Category Archives: News

News, Scientific American MIND

With A Little Help

The walk to and from school can’t be uphill both ways, but going it alone might make it seem that way. When judging the steepness of a hill, people overestimated its angle more when alone than when they were accompanied by—or even thinking about—a friend, reports an international group of researchers led by Simone Schnall of University of Plymouth in England in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in May. The longer the volunteers had been friends with their companions, the less steep the hill seemed.

See the rest of the story as it appeared in Scientific American MIND in [html] or [pdf]

News, Scientific American

Seismic “Noise”–Oil Prospecting Data Could Decipher Ocean Mixing

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Three decades ago researchers discovered what are essentially enormous saltwater lakes in the Atlantic Ocean. These “lakes,” called meddies, are gently spinning lenses of water up to 100 kilometers across and one kilometer thick. They float a few hundred meters below the surface of the ocean. Such large, warm bodies, which turned out to come from the Mediterranean Sea, should have an impact on heat exchange in the ocean—and on the planet’s climate. But efforts to study meddies—conventionally by dropping probes that directly measure the ocean’s temperature, salinity and velocity—have proved too costly, infrequent and spread out to reveal how the meddies dissipate their heat. Continue reading Seismic “Noise”–Oil Prospecting Data Could Decipher Ocean Mixing →

News, Scientific American MIND

Motion Magic

The brain looks forward

The brain takes nearly one tenth of a second to consciously register a scene. But the scenery changes far more quickly than that when we move. How does our brain cope? By constantly predicting the future, posits Mark Changizi, now at Rensselaer Polytechnic University.

[See pdf for illustration and the rest of the text.]

GOOD Magazine, News

In The Fold

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Mom wanted you to be a doctor, but you were too busy playing videogames to take the MCATs? Now is your chance to make amends.

Foldit, a new online game, taps our inner competitive streak to advance a key area of medicine: the understanding of how proteins form. Proteins are the engines of cellular life—they are, in layman’s terms, what make cells work—and hold the secret to many of the world’s worst viruses. Viruses use particular proteins to reproduce, and by figuring out the precise shape of these proteins, we’ll be well on our way to a cure. The problem, however, is that computers, for all their powers, aren’t terribly adept at determining the shape of proteins. That’s where you come in.

At Foldit, researchers post initial guesses of how a protein might be shaped, and challenge players to improve the guesses by making the virtual protein more compact (proteins naturally form the most compact shape possible). The more compact your protein model, the higher your score. It may not be as fun as Halo, but it’s a lot more helpful.

This story first appeared in GOOD Magazine: [html] [pdf].