Research
dmunger | April 17, 2008If you saw a headline like this one in your local newspaper, you might first think it's some type of info-tisement sponsored by the floral industry. You'd probably be right, too. So what is this headline doing in Cognitive Daily? We've found a study to support the notion that flowers actually induce real positive emotions.
Was it paid for by the floral industry? Yes, it was. Does that mean it's bad research? Not necessarily. A team led by Jeannette Haviliand-Jones has conducted an impressive set of three experiments, each of which contributes to the idea that giving someone flowers improves…
dmunger | April 15, 2008Clicking on the link below will bring up an image in a new window (you may need to disable pop-up blockers to do this). The picture contains five rows of asterisks. Your job is to count them as quickly as possible. Try using your finger to point and help keep track.
View image
Now try the same task again, only this time, keep your hands flat on the table while you count.
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If you're like most people, this second task was a little more difficult for you. It's not that you need to use your finger to help you count, it just seems to help things along a bit. When you weren't using your…
dmunger | April 14, 2008How often do you take time to reflect on the things you're grateful for? Once a month? Once a week, at church, perhaps? Maybe you say "grace" at mealtime every day. But even prayers that do express gratefulness, such as a traditional mealtime prayer, are often expressed by rote. Growing up, my family wasn't very religious, but when we had dinner with family or friends, we'd usually say grace. I was probably well into my teens before I understood what "blessusolordforthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthybounty" actually meant.
While many would agree that "counting your blessings" is a…
dmunger | April 8, 2008In our little college town, one of the most popular fitness trends over the past few years has been yoga. Friends and acquaintances often suggest we join them in their favorite class, claiming not only that we'll get stronger and more flexible, but that we'll feel better about ourselves.
But Greta and I both have fitness routines that work well for us. I like to go for a morning run, I bike, and I play soccer, and Greta not only walks for 30 minutes on the treadmill every day, she also walks to and from work, 1.3 miles each way. Despite our assurances that we enjoy these things, devout yoga…
dmunger | April 7, 2008The fact that infants are able to learn language without any help from adults can sometimes seem almost miraculous. Not only do children learn to speak and understand language completely on their own, active teaching of language skills seems to make almost no difference in their ability to talk.
One of the first difficulties when learning a language solely from listening to spoken language is determining where one word ends and the next one begins. Native speakers of a language typically leave no audible space between words at all. Even "motherese" doesn't leave any space between words -- if…
terrasig | April 4, 2008Actinomycin D was the first antitumor antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces parvallus cultures by the lab of 1952 Nobel laureate, Dr Selman Waksman, at Rutgers University. However, it took a young Chinese physician and the confidence in her by a future US Surgeon General for this natural product drug to positively impact the lives of children with cancer.
An unusually engaging Boston Globe obituary by Gloria Negri caught my attention this week that announced the death of pediatric oncology pioneer, Charlotte Tan (Hsu), MD, of pneumonia on 1 April in Brookline, MA. Dr Tan's 1959 paper in…
dmunger | April 3, 2008"Outing" gays and lesbians has always been a controversial practice, especially when done without the outed person's consent. But even when an individual outs him or herself, some people argue that outing is inappropriate because of the negative stereotypes that are evoked. But there's a subtler sort of outing as well: even if a person is publicly out, not everyone is immediately aware of it. While most Americans know that Ellen DeGeneres is a lesbian, fewer people might be aware that Alice Walker is too. While they might know Freddy Mercury was gay, they might not know about Cole Porter.
It…
dmunger | April 1, 2008Imagine yourself walking on a treadmill that starts at a reasonable pace: say, two and a half miles per hour. Every two minutes, the treadmill increases its speed by 0.2 mph: 2.7 mph, 2.9 mph, 3.1 mph, and so on. If you're in good physical condition, at some point -- usually between about 3.0 and 4.5 mph -- you'll find it more comfortable to start running instead of walking. Different individuals have different thresholds based on their fitness level and other factors, but even taking these things into account, it's difficult to explain exactly why people start running when they do. Do…
dmunger | March 31, 2008Researchers have known for some time that people are surprisingly accurate at visually judging distances to objects as far as 25 meters away. If you're allowed to briefly look at an object up to that distance away, then blindfolded, you'll walk right up to it with great precision. If you walk halfway, you can throw a ball the remaining distance, again, quite accurately.
But in 2000 Marla Bigel and Colin Ellard attempted a simple replication of the study: instead of viewing the object, volunteers were led blindfolded to the object and back, and asked to walk back to the object again. Now,…
terrasig | March 29, 2008A paper in last month's issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery reported that US drug approvals during 2007 were the lowest number since 1983. (17 new molecular entities and 2 biologicals; see this figure for 1996-2007 data.) The review cites increased regulatory action as a factor in this reduction, especially following high-profile post-marketing safety issues with blockbuster drugs like Vioxx or Avandia. But other commentators have noted other problems such as the science of drug discovery in pharma being overridden by managers or the reluctance to develop agents for diseases that afflict…
dmunger | March 28, 2008[This post was originally published in November of 2006]
Do you recognize the person depicted in this video? (QuickTime required; the movie is below the fold)
How about this one?
The first video is actually a "chimera," formed by fusing half-images of two well-known faces together, then animated using 3D projection software. The second video shows us just the top half of another famous person's head, rendered in the same way. If you're like most people, you have a much easier time recognizing the face in the second movie than you do either of the faces in the first one. But why?
I can…
jane | March 27, 2008Before I get too deeply into the Is computer science a science? series, ScienceMama suggested that I give my non-computer scientist readers an idea of what computer scientists actually do on a daily basis.
I'm going to focus on what I do as a research scientist. Hopefully some of my readers who are working as computer scientists in industry/government will chime in in the comments with a snapshot of what they do as well.
So, what does a typical research-focused day in my life look like?
MORNING:
First thing: check email, very briefly, just to make sure I don't have to put out any fires or…
dmunger | March 26, 2008[This article was originally published in January of 2007]
Many many studies have repeatedly shown the dangers of driving while using a cell phone. Yesterday, while discussing a new law in Britain imposing heavy penalties not only for driving using a handheld phone, but also while using phones with hands-free kits, commenter Jan claimed that talking to a passenger was less dangerous than talking on a phone. I replied that I hadn't seen a study demonstrating that talking with passengers was any different from talking on a phone, and Jan provided a link to one such study.
Greta and I have both…
dmunger | March 25, 2008Do you recognize the faces in this picture?
Sure you do -- you could recognize the authors of this blog anywhere, even upside-down. It might take you just a bit longer to realize that something isn't quite right with the picture. I'll show you what the problem is at the end of this post.
We've known for decades that the human perceptual system is especially good at recognizing faces, but that ability breaks down in predictable ways when the faces are upside-down. While it takes us a bit longer to recognize objects when they are inverted, faces take even longer compared to other things.…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dog walking, wild birds, ground-nesting birds, conservation, peer-reviewed research
Dog walking in natural areas harms wild birds, according to recently published research.
Millions of people walk their dogs every day, and many of them enjoy walking their dogs in natural areas where birds and other wild animals live. Unfortunately, a scientific paper was recently published showing that the presence of dogs, even when they are on a leash in these natural areas, seriously interferes with wild birds' reproductive success and even scares many of them away.
This…
dmunger | March 20, 2008Point-light displays are an amazing demonstration of how the visual system creates order out of what initially seems to be a random pattern. Take a look at this short movie (QuickTime required). Just looking at the first frame, it might be difficult to tell what's being displayed, but after watching for just a second, it all becomes quite clear:
Just these 13 dots, when placed in motion, instantly convey a very clear picture. We can even determine the gender of the person walking or recognize friends, just from displays like this. But now take a look at this movie:
It might take a bit…
jane | March 19, 2008Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with the struggles I've had to finish and submit journal articles. In particular, there are two such articles that I've been working on forever that I just couldn't seem to wrap up, for one reason or another.
Well, ahem...check out the "Stuff I should probably be working on" in the sidebar.
That's right, I finally got one of the two monkeys off my back. Relief does not even begin to describe what I feel right now.
I fully expect this article to be rejected, or best case scenario require major revisions. I sent it to the top journal in my…
dmunger | March 18, 2008My first introduction to psychology was in a required social science class in college over 20 years ago, reading Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. The experience made me think I'd better be careful if I ever had kids: I didn't want them telling their psychoanalysts how my misadventures in early parenting had scarred them. But while true Freudian psychoanalysts are becoming rarer with each passing year, one of the concepts he advocated has persisted for more than a century: transference.
Freud believed that transference was a fundamental part of the psychoanalytic…
dmunger | March 17, 2008There is a growing body of evidence that very young children -- too young even to talk -- still know plenty of words. When our kids were very young, it was quite clear that they knew the meanings of many more words than they could actually produce. When they couldn't speak at all, they understood words like "Mommy," "bottle," and "diaper." When they were older and could say those words but not complete sentences, they understood more complicated phrases like "go into the kitchen and bring me your sister's sippy cup."
But is there something special about words? Or could babies learn to…
terrasig | March 14, 2008It's been a roller coaster of a week for Charles E Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina. (Wikipedia history here).
As we noted earlier this week, Jordan's Shivani Sud took first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search for her work on biochemical markers of stage II colon cancer. The Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent prize is referred to often as the "junior Nobel prize."
Two and three days later, we learned the identities of the suspects apprehended in the murder of Eve Carson, student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Both young men,…