This weeks tidbits from the wider world....
Shallow babies
Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, suggesting that face recognition is hard-wired at birth than learned. Allan Slater's team at the University of Exeter in the UK showed paired images of faces to babies as young as one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face. "Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it's innate," Slater told the British Association for the Advancement of Science festival in Exeter this week. The preference for pretty faces might arise because attractive people have the prototype human face. If hundreds of faces are merged, the resulting "average face" is very appealing.
Let's hope it doesn't apply to blogs
"Dear diary. Worrying news today. I read in a magazine that people who keep diaries are more likely to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and even social dysfunction..." That is the conclusion of a study by UK researchers Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University and David Sheffield of the Staffordshire University. They compared 94 undergraduates who were regular diarists with 41 non-diarists. The volunteers filled in standard questionnaires about their health. "We expected diary-keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off," says Duncan, who presented the findings to a British Psychological Society meeting in Edinburgh this week. "You are probably much better off if you don't write anything at all." Because the study looked at existing diarists, it is not clear whether keeping a diary makes people less healthy or if less heathly people are more likey to keep a diary. But the findings are surprising because other studies suggest that people find it easier to recover from a traumatic event if they write about it. One possibility, Duncan says, is that keeping a diary makes people dwell on their misfortunes. "It's probably better not to get caught in a ruminative, repetitive cycle," she says. She hopes to do further studies to see if writing about positive or negative things, makes a difference.
Clear history
The use of glass during the industrial and scientific revolutions was what seperated western civilisation from the rest of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. Progress in everything from astronomy to medicine to modern genetics would have been impossible without it, an anthropologist is claiming. Without glass, there would be no microscopes or telescopes. Louis Pasteur would not have identified infectious diseases and launched a medical revolution. Biologists could not have observed cell division, understood chromosomes, or unravelled DNA's structure, leaving us bereft of modern genetics. Much of Galileo's work on the solar system would have been restricted to philosophy. And while it mat seem unlikely, glass even helped in the invention of the steam engine, says Alan Macfarlane of the University of Cambridge. It was essential to the barometer, manometer, thermometer and air pump, inventions that allowed Jacques Charles and Robert Boyle to derive the laws linking volume of a gas to its pressure and temperature. This understanding led to machines that could extract mechanical work from expanding gas, and led to the steam and internal combustion engines and eventually the gas turbine.
from New Scientist Magazine
Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, suggesting that face recognition is hard-wired at birth than learned. Allan Slater's team at the University of Exeter in the UK showed paired images of faces to babies as young as one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face. "Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it's innate," Slater told the British Association for the Advancement of Science festival in Exeter this week. The preference for pretty faces might arise because attractive people have the prototype human face. If hundreds of faces are merged, the resulting "average face" is very appealing.
Let's hope it doesn't apply to blogs
"Dear diary. Worrying news today. I read in a magazine that people who keep diaries are more likely to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and even social dysfunction..." That is the conclusion of a study by UK researchers Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University and David Sheffield of the Staffordshire University. They compared 94 undergraduates who were regular diarists with 41 non-diarists. The volunteers filled in standard questionnaires about their health. "We expected diary-keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off," says Duncan, who presented the findings to a British Psychological Society meeting in Edinburgh this week. "You are probably much better off if you don't write anything at all." Because the study looked at existing diarists, it is not clear whether keeping a diary makes people less healthy or if less heathly people are more likey to keep a diary. But the findings are surprising because other studies suggest that people find it easier to recover from a traumatic event if they write about it. One possibility, Duncan says, is that keeping a diary makes people dwell on their misfortunes. "It's probably better not to get caught in a ruminative, repetitive cycle," she says. She hopes to do further studies to see if writing about positive or negative things, makes a difference.
Clear history
The use of glass during the industrial and scientific revolutions was what seperated western civilisation from the rest of the world in the 17th and 18th centuries. Progress in everything from astronomy to medicine to modern genetics would have been impossible without it, an anthropologist is claiming. Without glass, there would be no microscopes or telescopes. Louis Pasteur would not have identified infectious diseases and launched a medical revolution. Biologists could not have observed cell division, understood chromosomes, or unravelled DNA's structure, leaving us bereft of modern genetics. Much of Galileo's work on the solar system would have been restricted to philosophy. And while it mat seem unlikely, glass even helped in the invention of the steam engine, says Alan Macfarlane of the University of Cambridge. It was essential to the barometer, manometer, thermometer and air pump, inventions that allowed Jacques Charles and Robert Boyle to derive the laws linking volume of a gas to its pressure and temperature. This understanding led to machines that could extract mechanical work from expanding gas, and led to the steam and internal combustion engines and eventually the gas turbine.
from New Scientist Magazine
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home