In his free time, Sven Laumer serves as a referee for Bavaria’s highest amateur football league. A few years ago, he noticed several footballers had quit Facebook, making it hard to organize events on the platform. He was annoyed, but as a professor who studies information systems, he was also intrigued. Why would the young men want to give up Facebook? Social scientists had been saying the social network was a good thing.
Category: research
Are scientists easy prey for jihadism?
What kind of person becomes a jihadi terrorist? Specifically, what kind of educated person? The overwhelming majority of graduates recruited into Islamist terrorism studied engineering, science and medicine. Almost none are social science or arts graduates, according to research. The insight could have important implications.
Almost half (48.5%) of jihadis recruited in the Middle East and north Africa had a higher education of some sort, according to a 2007 analysis by Diego Gambetta that is cited in Immunising the Mind, a new paper published by the British Council; of these 44% had degrees in engineering. Among western-recruited jihadis that figure rose to 59%.
Harvard MRI Study Proves Meditation Literally Rebuilds Brain’s Gray Matter In 8 Weeks
A study conducted by a Harvard affiliated team out of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) came across surprising conclusions regarding the tangible effects of meditation on human brain structure. An 8 week program of mindfulness meditation produced MRI scans for the first time showing clear evidence that meditation produces “massive changes” in brain gray matter.
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Are Cats Domesticated?
“The cat does not offer services,” William Burroughs wrote. “The cat offers itself.” But it does so with unapologetic ambivalence. Greet a cat enthusiastically and it might respond with nothing more than a few unhurried blinks. Later, as you’re trying to work, it will commandeer your lap, keyboard, and attention, purring all the while. A cat will mew at the food bowl in the morning and set off on a multiple-day trek in the afternoon. Dogs are dependent on us to the point of being obsequious, but cats seem to be constantly reëvaluating the merits of our relationship, as well as their role in domestic life. “Are cats domesticated?” is one of the most frequently Googled questions about the animals, based on the search engine’s autocomplete suggestions.
It’s a question that scientists have been asking, too. The latest answer, based on insights from recent archeological discoveries and genome-sequencing studies, is that cats are semi-domesticated…
DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked
If you went to grade school in the 1980s or 90s, chances are good you were publicly offered drugs at school by a uniformed police officer.
“Hey,” he might have said, “Want to meet up behind the gym after school and get high?”
Luckily for you, you were savvy enough to understand that this wasn’t an earnest offer. It was an exercise in resistance.
“No thanks!” you’d say. “I have homework to go do.”
“Come on,” he’d retort. Impressed with your delivery, he’d decided to step up the simulated peer pressure. “I thought you were cool.”
“Not doing drugs is cool,” was your reply.
Your classmates might have applauded, at the officer/teacher’s prompting. Then you went back to your seat, and the officer would go over the things you did well in the exercise, so the class could learn by your example. In addition to teaching the other students, the officer was also building up your self esteem.
Self esteem and resistance were two major cornerstones of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program, also known as DARE. Through the 1980s and the 1990s, DARE swelled from a tiny local program to a massive, and massively expensive, national campaign against drugs in schools. At its peak, DARE was practiced in 75% of American schools, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run. It had spiffy, 90s branded swag, and a baritone-voiced mascot, “Daren the Lion.”
There was just one problem: DARE didn’t work.
7 Hobbies Science Says Will Make You Smarter
For a long time, it was believed that people are born with a given level of intelligence and the best we could do in life was to live up to our potential. Scientists have now proven that we can actually increase our potential and enjoy ourselves in the process. We now know that by learning new skills the brain creates new neural pathways that make it work faster and better.
Here is a list of seven hobbies that make you smarter and why.
“Missing Link” Discovered In Brain
“Throw out the textbooks” and “missing link” are words rarely heard anymore in science, but that’s what researchers around the world are saying about the recent discovery of microscopic lymphatic vessels connecting the brain to the immune system.
That physical link was long thought absent, confounding scientists who study neurological disorders with an immune component. The vessels were found in mice, by accident, by University of Virginia researchers who published their results in Nature. If confirmed in humans, experts say, the discovery could have profound implications for a range of conditions including chronic fatigue syndrome, autism, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease.
Lymphatic vessels, which piggyback on blood vessels, distribute immune cells to tissues to fight infection and carry fluid away from tissues to dispose of cellular waste. This complex drainage system has been found in nearly every part of the human body but not, until now, in the brain.
Scientists Figure Out How to Retrieve ‘Lost’ Memories
Mice certainly aren’t men, but they can teach us a lot about memories. And in the latest experiments, mice are helping to resolve a long-simmering debate about what happens to “lost” memories. Are they wiped out permanently, or are they still there, but just somehow out of reach?
Researchers in the lab of Susumu Tonegawa at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT conducted a series of studies using the latest light-based brain tracking techniques to show that memories in certain forms of amnesia aren’t erased, but remain intact and potentially retrievable. Their findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, are based on experiments in mice, but they could have real implications for humans, too.
The cloth cap that could help treat depression
At first glance, the cloth cap produced by Barcelona-based Neuroelectrics looks less like a medical device than a hybrid of the headgear for a Soviet-era cosmonaut and a swimmer in the 1930s. With a network of protruding wires and an electronics pack on the back, the futuristic soft helmet is in fact a tool for electrically stimulating the brain to identify and treat depression and strokes. Soon, the technology could be used by patients at home while doctors monitor them remotely.
Dubbed a “Fitbit for the brain”, in a nod to the fitness monitoring device, the cap can diagnose medical conditions by examining brainwaves – small electronic pulses fired between the human brain’s nerve cells. It then treats the conditions by stimulating the brain with a low electrical current conveyed via a series of electrodes placed around the cap.