I ran across this Wired article that mentioned an article in the March issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry that internet addiction be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Really, people get a grip. This is the kind of stuff that causes non-psychologists/psychiatrists to believe that all mental disorders are […]
The quote above was made by Carl Sagan. That quote has become even more meaningful recently with the release of a new research study by Zita Martins, Oliver Botta, Marilyn L. Fogel, Mark A. Sephton, Daniel P. Glavin, Jonathan S. Watson, Jason P. Dworkin, Alan W. Schwartz and Pascale Ehrenfreund. The title of the paper […]
It seems that when the Mars soil was first scooped up and the arm tried to dump it in the ovens there was a bit of a problem. The soil was clumpy and things didn’t turn out quite the way they were expected too. However, scientists on Earth sent commands to jiggle/vibrate the screens over […]
I know this is a bit old for news but I finally found the original research article and got a chance to read it and then follow up with some encyclopedia entries on haplotypes and haplogroups. Basically, getting DNA from archaeological sites isn’t that difficult. What is difficult is getting a sample that hasn’t been […]
I was at Balticon this weekend and while I knew Phoenix was going to land on Mars and that it had been successful, I didn’t get to read the articles or watch video until today. This YouTube video is from the control room intercut with the lander animation. The animation only videos are great but […]
I’ve been thinking about the abstract comment: While research on the acoustics of speech production indicates that a vocal tract with this shape is insufficient for producing quantal speech sounds resistant to articulatory error and perceptual confusion, other modeling studies suggest that Neanderthals could have possessed fully-articulate speech capabilities. I’m thinking that since we’ve never […]
Today, I came across a report in New Scientist called “Neanderthals Speak Out After 30,000 years“. Based on a talk called “Voices out of the past: synthesizing Neanderthal speech” given by Robert McCarthy on research done by himself and F. Yates, P. Lieberman at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting this year. As I […]
A new study found that pollution in the air changes the scent of flowers, either masking it or shortening the distance over which bees (and others) can smell them. I came across the report and all of a sudden realized that this means big trouble for all of us. “The scent molecules produced by flowers […]