15 Mar 2010 at 10:00pm
In 2009, Miley Cyrus reportedly made an astonishing 25 million dollars. Most of that money came from album sales, which were reported to be slightly over 4 million during that year. Four million…Four million?! Have you heard Miley Cyrus sing? Are there really four million kids out there willing to spend their hard-earned babysitting money on a Miley Cyrus album because they deeply love listening to her sing? Well, according to the findings of a study recently published in Neuroimage, selling four million albums does not translate to having four million people like your music. The study reports that there is good reason to believe that a lot of those purchases were made out of fear -- a fear well known to adolescents all over America: terror of social rejection.
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15 Mar 2010 at 11:30am
Climate change is already happening, but scientists need to do a better job of getting that message to the public, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said Friday.
"I think scientists have seriously underestimated the importance of explaining what we know about climate change and climate variability in ways that are understandable to most people," Lubchenco told reporters in a wide-ranging interview to mark her first anniversary on the job.
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15 Mar 2010 at 10:17am
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
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15 Mar 2010 at 9:15am
The Texas Board of Education has long promoted the teaching of creationism in schools instead of actual science. It’s former chairman and current member Don McLeroy uttered this immortal line when confronted with numerous actual scientists urging that evolution be discussed accurately in the curriculum: “I disagree with these experts. Somebody’s gotta stand up to experts that are just…I think, I don’t know why they’re doing it, they’re wonderful people.”
This stuff is important nationwide. Because Texas buys so many textbooks. So textbook publishers tailor their products so that they’ll be marketable in Texas. And many places around the country get stuck with the same books.
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15 Mar 2010 at 8:00am
NEW YORK CITY--The bustling food market on the corner of 165th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx almost has a casino feel, except that the chips are dull brown, and rather than cherries on a slot machine real fruit and vegetables are lined up on display. But the cheers are no less exuberant: "This is so awesome!" exclaims one happy customer clutching a handful of tokens and tomatoes. "It's just like Atlantic City." [More]
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15 Mar 2010 at 7:00am
Although our perception of the world seems effortless and instantaneous, it actually involves considerable image processing, as we have noted in many of our previous columns. Curiously enough, much of the current scientific understanding of that process is based on the study of visual illusions.
Analysis and resolution of an image into distinct features begin at the earliest stages of visual processing. This was discovered in cats and monkeys by a number of techniques, the most straightforward of which was to use tiny needles--microelectrodes--to pick up electrical signals from cells in the retina and the areas of the brain associated with vision (of which there are nearly 30). By presenting various visual targets to monitored animals, investigators learned that cells in early-processing brain areas are each sensitive mainly to changes in just one visual parameter, not to others. For instance, in the primary visual cortex (V1, also called area 17), the main feature extracted is the orientation of edges. In the area known as V4 in the temporal lobes, cells react to color (or, strictly speaking, to wavelengths of light, with different cells responding to different wavelengths). Cells in the area called MT are mainly interested in direction of movement.
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15 Mar 2010 at 6:00am
Thirty years ago Charles F. Baes, Jr., a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, wrote that the earth was undergoing a great “uncontrolled experiment,” one that would soon reveal the global consequences of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Today scientists know that deforestation, land use and the burning of fossil fuels are warming our planet. We are less certain, however, about how climate change will alter forests and grasslands, as well as the goods and services these ecosystems provide society.
Much of the climate change news in the mass media comes not from experiments but observations. Scientists monitor Arctic sea ice, glaciers and natural events such as the timing of leaf appearance and inform the public when changes fall outside normal expectations. Recording this kind of information over time is important. But rather than waiting to see how an evolving climate slowly alters the biosphere, climate change biologists are conducting field experiments, often at large scales, to see how ecosystems will respond to more or less precipitation, rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and warming temperatures. Experimental data are key to determining if and to what extent ecosystems will be affected by climate change in 10, 50 or 100 years and how those changes might feed back to further advance change. The results can help separate fact from fiction in the climate debate, which is charged with emotion.
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