We like to think of our moral judgments as consistent, but they can be as capricious as moods. Research reveals that such judgments are swayed by incidental emotions and perceptions—for instance, people become more moralistic when they feel dirty or sense contamination, such as in the presence of moldy food. Now a series of studies shows that hippies, the obese and “trailer trash” suffer prejudicial treatment because they tend to elicit disgust....
Here’s a fun experiment: Try counting the electronic sensors surrounding you right now. There are cameras and microphones in your computer. GPS sensors and gyroscopes in your smartphone. Accelerometers in your fitness tracker. If you work in a modern office building or live in a newly renovated house, you are constantly in the presence of sensors that measure motion, temperature and humidity. Sensors have become abundant because they have, for the most part, followed Moore’s law: they just keep getting smaller, cheaper and more powerful....
#1 Know that scarcity can sway you—big time. That Old Navy e-mail used a really compelling tactic by highlighting the limited time parameters of the sale—it introduced the idea of scarcity into readers’ minds and implied that we could miss out. “Scarcity is very primal,” says Kelly Goldsmith, assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “When people see the world as running out of anything, the research shows it makes them crazy selfish—it starts to explain things like Black Friday violence....
India joined the distinguished club of Mars explorers on 24 September, as its Mangalyaan probe maneuvered into the red planet’s orbit according to plan. Until then, only the United States, the former Soviet Union and the European Space Agency had conducted missions that successfully reached Mars. India’s space program is the first to do so on its first attempt. “History has been created today,” declared Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) mission control room in Bangalore....
People should stop wasting their money on dietary supplements, some physicians said today, in response to three large new studies that showed most multivitamin supplements are ineffective at reducing the risk of disease, and may even cause harm. The new studies, published today (Dec. 16) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine —including two new clinical trials and one large review of 27 past clinical trials conducted by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — found no evidence that taking daily multivitamin and mineral supplements prevents or slows down the progress of cognitive decline or chronic diseases such as heart diseases or cancer....
In and around Cape Canaveral, Fla., it’s all things Artemis. Colorful hand-painted placards proclaiming “Go Artemis!” adorn storefronts. Large temporary street signs carry launch-day traffic advisories. Astronauts, NASA officials and aerospace industry executives squeeze into bars, which are rife with chatter about NASA’s flagship human space exploration program. “We are going,” NASA declared in the days before the space agency attempted to launch its Artemis I mission, the first test of a megarocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) and a crew-rated spacecraft called Orion....
Images purporting to show a replacement screen for the next-generation iPad 5 have surfaced. Macfixit Australia, a company that provides parts for Apple products, published photos recently of what it claims is an iPad 5 screen/digitizer replacement. The company received the images from its supplier, which said it is the new iPad 5 display. The images seem to show a display that looks more similar to the iPad Mini than the current-generation, full-sized iPad....
Each summer, archaeologist Sarah Hlubik treks rutted dirt tracks to a dry riverbed in Kenya, following, approximately, in the footsteps of ancient hominins who camped there about 1.6 million years ago. Those early people likely butchered animals and fashioned stone tools, and Hlubik, a graduate student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, thinks they did so around a flickering campfire. On her summer expeditions, she collects bits of burned bone and soil samples in the hope of proving her case....
The prosthetic exoskeleton sits bolt upright in a chair, looking as if a robot has stood up, walked away and left part of itself behind. Roughly three minutes later Kevin Oldt is strapped into the metal frame and ready to stand. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, stretching his arms away from his body like a high diver about to take a plunge. Except Oldt holds a crutch in each hand, and when it’s go time he pushes upward with his powerful arms....
“Genius,” Thomas Edison famously said, “is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” He would have found a kindred spirit in Elif Bilgin, 16, of Istanbul, winner of the 2013 Science in Action Award, part of the third annual Google Science Fair. The $50,000 award, sponsored by Scientific American, honors a project by teens from 13 to 18 that can make a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge....
The human brain has long been known to perceive things that aren’t there—from phantom limbs to patterns in chaos. But a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) shows for the first time that it is surprisingly quick to bend reality when normal perception is disrupted. The results were published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience. A case study from 2007 found that a stroke patient was experiencing distorted vision after having lost the optical pathways from the upper left field of his vision....
Attempts to move a vintage NASA spacecraft into a new orbit 36 years after the probe’s launch are in flux, with controllers fearing the spacecraft may have run out of fuel while performing maneuvers on Tuesday (July 9). The vintage International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft, now under the control of a private group, was expected to fire its engines several times Tuesday to move into a more advantageous position to communicate with Earth....
President Trump cast the day as a sea change a year ago when he announced the United States would exit the Paris climate accord. Capitalizing on a campaign promise, Trump said casting aside the U.N. pact would unshackle U.S. energy and thwart economic rivals. So, one year later, what has that decision really accomplished? Perhaps most symbolically, the United States hasn’t even formally done the thing Trump said he was doing—U....
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The internet may be an international system of interconnecting networks sharing a rough global consensus about the technical details of communicating through them – but each country manages its own internet environment independently. As the U.S. debate about the role of government in overseeing and regulating the internet continues, it’s worth looking at how other countries handle the issue....
The lenses in human eyes lose some ability to focus as they age. Monovision—a popular fix for this issue—involves prescription contacts (or glasses) that focus one eye for near-vision tasks such as reading and the other for far-vision tasks such as driving. About 10 million people in the U.S. currently use this form of correction, but a new study finds it may cause a potentially dangerous optical illusion. Nearly a century ago German physicist Carl Pulfrich described a visual phenomenon now known as the Pulfrich effect: When one eye sees either a darker or a lower-contrast image than the other, an object moving side to side (such as a pendulum) appears to travel in a three-dimensional arc....
In the human form of mad cow disease, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a person’s brain deteriorates—literally developing holes that cause rapidly progressing dementia. The condition is fatal within one year in 90 percent of cases. The culprits behind the disease are prions—misfolded proteins that can induce normal proteins around them to also misfold and accumulate. Scientists have known that these self-propagating, pathological proteins cause some rare brain disorders, such as kuru in Papua New Guinea....
Why do flowers have scents? —H. JAMES, WOODBRIDGE, VA. Natalia Dudareva, associate professor in the department of horticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University, offers an answer: Scent is a chemical signal that attracts pollinators to a particular flower in search of nectar or pollen, or both. The volatile organic compounds emitted play a prominent role in the localization and selection of blossoms by insects, especially moth-pollinated flowers, which are detected and visited at night....
The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack: And Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution by Ian Tattersall Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (($27)) Around when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was published, scientists were puzzled by ancient human bones discovered in 1856 Germany that featured a prominent browridge. Rather than considering that the remains belonged to a species separate from modern humans, some researchers at the time attributed the skeleton to a Cossack horseman with a painful condition of rickets that caused him to furrow his brow until the bone above his eyes grew....
Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) blew chaos and fear into residential neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey, where a blast hit festivities at a five-kilometer charity race to benefit U.S. Marines and sailors, over the past weekend. The incidents follow a familiar pattern in which homemade devices made from pressure cookers and pipes are loaded with ball bearings and other metal objects, and detonated using chemicals that can easily be obtained at retail stores or online....
Once they “understand” a topic or game completely, computers can calculate solutions with stunning speed, far faster than the wetware in our skulls. AlphaGo Zero, from British company DeepMind, accumulated experience by competing against itself millions of times to master the game Go and now exceeds the skills of the game’s human experts. That’s a remarkable achievement over the first version, AlphaGo, which had mined the data from numerous games played by people....
