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Re: Science News
Has Maternal Mortality Really Doubled in the U.S.?
Statistics have suggested a sharp increase in the number of American women dying as a complication of pregnancy since the late 1980s, but a closer look at the data hints that all is not as it seems
By Dina Fine Maron | June 8, 2015
Answers about the increases in U.S. maternal mortality are hard to pin down.
Getty Images/Thinkstock
There is no charity walk to raise awareness about the 700 to 800 women that die each year during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth in the U.S. There are no dedicated colored-plastic wristbands. But statistics in recent years have revealed a worrisome trend: the rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past few decades. Whereas 7.2 women died per 100,000 births in 1987, that number swelled to 17.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2009 and 2011. The uptick occurred even as maternal mortality dropped in less-developed settings around the world. Now women giving birth in the U.S. are at a higher risk of dying than those giving birth in China or Saudi Arabia. The reason for this disturbing trend has eluded researchers, however.
So what exactly is it about being in a family way that is getting worse in America? According to some experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ...
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Supercharged Large Hadron Collider Tackles Universe's Big Questions
Check out this graphical guide to the science ahead at the LHC in Europe
By Elizabeth Gibney and Nature magazine | June 4, 2015
Credit: CERN
Ramped up in power after a two-year upgrade, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator is once again doing science. Following its official restart on June 3, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, can smash protons together faster and with higher energies than during its first run, which ended in February 2013. Our graphical guide illuminates the discoveries that could lie ahead in the next run of the LHC.
The first run began in earnest in November 2009. The LHC collided particles—mainly protons, but also heavier particles such as lead ions—at high enough energies to confirm the existence of ...
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Re: Science News
Too Much Praise Promotes Narcissism
The first longitudinal study in children supports the theory that parents with unrealistically positive views of their kids foster narcissistic qualities
By Andrea Alfano | May 19, 2015
Thomas Fuchs
Sometimes it's cute when kids act self-centered. Yet parenting styles can make the difference between a confident child and a narcissistic nightmare, psychologists at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University in the Netherlands concluded from the first longitudinal study on the origins of intense feelings of superiority in children.
Two prominent but nearly opposing schools of thought address how narcissism develops. The first attributes extreme self-love to a lack of affection from parents; the other implicates moms and dads who place their children on a pedestal by lavishing them with praise. Over the course of 18 months, 565 kids aged seven through 11 took multiple surveys designed to measure self-esteem, narcissism and their parents' warmth, answering questions about how much they identify with statements such as “kids like me deserve something extra.” The parents filled out reciprocal surveys about their approach to child rearing.
In a March issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the Dutch researchers report that ...
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Beautiful Minds
How Is Creativity Differentially Related to Schizophrenia and Autism?
By Scott Barry Kaufman | June 10, 2015
"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." -- Salvador Dali
For some reason, the general public is fascinated by the link between madness and genius. A new paper, which has been garnering a lot of media attention, has stoked the flames once again on this age-old debate.
The paper shows a link between artistic engagement and the genes underlying schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. To be sure, the effects are really small (the genes explain less than 1% of the variation in choosing an artistic profession), and the results do not mean that if one has a mental illness they are destined for creativity (or that creative people are destined for mental illness). Nevertheless, the results are consistent with other solid studies showing there is a real and meaningful link between the schizophrenia spectrum and artistic creativity (see here, here, here, and here). Indeed, the supplemental data shows that the strongest relationships are between the genes underlying schizophrenia and engagement with music, the visual arts, and writing.
So there's something here worth exploring. But what exactly is going on?
This past year, I conducted a relevant study with a stellar ...
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Re: Science News
How Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin's Environmental Legacy
As governor of Wisconsin, the likely Republican presidential nomination-seeker consistently dismissed science and sided with polluters
By Siri Carpenter | June 17, 2015
Scott Walker speaking at CPAC 2015 in Washington, DC.
Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
When Wisconsin’s new state treasurer Matt Adamczyk took office in January, his first act was to order a highly symbolic change in stationery. Adamczyk, a Republican and one of three members of the board that oversees a small public lands agency, “felt passionately” that Tia Nelson, the agency’s executive secretary, should be struck from the letterhead. As soon became clear, his principal objection to Nelson, daughter of former Wisconsin governor and environmentalist-hero Gaylord Nelson, was that in 2007–08 she had co-chaired a state task force on climate change at the then-governor’s request. Adamczyk insisted that climate change is not germane to the agency’s task of managing timber assets, and that Nelson’s activities thus constituted “time theft.” When he couldn’t convince the two other members of the agency’s board to remove Nelson from the letterhead, he tried to get her fired. When that motion failed, he moved to silence her. In April the board voted 2–1 to ban agency staff from working on or discussing climate change while on the clock. The climate censorship at the public lands agency made national headlines.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has kept his distance from Adamczyk. It is easy to see why: Walker is widely expected to ...
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Pope Francis Backs Science, Warns of Climate Risk
The pope’s encyclical Laudato Si warns of global warming's human causes and grave implications
By Scott Detrow and ClimateWire | June 18, 2015
Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han)/Wikimedia Commons
In a historic document addressed to “every person living on this planet,” Pope Francis warns that climate change and other forms of environmental degradation have reached a crisis point.
Francis frames “Laudato Si’,” the first papal encyclical devoted solely to ecological issues, as an “urgent appeal ... for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet.” Encyclicals are among the highest forms of Catholic teaching a pontiff can publish.
“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” Francis writes, pinning the majority of the blame for rising temperatures on man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades,” Francis writes, arguing that the global poor are more likely to live in environmentally vulnerable areas, depend on natural resources for their incomes and lack the resources to “adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited.”
“There is an urgent need to ...
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Re: Science News
Navajo Generating Station Powers and Paralyzes the Western U.S.
The latest in ProPublica’s “Killing the Colorado” series looks inside the power plant fueling America’s drought
By Abrahm Lustgarten and ProPublica | June 16, 2015
Navajo Generating Station about 4 miles east of Page, Arizona; viewed northwest from SR 98.
Wolfgang Moroder/Wikipedia
A couple of miles outside the town of Page, three 775-foot-tall caramel-colored smokestacks tower like sentries on the edge of northern Arizona’s sprawling red sandstone wilderness. At their base, the Navajo Generating Station, the West’s largest power-generating facility, thrums ceaselessly, like a beating heart.
Football-field-length conveyors constantly feed it piles of coal, hauled 78 miles by train from where huge shovels and mining equipment scraped it out of the ground shortly before. Then, like a medieval mortar and pestle machine, wheels crush the stone against a large bowl into a smooth powder that is sprayed into tremendous furnaces — some of the largest ever built. Those furnaces are stoked to 2,000 degrees, heating tubes of steam to produce enough pressure to drive an 80-ton rod of steel to spin faster than the speed of sound, converting the heat of the fires into electricity.
The power generated enables a modern wonder. It drives a set of pumps 325 miles down the Colorado River that heave trillions of gallons of water out of the river and send it shooting over mountains and through canals. That water—lifted 3,000 vertical feet and carried 336 miles—has enabled the cities of Phoenix and Tucson to rapidly expand.
This achievement in moving water, however, is gained at an enormous cost. Every hour the Navajo’s generators spin ...
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Meteorite Thefts Pose a Problem in Ancient Impact Field
The largest meteorite in the Americas, along with some 30 related craters, is located on farmland in Argentina, but the specimens are being illegally taken
By Lucas Viano | June 19, 2015
Caption: Alejandro López with El Chaco, the second-largest meteorite in the world.
Photo courtesy of Alejandro López
Argentina’s Chaco Province, a vast plain once covered by dense forest, is today home to farmland. The flat terrain, however, is not a typical agrarian landscape but rather is studded with enormous metallic meteorites and craters created by pieces of the same source rock. The region is referred to as Campo del Cielo (Field of Heaven or Field of the Sky), unique in the world for its trove of well-preserved objects from space.
Campo del Cielo features 1,350 square kilometers of meteorite impacts formed 4,000 years ago when a huge metallic fireball struck Earth at almost a right angle, as if trying to make a graceful landing, at a speed of 14,000 kilometers per hour. The result was a shower of meteorites ranging in size from small stones weighting only a few grams to El Chaco, a behemoth weighing in at 37 tons and the second-largest intact meteorite in the world. Its size is second only to Hoba, a 66-ton rock that fell in Namibia no earlier than 80,000 years ago.
NASA scientists have investigated the site on two occasions. Now local researchers are raising concerns about weak protection for the region’s space rock heritage.
Chaco Province passed a law in 1990 to declare ...
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Re: Science News
Your Facial Bone Structure Has a Big Influence on How People See You
New research shows that although we perceive character traits like trustworthiness based on a person’s facial expressions, our perceptions of abilities like strength are influenced by facial structure
By Jessica Schmerler | June 18, 2015
We can alter our facial features in ways that make us look more trustworthy, but don't have the same ability to appear more competent. A face resembling a happy expression, with upturned eyebrows and upward curving mouth, is likely to be seen as trustworthy while one resembling an angry expression, with downturned eyebrows, is likely to be seen as untrustworthy. However, competence judgments are based on facial structure, a trait that cannot be altered, with wider faces seen as more competent.
Image courtesy of Jonathan Freeman and Eric Hehman
Selfies, headshots, mug shots — photos of oneself convey more these days than snapshots ever did back in the Kodak era. Most digitally minded people continually post and update pictures of themselves at professional, social media and dating sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Match.com and Tinder. For better or worse, viewers then tend to make snap judgments about someone’s personality or character from a single shot. As such, it can be a stressful task to select the photo that conveys the best impression of ourselves. For those of us seeking to appear friendly and trustworthy to others, a new study underscores an old, chipper piece of advice: Put on a happy face.
A newly published series of experiments by cognitive neuroscientists at New York University is reinforcing the relevance of facial expressions to perceptions of characteristics such as trustworthiness and friendliness. More importantly, the research also revealed the unexpected finding that perceptions of abilities such as physical strength are not dependent on facial expressions but rather on facial bone structure.
The team’s first experiment featured photographs of 10 different people presenting five different facial expressions each. Study subjects rated how friendly, trustworthy or strong the person in each photo appeared. A separate group of subjects scored each face on an emotional scale from “very angry” to “very happy.” And three experts not involved in either of the previous two ratings to avoid confounding results calculated ...
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Social Media Cyber Bullying Linked to Teen Depression
Victims tend to suffer in silence, making it difficult for parents to identify and address the problem
By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience | June 23, 2015
LLoyd Morgan/Flickr
Cyberbullying on social media is linked to depression in teenagers, according to new research that analyzed multiple studies of the online phenomenon.
Victimization of young people online has received an increasing level of scrutiny, particularly after a series of high-profile suicides of teenagers who were reportedly bullied on various social networks. In 2013, for example, a spate of suicides was linked to the social network Ask.fm, where users can ask each other questions anonymously. The deaths of teens who had been subject to abuse on the site prompted Ask.fm (which was acquired by Ask.com in 2014) to launch new safety efforts. Twitter, likewise, announced plans in April to filter out abusive tweets and suspend bullying users.
Social media use is hugely common among teenagers, said Michele Hamm, a researcher in pediatrics at the University of Alberta, but ...
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Re: Science News
Does a Multiverse Fermi Paradox Disprove the Multiverse?
By Caleb A. Scharf | June 23, 2015
Having just orbited our way through another summer solstice, it feels like time to let slip some more speculative ideas before the hot days of the northern hemisphere shorten too much again and rational thinking returns.
So, grasping a fruity alcoholic beverage in one hand, consider the following thought experiment.
The so-called ‘Fermi Paradox’ has become familiar fodder for speculations on the nature of life in the universe, so I’m not going to repeat it in any great detail here. Instead, take a look at this nice description by Adam Frank, and remember that the basic premise is: if life in the universe is not incredibly rare, it should have already shown up on our proverbial doorstep. The fact that is hasn’t is therefore interesting.
But the universe is such a paltry thing. Hordes of physicists are telling us ...
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Cosmic Turbulence May Spawn Monster Magnetic Fields
Galactic collisions replicated in the lab help researchers investigate the origins of vastly amplified magnetic fields in the universe
By Maria Temming | June 23, 2015
Laboratory astrophysicist Jena Meinecke with experimental setup
Stephen Kill, STFC
Our universe is highly magnetized, but no one knows exactly why. The current theory is that cosmic turbulence amplified tiny “seed” magnetic fields to create the powerful ones that govern galaxies today. Astrophysicists are still working to fully understand this process but a recent lab experiment mimicking galactic collisions might bring scientists one step closer to figuring out the mysterious origins of cosmic magnetism.
The matter in our universe forms a web of densely populated galaxy clusters and connecting filaments separated by vast voids, interrupted only by the occasional stray galaxy. When astronomers first started to observe magnetic fields in space, they noticed something peculiar: The universe is magnetized. Scientists had expected to find magnetism in active regions, where plasma currents such as those inside stars might spawn magnetic fields. But apparently even the most vacant cosmic stretches, where scientists expected very little to be happening, are threaded with magnetism. Cosmic magnetic fields are key players in governing the motion and evolution of stars and galaxies, so scientists are keen on understanding how they were born and how they became so strong.
Astrophysicists suspect that intergalactic magnetism originated as ...
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Re: Science News
What Is the Big Secret Surrounding Stingray Surveillance?
State and local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. are setting up fake cell towers to gather mobile data, but few will admit it
By Larry Greenemeier | June 25, 2015
Stung: Law enforcement agencies sometimes use a device called a stingray to simulate a cell phone tower, enabling them to gather international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI), location and other data from mobile phones connecting to them. Pictured here is an actual cell tower in Palatine, Ill.
Courtesy of Joe Ravi (CC-BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Given the amount of mobile phone traffic that cell phone towers transmit, it is no wonder law enforcement agencies target these devices as a rich source of data to aid their investigations. Standard procedure involves getting a court order to obtain phone records from a wireless carrier. When authorities cannot or do not want to go that route, they can set up a simulated cell phone tower—often called a stingray—that surreptitiously gathers information from the suspects in question as well as any other mobile device in the area.
These simulated cell sites—which collect international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI), location and other data from mobile phones connecting to them—have become a source of controversy for a number of reasons. National and local law enforcement agencies closely guard details about the technology’s use, with much of what is known about stingrays revealed through court documents and other paperwork made public via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
One such document recently revealed that the Baltimore Police Department has used a cell site simulator ...
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The Problem with Female Superheroes
From helpless damsel to powerful heroine, but still hypersexualized
By Cindi May | June 23, 2015
A woman dressed as Wonder-Woman at Comic-Con in San Diego.
Credit: The Conmunity via Wikimedia Commons
What do you want to be when you grow up? When pondering this question, most kids have given at least passing consideration to one fantastical if improbable calling: superhero. There is an understandable allure to the superhero position — wearing a special uniform (possibly with powerful accessories), saving the world from evil, and let's not forget possessing a wickedly cool special power like x-ray vision or the ability to fly.
But new research by Hillary Pennell and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz at the University of Missouri suggests that, at least for women, the influence of superheroes is not always positive. Although women play a variety of roles in the superhero genre, including helpless maiden and powerful heroine, the female characters all tend to be hypersexualized, from their perfect, voluptuous figures to their sexy, revealing attire. Exposure to this, they show, can impact beliefs about gender roles, body esteem, and self-objectification.
Consider, for example, superhero movies like Spider-man or Superman. These action-packed films typically feature a strong, capable, intelligent man fighting a villainous force. The goal of course is to save humanity, but ...
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Re: Science News
Wearable health trackers have quickly moved into the mainstream. What if you could monitor your alcohol intake as easily as you track your physical activity?
This is the $300,000 challenge issued by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health, to help design a better alcohol biosensor, one that improves on current technology by providing real-time monitoring in an inconspicuous device.
Current wearable alcohol monitors are bulky and give readings only every 30 minutes. A personal device that measures blood alcohol levels in real time would be invaluable not just to individuals looking to track their drinking habits but also to scientists who study alcohol use.
The winner of this contest will design a discreet, wearable working prototype that provides blood alcohol monitoring in real time. It could be a wristband, jewelry, or item of clothing. Creative approaches are encouraged. The device must be able to measure blood alcohol level, interpret the data, and store or transmit it wirelessly to a smartphone or other device.
Submissions are due by December 1, 2015. Winners will be announced in February 2016. The best design will receive $200,000. Second prize is $100,000.
Up to the challenge? See the Federal Register ( https://www.federalregister.gov/arti...nsor-challenge ) announcement for details, or email NIAAAChallengePrize@NIH.gov.
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Re: Science News
Super-Muscular Pigs Created by Small Genetic Tweak
Researchers hope the genetically engineered animals will be approved for human consumption
By David Cyranoski and Nature magazine | July 1, 2015
These meaty pigs could become the first genetically engineered animals to be approved for human consumption.
Xi-jun Yin
Belgian Blue cattle are hulking animals that provide unusually large amounts of prized, lean cuts of beef, the result of decades of selective breeding. Now, a team of scientists from South Korea and China says that it has created the porcine equivalent using a much faster method.
These ‘double-muscled’ pigs are made by disrupting, or editing, a single gene—a change that is much less dramatic than those made in conventional genetic modification, in which genes from one species are transplanted into another. As a result, their creators hope that regulators will take a lenient stance towards the pigs—and that the breed could be among the first genetically engineered animals to be approved for human consumption.
Jin-Soo Kim, a molecular biologist at Seoul National University who is leading the work, argues that his gene ...
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As Earth's Spin Slows, Clocks Get Another Leap Second
The history of the leap second reveals a curious pattern of decreasing frequency since its adoption 43 years ago
By Amanda Montañez | June 30, 2015
Beth Scupham/Flickr
Due to a complex interplay of Earth’s and the moon’s gravitational fields, our planet’s rotation has gradually slowed over the millennia. It hasn’t been the designated length of one solar day—the time it takes Earth to make a full rotation, or slightly more than 86,400 seconds—since about 1820.
As a result, our global standard of time, known as Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, occasionally becomes misaligned with UT1—the marker used to measure the actual length of one mean solar day. UT1 is determined ...
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