the fact that amusics can't detect many changes in pitch.…

Casual Fridays: Can sound cause us to experience a visual illusion?

Last week's Casual Friday study was inspired by a recently-discovered illusion which showed that sound could influence what people percieve visually. I was planning to report on the study confirming that illusion yesterday, but my computer wasn't cooperating with me, and I couldn't generate a demo of the illusion. I think I've figured it out now, but now it's Casual Friday, so you'll have to wait until Monday to see it. In the meantime, we've created our own study of visual illusion and sound. What we wanted to know is if sound could push a viewer over the threshold from not perceiving an…

What kids know about music (updated with poll)

Just by listening to music, we can learn a lot about its structures and conventions. For example, even you have no musical training, you can tell that something is wrong with this scale (it's followed by a proper C-major scale): But we learn a lot more than just standard scales when we listen to music. When you're exposed to a particular type of music for many years, you learn much more. Consider the following sequence of chords: Anyone who's been raised listening to Western music should recognize this sequence as an appropriate musical phrase (if you don't read music, don't worry -- I'll…

Best way to handle crises like 9/11: A good sense of humor?

For many Americans, the healing process after the attacks of September 11, 2001, began with the publication of a special issue of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Headlines like those in the illustration below meant we could finally start to laugh about the tragedy: But some have suggested that positive emotions such as happiness and optimism are inappropriate at times of crisis, especially when so many innocent lives have been destroyed. Sure, they might provide temporary relief, but does appealing to the lighter side actually help us deal with the crisis at hand? A team led by Barbara…

Six Days to Go: The Bottomless Wells

Well, I continue to peruse The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design in anticipation of the debate tonight. (11 pm ET, the Alan Colmes Show, website here.) By this point in the text, Wells is done debunking evolution; now he's on to promoting intelligent design. In the "debunk evolution" section, he tried to undermine evidence from the fossil record, embryology, molecular phylogeny, and speciation. None of these attacks were convincing, but what's even more illuminating are the strands of evolutionary evidence that got completely ignored: biogeography, DNA evidence,…

Inhofe Attacking Journalists (Again)

In my book, The Republican War on Science, I noted that James Inhofe in a 2003 speech had included a "harsh attack on science blogger and journalist David Appell." The phrase "sheer lunacy" was used. You can see for yourself here. (Why I'm defending Appell I don't know, as he hasn't been particularly kind to me lately, but whatever, he's part of the tribe.) Anyway, now Inhofe and his staff are at it again, with attacks on two very respected science writers, Seth Borenstein of the AP and Andy Revkin of the New York Times. Much of this has been reported in Greenwire, for which you unfortunately…

The War on Science: A Question of Causation (Part II)

My last post was about whistleblower Susan Wood, and her apparent reluctance to explain why access to Plan B emergency contraception is being held up within the administrative bowels of the Food and Drug Administration. Wood seemed hesitant to offer a political explanation for what is, unmistakably, a political phenomenon. Now I'd like to move on to a related case: David Baltimore, distinguished scientist, Nobel laureate, and president of CalTech. If Susan Wood seemed to shy away from explaining the root causes of the war on science, Baltimore has offered a causal explanation that, to put it…

The Stroop Effect: Not as automatic as was once thought

The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you can: If English is your native language, you should be much quicker at naming the colors of the first list than the second list. Why? Even though the task is to identify the colors, proficient readers can't stop themselves from reading the words, which slows color identification in cases where…

Scientific ignorance and the doctor-patient relationship

Americans, as any ScienceBlogger will tell you, have a woefully poor understanding of math and science. For the most part, even the most ignorant among us are able to stumble through life, but what happens when we're confronted with a genuine scientific question with a real impact on our lives? Consider the typical doctor's office scenario: the doctor asks a breast cancer patient to decide on a treatment. "There's a 30 percent chance of recurrence in five years," she tells the patient, "but with chemotherapy, the chance is reduced to 10 percent." If the patient doesn't have a basic…

How fast do we notice pretty faces? Before we know we saw them.

How long does it take to decide if someone's attractive? It might be before you even know you looked. Researchers can use a masking technique to show an image of a human face subliminally -- without the observer being aware of seeing it. To do it, they first show a scrambled face (39 milliseconds). Next, the face itself (13 milliseconds), a blank screen (13 milliseconds), and a cartoon face (39 milliseconds). I've tried to duplicate the technique using an animated GIF file, but I think it's beyond the capability of an ordinary web browser. Click here to see it Did you see a human face? I had…

Don't believe your big siblings when they tell you they're naturally smarter

In 1973, a massive study of almost 400,000 Dutch men appeared to confirm what anecdotal evidence and even some scientific research had led scholars to suspect: The first-born child in a family tends to be the most intelligent. The researchers, Lillian Belmont and Francis Marolla, found that within a given family size, earlier-born children tended to have slightly higher IQs than later-born children, even after controlling for social class. Their study pool was the entire population of 19-year-old men in the Netherlands. Since then, researchers have developed all sorts of models to try to…

Learning to identify musical style

Listen to these two short music clips. Music Clip 1 Music Clip 2 Now, can you identify the musical style of each clip? If you said "Classical," you're technically only correct for the first clip. The second clip is actually in the Romantic style (bonus points for identifying the works and composers in the comments!). While both are examples of the classical genre, classical music is also divided into styles corresponding roughly to historical periods: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Post-Romantic. Traditionally, only trained musicians have been regarded as being able to easily distinguish…

Reading Revolutions: Copernicus Part I

In my last post I remarked on how "radically strange--and yet strangely modern" I expected the 1543 work that kicked off the "scientific revolution" to be. Now that I've read the first two books of De Revolutionibus, I can say, boy was I right. This is the first of several posts about my experience of reading Nicholaus Copernicus in the original (er, translation). So first, let me point out the things I found "radically strange" about the work, with the "strangely modern" to come in the next post: Radically strange: Instructions for how to build an astrolabe. Vast tables of star locations,…

Update To Supporters On The Senate Stimulus Package Science Restoration Initiative

Reposted from ScienceDebate: (February 6, 2009) - Well it's been a long, long day with thousands of emails and phone calls, but we are happy to report that your efforts, and those of the rest of the U.S. science and technology community, have paid off in a big way - for the time being.  Senators Nelson, Collins, Lieberman and Specter held a press conference earlier this evening, also crediting Senator Snowe, and followed up by Senate Majority Leader Reid, declaring a compromise bill has been reached on the stimulus package.  You can read the exact line items of the bill here in an xls…

Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General? Here's My Gripe

CNN is reporting that one of its own is being considered for the Surgeon General post. I have nothing against Sanjay Gupta, and I don't think he's unqualified. In fact, someone with so much television and communication experience would probably help raise the profile of the office. However, let's not forget that he Gupta and CNN really made fools of themselves in an episode from 2002 that we should never forget--the Clonaid fiasco. As I reported back in 2004 in Columbia Journalism Review: Consider the great 2002 cloning hoax. In the media lull following Christmas, one Brigitte Boisselier --…

Slaying The Beast: The Federal Government Tackles Global Carbon Emissions One Computer At A Time

by Philip H. DISCLAIMER - The opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author alone. They do NOT represent the official opinion, policy, or action of any governmental agency the author may work for or have ever worked for at the county, state or federal level. If you do not like the content or opinions, contact the author, not your Congressmen. As one of the largest users of electricity in the U.S., the federal government has both an obligation, and an opportunity to help with global carbon emissions. You see, much of that electricity powers the computers that federal…

SETI built on GIGO

I've never been a fan of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It's like playing the lottery obsessively, throwing down lots of money in hopes of a big payoff, and I don't play the lottery, either. I'd really like to know if Seth Shostak is innumerate enough to play the lottery, though, because his recent claim that we stand a good chance of discovering extraterrrestrial intelligence within 25 years. All right, bring it: let's see your evidence for such a claim. "I actually think the chances that we'll find ET are pretty good," said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Search…

The life, and death, of Ota Benga

During the past week I've been tracking down information about various performing primates and famous apes like "Consul" and John Daniel, but as I did so something kept bothering me. Didn't the Bronx Zoo, sometime early in the 20th century, display a person from Africa in the Monkey House? Although my recollection was a little fuzzy, it turns out that a man named Ota Benga (a pygmy from Congo) was kept at the Bronx Zoo in 1907. Publicly heralded as a "missing link," he was kept in a cage with other primates, and visitors flocked to see him. Ota had been brought to America by S.P. Verner, and…

Book Review: Stories in Stone

By the spring of 2008 Rutgers University was overflowing with undergraduates. In an attempt to lessen the sting of the budget crisis Rutgers admitted more students than it had room for even though everyone knew this was not a permanent solution. Hotels acted as makeshift dorms, and the few buses that shuttled students between campuses brought the individual members of the student body a bit too close for comfort. Given that I lived in New Brunswick, though, I could afford to walk. Walking between the Cook and College Avenue campuses took about as long as it did to take the bus, and on same…

Shifting Focus from Gore to Improving Ocean Communication

As a marine conservationist, I'm compelled to comment on the Gore/Sea Bass faux pas.. or lack there of. Jennifer and Tim recently posted on the former VP's meal at his daughter's wedding which included (gasp!) Chilean Sea Bass aka Patagonian Toothfish. Our newest Science Blogger, The Angry Toxicologist was quick to weigh in as well, and I already enjoy his company in the blogosphere. Although I'd never order that species myself, it's ridiculous to spend the afternoon lambasting Gore on one meal bearing in mind the event in question. Yes he's an environmental leader, although as far as I…

Hollywood's Offensive and Deeply Unoriginal "Skeptic Conversion" Narrative

Pardon me while I breathe some fire for a minute. You see, I was looking for a good movie to go see over the weekend and instead ran across this obnoxious one: 1408. The plot: "Renowned horror novelist Mike Enslin believes only in what he can see with his own two eyes. But after a string of best-sellers discrediting paranormal events in the most infamous haunted houses and graveyards around the world, he has no real proof of life--afterlife. But Enslin's phantom-free run of long and lonely nights is about to change forever when he checks into suite 1408 of the notorious Dolphin Hotel for his…

Framing Science from Australia

Yesterday I gave a talk in Melbourne at the Bureau of Meteorology, sponsored by the Melbourne Centre of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Although in my previous conference talk here I had already raised the subject of framing (see coverage here and here), this time (for the first time) I devoted an entire talk to laying out the arguments that I've been putting forward with the help of Matt Nisbet. The audience was a small but high caliber group of a few dozen scientists. My impression is that they were extremely receptive, in general, to the message. Some responses to…

Casual Fridays: Christmas procrastinators' edition

[Originally posted in December, 2006] So it's December 22, and you are one of the few people who hasn't already bagged out of work to get ready for the holidays. You've been absolutely deluged -- swamped with work -- the entire month of December. You've hardly had time to think about Christmas, let alone shop. But now, with the holiday just a couple short days away, you're faced with the shocking truth. You'll be attending three different Christmas parties (or whatever alternative you prefer). Gifts will be exchanged. What's an overworked procrastinator to do? Would gift certificates be…

Does seeing objects in a scene help us remember them? (Part 1)

Change blindness is a truly remarkable phenomenon. There are so many ways that the human perceptual system can be tricked into missing a change that appears right before our eyes, that it's sometimes astonishing that we aren't constantly running into walls or misplacing the basics of life -- our car keys, wallet, our what were were planning on eating for dinner. If you've never seen a demonstration of change-blindness, I'd suggest checking out some of the posts we've written about it before (For example, here, here, and here). So why don't we notice these sorts of changes? This video, based…

Being excluded from a social group makes you feel cold -- literally

I play soccer every week with an ever-changing group of people. We're all busy, and people get injured or lose interest, so every week the crowd is slightly different; it often feels like we need to re-acquaint ourselves before every game. The easiest way to do this is during warm-ups when small groups kick the ball around in a circle or take practice shots on goal. If you arrive a little late, you might have to insinuate yourself into one of the groups by strolling up and hoping someone passes you the ball. Typically this is pretty easy, but if the others are engaged in conversation, they…

High-pitched voices are most attractive -- with a few exceptions

Have you ever seen Singin' in the Rain? One of the movie's most hilarious moments is when the beautiful silent movie star Lina Lamont is asked to start making "talking pictures." As soon as this gorgeous screen siren opens her mouth, the illusion of her beauty is shattered: her squeaky voice instantly transforms her from a glamorous leading lady into a cartoonish boor. Threatened with losing their box-office cash-cow, the studio chiefs frantically enroll her in voice and etiquette lessons, but nothing helps, and eventually they're forced to substitute the voice of the attractive and lovely-…

Sportsmanship

With a little less than a week to go, I have fallen behind in the 3rd Annual Blogging Scholarship contest. Thanks to the many links and referrals I received from friends during the weekend and the beginning of the week I was able to hold on to third, but later this week The Burnt Orange Report came out of nowhere and buried me. At present I'm barely holding on to 4th, with the MIT Admissions blog catching up. Even if I was able to make it back into the top 3, the far-and-away leader of this contest is the USS Mariner, a sports analysis blog. With nearly 7,000 votes, it is doubtful that anyone…

Consumer Safety Does NOT Equal Homeland Security?

It was kind of depressing to see the post on Effect Measure ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/10/chemical_plants_internal_dange.php#more">Chemical plants: internal dangers, external costs) about the half-measures being taken to safeguard chemical plants and facilities. The chemical security problem is as urgent as it is obvious. Chemical plants are potentially static weapons of mass destruction: large volumes of ammonia, chlorine, highly flammables like propane, large repositories of chlorinated organic solvents and chemical feedstocks like phosgene and more. The…

"Intensive" Treatment Better for Bipolar Disorder

What is the world coming to?   title="Am J Psychiatry">AJP has an article about "intensive" therapy for bipolar disorder.  Their definition of intensive?  Thirty sessions over a period of nine months. Back in the day, when you could struggle to stay awake during a seminar when people read their process notes to their supervisors, and watch brachiosaurids frolic outside the window, intensive therapy was at least twice weekly.  More like thrice weekly.   Gone are the sauropods.  Now, you are likely to see hitherto-unknown strange creatures with spiked hair and iPods race by on their Razor…

Put That In Your Pipe And Smoke It

For some reason, my Father used to say that when he made an indisputable point of some significance.  It is in the href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=put+that+in+your+pipe+and+smoke+it" rel="tag">Urban Dictionary in case you are curious about the expression.  It is also the title of href="http://www.autoblog.com/2007/07/17/put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it-fords-made-of-hemp/">a post on Autoblog about a 1941 Ford made of organic plastic, which had been made from plant material.  Apparently they now are researching a similar idea using hemp. href="http://blog.…

Hyponatremia in Marathon Runners

Every once in a while one of the world's most physically fit persons drops over and dies.  In fact four persons have died during or shortly after running the Boston Marathon. It has been href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/352/15/1550">known for a while that the cause, in at least some cases, is an abnormally low concentration of sodium in the blood (hyponatremia.) The reason is that some people, especially the slower runners, drink too much water during the race.  But the exact mechanism (pathophysiology) has not been fully understood. Now, in a short piece on Medpage…

Cool call for papers on inclusive science for NWSA Journal!

My colleague Donna Riley just sent me a way-cool call for papers: inclusive science, for a special issue of the National Women's Studies Association Journal. Get your writing hats on -- papers are due January 15! The rest of the call is after the fold. INCLUSIVE SCIENCE: ARTICULATING THEORY, PRACTICE, AND ACTION Call for papers for a Special Cluster of Papers in the National Women's Studies Association Journal It is no secret that there is a national crisis in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), particularly in terms of the involvement of women and people of…

Vegetarian Hundred

I saw this meme over at at Jane's, who saw it at Janet's: The Vegetarian's Hundred, a veggie response to the Omnivore's Hundred meme. Here are Jane/Janet's rules: If you want to play along, here's how you do it: copy the list, including my instructions, and bold any items you have eaten and strike out any you would never eat, and then post it to your blog. I'm going to add the following rule: italicize items you have made (or grown) yourself. (Presumably, you've eaten those as well. Fun! And I'm in avoidance about work too. Best think about food! 1. Real macaroni and cheese, made from…

Mommy Monday: Child development is not a linear process.

Introduction: A wise friend has told me more than once that "child development is not a linear process." For example, teeth come in batches, often in fours separated by a few months of non-teething. As another example, just because Minnow is sleeping peacefully in her crib as I started to type this doesn't mean that she will be a peaceful sleeper the next night. As a matter of fact, our journey toward the mythical sleeping through the night* has been anything but peaceful...and anything but linear. Null Hypothesis: Child development, specifically duration of night-time sleep, is not a…

My father & Yasser Arafat, Israel & the Palestinians

Regular readers will know that I rarely write about politics. But this post is an exception, as it is written in memory of my father, who died on this day 7 years ago. That's my father on the left, with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died almost exactly four years later. Some 14 months after Arafat's death, in January 2006, the Palestinians elected as their leaders the Islamist group Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement). The election was democratic, in the real sense of the word. Unfortunately, however, the Palestinians elected the…

Experimenting with a four-headed penis

A new paper about the reproductive behaviour of the spiny anteater, to be published in the December issue of American Naturalist, makes for fascinating - if slightly disturbing - reading. The spiny anteater (Tachyglossuss aculeatus) is a primitive mammal with an unusual four-headed penis. The animal is difficult to observe in the wild, and does not readily copulate when in captivity, so exactly how the male uses its penis was a mystery. Stephen Johnston of the University of Queensland and his colleagues obtained a male spiny anteater which regularly produced erections when handled during…

Mobs of honeybees kill hornets by asphyxio-balling

(Image credit: Emmanouil Filippou / GreecePhotoBank/ Current Biology) Giant hornets are the honeybee's arch enemy. They enter nests, kill the bees and take them home to feed their young. Before leaving the nest, the pioneer foraging hornet secretes a hormone which attracts its nestmates. Other hornets then congregate at the nest, and attack it en masse. In this way, several dozen hornets can wipe out a colony of tens of thousands of bees in a matter of hours.  Bees normally fend off predators by stinging them. But this doesn't work with hornets, because a bee's stinger…

Alzheimer's protein implicated in glaucoma

Alzheimer's is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterised by the formation of senile plaques consisting of amyloid-beta protein. The molecular genetic basis of Alzheimer's is very complex. Amyloid-beta is a toxic protein fragment produced by abnormal processing of amyloid precursor protein (APP), which accumulates to form the insoluble plaques found within cells. (This occurs by a seeding mechanism similar to that of prion proteins.) A new study, by researchers at UCL's Institute of Ophthalmology, in collaboration with French and Italian colleagues, now confirms the role of…