Category Archives: Outlets

Thoughts of money soothe social rejection

Handling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt.

The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes people feel physically stronger and less dependent on the approval of others to satisfy their needs. “Money activates a general sense of confidence, strength, and efficacy,” the researchers propose.

Read the rest of this news story on Nature News: [html][pdf].

Also summarized by a Mexican outlet, called Reporte Indigo here: [html]

Published online 14 May 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.481 News  Thoughts of money soothe social rejection Handling cash also eases physical pain.  Lucas Laursen    A substitute for social acceptance? PunchstockHandling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists1. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt.   The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes people feel physically stronger and less dependent on the approval of others to satisfy their needs. “Money activates a general sense of confidence, strength, and efficacy,” the researchers propose.

Nature Internship 4: Sybil Attack of the Stem Cell Clones

cover_nature1A real-life network of scientists, policymakers and journalists linked to stem cell research recently found itself cloned on social networking site Facebook. The originals had no control over the profiles, which used their names and photos and which hijacked their real friends in what’s called a sybil attack. Find out more in my news story, online ahead of next week’s print edition.

A former NASA collaborator has just published a new analysis of his copy of Apollo-era data–NASA lost the originals–from a lunar dust experiment. I reported in an online news story that NASA archivists are trying to recover other Apollo data, too, in advance of the next moon missions.

Earthquake scientists have created some pretty awesome -looking images of the Italian region hit by an earthquake earlier this month. Nature printed [html] one this week, based on my blog post last week. I also blogged about animal researchers who protested violence against them at UCLA and about a TV documentary on controversial human cloning attempts. And while I was covering controversy, I blogged about allegations that Jared Diamond defamed a pair of feuding New Guinean men in a New Yorker article.

Apollo scientist dusts off ‘lost’ lunar data

A new analysis based on an Apollo scientist’s copies of lost NASA data seeks to determine how sticky, abrasive moon dust will affect lengthier future lunar missions.

The author of the new study, Brian O’Brien, was the principal investigator for the dust detectors left behind in 1969 by the first two manned missions to the Moon, Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. At the time, O’Brien was a professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Continue reading Apollo scientist dusts off ‘lost’ lunar data

Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit

In September 2008, Forbes science editor Matthew Herper and former Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss appeared together on a panel at the World Stem Cell Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. In late February, Herper received an invitation to ‘friend’ Weiss on the Internet social-networking site Facebook. On the basis of their acquaintance, Herper accepted, noticing that a number of other people involved with stem cells were listed as friends on Weiss’s profile. However, that profile — and many of those it was linked to — was a fake. Continue reading Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit