(Image: University of Colorado Denver)

Facebook users who decide to unfriend someone may trigger a series of real-life consequences which reach beyond cyberspace, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Denver.

Based on 582 survey responses gathered via Twitter, the study found that 40 percent of people would avoid anyone who unfriended them on Facebook in real life. Half of the respondents said they would not avoid the person, and the remaining 10 percent were unsure.

The survey found more women than men would avoid contact with the person who unfriended them. That surprised researchers, who were unable to find any reasons behind the difference between genders.

Social media websites have opened a new chapter in human relationships. In the past, making a friend involved face to face communication and interaction; friends were an actual physical part of your social circle.

Sites like Facebook allow users to become friends with people they’ve never met and might never meet in person.

(Image: AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, file)

This past October, Facebook alone logged its one billionth user.

Social media websites have been changing the dynamics in interpersonal communication as well. Traditional face-to-face dialog has given way to quick online interactions that have their own set of rules, language and even etiquette – called ‘netiquette’.

“People think social networks are just for fun,” said study author Christopher Sibona, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Denver Business School. “But, in fact, what you do on those sites can have real-world consequences.”

Sibona found there were six factors which predicted whether someone would avoid a person who unfriended them.

♥ If the person discussed the event after it happened

♥ If the emotional response to the unfriending was extremely negative

♥ If the person unfriended believed the action was due to offline behavior

♥ The geographical distance between the two – if they lived close to each other and there’s a chance of physical contact

♥ If the troubled relationship was discussed prior to the unfriending

♥ How strong the person valued the relationship before the unfriending

Those who thought the unfriending was punishment for behaving badly offline also tended to avoid further contact with the ‘unfriender’

Everybody loves friends (Image: Pollyalida/Creative Commons at Flickr)

Compared to real-life relationships, the cost of maintaining online relationships is extremely low, according to Sibona. “In the real world, you have to talk to people, go see them to maintain face-to-face relationships. That’s not the case in online relationships. ”

Sibona also points out that real-life friendships often end by just fading away as people drift apart. However, an online friendship can come to an abrupt end when one friend unilaterally declares the friendship is over.

“Since it’s done online, there is an air of unreality to it, but in fact there are real-life consequences,” Sibona said. “We are still trying to come to grips as a society on how to handle elements of social media. The etiquette is different and often quite stark.”

In 2010, Sibona authored another Facebook-based study which examined why people are unfriended on Facebook. He found four top reasons for unfriending:

♥ Frequent, unimportant posts

♥ Polarizing posts usually about politics or religion

♥ Inappropriate posts involving sexist, racist remarks

♥ Boring everyday life posts about children, food, spouses etc.

Unfriending someone in Facebook could have real world consequences (Image: Oli Dunkley/Creative Commons via Flickr)

According to Sibona, past research shows individuals who’ve been ostracized from a group of friends experience lower moods, have less of a feeling of belonging, and feel a sense of loss of control and reduced self-esteem.

“People who are unfriended may face similar psychological effects, because unfriending may be viewed as a form of social exclusion,” Sibona said. “The study makes clear that unfriending is meaningful and has important psychological consequences for those to whom it occurs.”

Eating breakfast may help keep you from getting fat and making poor food choices (Photo: Angela de Março via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Skipping breakfast sets the brain up to make poor food choices later in the day, according to a new study.

Scientists from the MRC Clinical Science Centre at London’s Imperial College, compared the brain scans and eating patterns of people both after eating breakfast and when they were fasting.

They found that those who avoid breakfast may overeat throughout the rest of the day, often choosing high-calorie or junk food over healthier selections.

The researchers studied the magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of 21 volunteer test subjects who didn’t eat anything before coming in for their tests.  On one those visits, the volunteers were first given a 750-calorie breakfast before the researchers ran the MRI scans.

On another visit to the research center, the test subjects weren’t fed any breakfast, but were always served lunch after each scanning session.

“Through both the participants’ MRI results and observations of how much they ate at lunch, we found ample evidence that fasting made people hungrier, and increased the appeal of high-calorie foods and the amount people ate,” said Dr. Tony Goldstone, who led the study.

Researchers believe the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex (highlighted in this MRI image) might play a key role in influencing food choices. (MRI Image: Paul Wicks via Wikimedia Commons)

While examining the MRIs of volunteers who hadn’t eaten breakfast, the scientists found a variation in the pattern of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, that’s the area of the brain located right above the eyes that can affect decisions concerning the appeal and reward value of food.

When participants who were fasting or didn’t eat any breakfast were shown pictures of high-calorie food,  the MRIs showed that that portion of the brain was “activated,” a reaction less strong when they had eaten breakfast.

After studying and comparing the MRI scans over a period of time, the researchers were able to use the brain scans to predict which of their test subjects would be the mostly likely to respond strongly to high-calorie foods.

To Goldstone and his colleagues, these findings suggest  the orbitofrontal cortex may play a key role in influencing people in making their food choices.

They also say their research complements previous studies that show fasting may not be the best way to lose weight, since doing so tends to create a “bias” in the brain that makes us seek a high-calorie food reward.

Nutritionists recommend foods with protein (eggs/lean meat), whole grains, and fruits or vegetables, for a healthy breakfast (Photo: Kenji Ross via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Eating a healthy breakfast doesn’t necessarily mean sitting down to a formal meal or even eating traditional breakfast foods like cereals or eggs.

You can mix up the food items you want to eat for breakfast and that could also include eating some of those tasty leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.

Here are some tips and suggestions on healthy breakfast choices from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics:

• Include some lean protein, such as eggs, cheese, deli meat, peanut butter, Canadian bacon or yogurt
• Pair that lean protein with a whole-grain carbohydrate food, such as a whole-grain cereal, bread, waffles, pancakes or oatmeal
• Be sure to include fruits and vegetables to your breakfast  Top off yogurt with some fruit or chop up some veggies to add to your omelet
• To save time, nutritionists suggest prepping breakfast the night before

Many factors influence a woman’s self-perception of physical attractiveness. New research shows that genetics may also play a role in how some women gauge their body image. (Photo: Christine Tremoulet via Flickr/Creative Commons)

While cultural and societal factors have long been thought to influence how women see themselves in the mirror, a new study in Michigan has revealed that genetics may also play a role in making some women more vulnerable to the pressure of being thin.

Many people today, especially women, have taken the modern axiom, “Thin is In“ to heart.  So much so that a number of those pushing themselves to lose weight in order to become thin have developed serious problems such as the potentially deadly eating disorder, Anorexia Nervosa.

Women are constantly reminded by the media that it’s best to be thin.  From size-zero models to airbrushed film stars, thinness is portrayed as equaling beauty across Western culture. While both genders are subject to this pressure, it tends to fall harder on women for a variety of reasons. That skinny ideal can cause women to have a poor body image in the way they see themselves and imagine how they look.

Michigan State University researcher Jessica Suisman led a study that focused on the possible psychological impact of women who actually believe this perceived ideal of thinness, something the researchers called “thin-ideal internalization.”

Ms. Suisman and her colleagues gathered more than 300 female twins, from 12 to 22 years of age, from the Michigan State University Twin Registry, to participate in the study.  The researchers first made a measurement of the women’s “thin idealization” — or just how much their study subjects wanted to look like the thin women who are often shown on TV and in magazines.

In western cultures women are constantly reminded by the media that it’s best to be thin. (Photo: Helga Weber via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Once these measurements were made, the researchers then compared the genetics of identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, with those of fraternal twins who share 50 percent.

The researchers, examining the results of these measurements found that identical twins have a close to identical level of thin idealization than their fraternal twin cohorts.  To Suisman and her colleagues this suggests that genetics play a significant role in pressuring women to believe that they need to be thin (“thin idealization”).

As they continued their analysis of the data, the researchers found that the heritability of thin idealization is 43 percent, which they believe means that nearly half of the reasons women differed in their idealization of thinness can be explained by variations in their genetic makeup.

But Suisman pointed out that their research did not find a specific gene that makes a woman think, ‘I want to be thin.’  “That wouldn’t make any sense because we haven’t always had these thin models as our ideals,” said Suisman.   “We aren’t sure exactly what these same genes would have done many years ago or even in a different culture in the world where thinness isn’t seen as the equivalent for beauty,” she adds.

Suisman’s research team also looked at what environmental influences, such as friends, family, society and/or culture, were most important in determining how women felt about their bodies and how much they wanted to look like the ‘media ideal.’

A study led by Jessica Suisman, from Michigan State University, suggests that, for some women, genes may influence the pressure to be thin. (Photo: Michigan State University)

“And what we actually found was that environmental influences that were really specific to each individual woman, rather than the general environment was more important,” said Suisman.  In other words, individual experiences such as having friends and peers who are focused on thinness, or being involved in a sport that’s also focused on thinness, were more important and played more of a role in pressuring women to be thin than general societal and cultural influences.

“The take-home message,” Suisman said, “is that the broad cultural risk factors that we thought were most influential in the development of thin-ideal internalization are not as important as genetic risk and environmental risk factors that are specific and unique to each twin.”

Jessica Suisman joins us this weekend on the radio edition of Science World.  She tells us more about her research and findings and how genetics could play a role in pushing women to focus on being thin.

Check out the right column for scheduled air-times or listen now to the interview below.

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“I don’t!” – Runaway bride (Photo: Kate Hiscock via Flickr/Creative Commons)

A new study suggests brides should not ignore those pre-wedding day jitters.

Women who have doubts right before their nuptials  are more likely to have an unhappy marriage and end up in divorce court, according to the report in the Journal of Family Psychology.

“People think everybody has premarital doubts and you don’t have to worry about them,” said Justin Lavner, a UCLA doctoral candidate in psychology and lead author of the study. “We found they are common but not benign. You know yourself, your partner and your relationship better than anybody else does; if you’re feeling nervous about it, pay attention to that. It’s worth exploring what you’re nervous about.”

The UCLA psychologists studied 232 newlywed couples living in the Los Angeles area.  The researchers then checked in with the couples every six months for four years to conduct  follow-up surveys.

The average age of the husbands  studied was 27, while the wives were 25.

In their first interview, the newlyweds were asked, “Were you ever uncertain or hesitant about getting married?” Forty seven percent of the guys said “yes,” while 38 percent of their wives answered in the affirmative.

The psychologists found that, while the ladies had fewer misgivings than their spouses, the doubts they did express were much more telling in predicting trouble after the wedding.

In 36 percent of cases,  both  husband and wife had no doubts about getting married.

A new study suggests women who get married despite pre-wedding doubts are more likely to end up in divorce court. (Photo: Vic (Hang in There) via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Yet 19 percent of the women who did express pre-wedding doubts ended up  divorced four years later, as compared with 8 percent of those who didn’t have doubts.

Among the guys, the 14 percent who said  they had premarital uncertainties were in divorce court four years.

By comparison, 9 percent of the men who didn’t have doubts ended up divorced.

One in 10 couples got divorced when only the husband had reservations about getting married. That statistic almost doubles, to 18 percent, when the wife alone had doubts.

But when both spouses expressed doubts about entering into the bonds of matrimony, 20 percent of the couples got divorced.

In fact, doubt proved to be a critical indicator of whether the marriage would succeed, more so than factors such as how satisfied the married couples were with their relationships, whether their parents were divorced, if the couple had lived together before the wedding or had a troubled engagement.

While the psychologists aren’t suggesting doubters should call off their weddings, they do advise  couples to sit down and discuss concerns before going any further in the relationship.

“Talk about it and try to work through it,” said Thomas Bradbury, a UCLA psychology professor and co-author of the study. “You hope that the big issues have been addressed before the wedding.”

(Photo: spaceamoeba via Flickr/Creative Commons)

The brain isn’t always entirely accurate when it comes to processing language, according to a new study.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) finds we may not be processing every word see hear or read.

This can mean our brain doesn’t pick up on changes made to key words in a sentence, even if they change its meaning.

Consider this  example: “After a plane crash, where should the survivors be buried?”

Many of us pick up on words like “plane crash” and “buried,” so we may think we’re being asked where those who died in the crash should be buried, rather than realizing the question is about those who actually survived the crash.

The study shows that roughly half the people asked this question answer it as if they are being asked about the victims and not the survivors.

Or try this: “Can a man marry his widow’s sister?”

According to the study, most people answer in the affirmative, not realizing they’re agreeing that a dead man can  marry his bereaved wife’s sister.

This has something to do with what are known as semantic illusions.

(Photo: Moritz Petersen via Flickr/Creative Commons)

These are words that may fit the general context of a sentence, even though they don’t actually make sense. They can challenge  traditional methods of language processing, which assumes we develop our understanding of a sentence by thoroughly weighing the meaning of each  word.

Instead, the researchers  found  these semantic illusions show that, rather than listening and analyzing each word, our language processing is based only on  shallow and incomplete interpretations of what we hear or read.

To find out what’s happening in our brains when we process sentences containing semantic illusions, Professor Hartmut Leuthold, from the Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging at the University of Glasgow, led his colleagues in research that used Electroencephalography (EEG) devices to read, measure and record ‘brain waves’.

Looking at the EEG patterns of volunteers who read or listened to sentences containing semantic anomalies, researchers found that when  volunteers were tricked by the semantic illusion,  their brains had not even noticed the unusual words.

Man wired up with electrodes for EEG monitoring (Photo: Douglas Myers via Wikimedia Commons)

The researchers’ analysis also showed that the volunteers used these shallow processing methods even more when they were stressed or faced more difficult or multiple tasks.

If you want to make sure that the correct message gets across to your listener or reader, the study suggests a few  tricks.

“We know that we process a word more deeply if it is emphasized in some way.  So, for example in a news story, a newsreader can stress important words that may otherwise be missed and these words can be italicized to make sure we notice them when reading,” says Leuthold.

The way we construct sentences can also help reduce misunderstandings.

“It’s a good idea to put important information first because we are more likely to miss unusual words when they are near the end of a sentence,” he says. “Also, we often use an active sentence construction such as ‘Bob ate the apple’ because we make far more mistakes answering questions about a sentence with a passive construction – for example ‘The apple was eaten by Bob’.”

Researchers believe the findings not only offer better insight into the various processes  used in our comprehension of language but also, according to  Leuthold, knowing what is happening in the brain when mistakes occur can help us to avoid the pitfalls – such as missing critical information in textbooks or legal documents – and to communicate more effectively.

Turns out obesity isn’t just a health issue;  all of that overeating could seriously cut into the future world food supply.

According to a new study from Great Britain, if the current worldwide obesity epidemic continues unabated, maintaining enough food to feed the world could actually become a much more serious challenge.

Right now, the world’s population is over seven billion, and growing.  The more people there are, the more food and resources are needed.

According to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine,  the weight of the human population should be taken into consideration – in addition to the number of people in the world -  when determining future food security and environmental sustainability.

Using data from various studies, researchers determined the world’s adult population weighs 287 million metric tons, or 287 billion kilograms.

Separately, we each weigh an average of 62 kilograms, but that average varies from country to country.

Researchers estimate 15 million of that 287 metric tons is due to those who are overweight, while 3.5 million metric tons are due to obesity.

North Americans have the highest body mass of any continent, according to the study, with an average body mass of 80.7kg.

While North America has only about six percent of the world’s population, it contributes 34 percent of the world’s biomass.

Asians, on the other hand, whose average weight is 58 kilograms, make up around 61 percent of the world’s population, but they’re only responsible for roughly 13 percent of the world’s biomass.

Among nations,  the United States came in as the “heaviest” country, while Eritrea was the “lightest”.

The researchers also looked at how those who are overweight and obese impact the total weight and averages.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between being overweight and obese.

You’re considered to be overweight when you weigh more than the weight that is appropriate for your height and bone structure or have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25 or greater.

If you have BMI of 30 or more, medical experts consider you to be obese.

Experts say that up to half of all food that is eaten is burned up by various physical activities.  But as your weight rises, your energy requirements increase as well, because it takes more energy to move a heavy body.

Even when at rest, those who have a bigger body mass burn more energy.

So, the bigger you are, the more energy you’ll need; the more energy you need means you must eat more; the more food eaten by a growing world population could  then, in turn, impact affect food supplies and future food security.

Soybeans being harvested (Photo: Jake was here via Wikimedia Commons)

The domino effect of a heavier populace can also affect environmental sustainability.  Because in order to feed, cool or warm and transport a heavier population, more natural resources, such as fossil-fuels, will be needed and consumed.

Sarah Walpole, a practicing medical doctor who co-authored the study,  worries people from developing nations, who tend to be thinner than those in developed countries, will be most at risk of food insecurity.

“If our global consumption for food or our demand for food are increasing, it going to be those poor populations that feel the impact most,” she says.

One of the areas researchers want to study next is the impact the global child population has on the world’s total human biomass.

Dr. Walpole joins us on this week’s radio edition of “Science World.”  Check out the right column for scheduled air-times or listen to the interview with Dr. Walpole below.

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Other stories we cover on the “Science World” radio program this week include:

• Kenyan conservationists preserve endangered sea turtles
• Ocean levels rising faster on US coasts than elsewhere in the world
• 2009 swine flu deaths were much higher than first reported
• Crisis mapping helps first-responders do their jobs in times of disaster
• Gastric Bypass Surgery, Alcohol Not a Good Mix for Some

(Photo: Nicolas Holzheu via Flickr/Creative Commons)

People can tell how old you are by how you smell, according to new research published in the journal PLoS One.

It appears that “old person smell” some people complain about is for real, that elderly people emit a unique identifying odor.

An elderly individual’s “old person smell”  is actually acknowledged and accepted in cultures throughout the world.  In Japan, there’s a special word, kareishū,  that describes it.

Funny thing though, according to the research, all age groups rated “old person smell” as less intense and less unpleasant than the body odors of middle-aged and young individuals.

Our sense of smell, coupled with our unique body odor, provides us with a very powerful and effective method of non-verbal communication.

The body odors of other, non-human animals, hold a wide assortment of a number of chemical components that can communicate a wide variety of social information.  Scientists say that the intensities of the chemical behind those odors and how they are perceived by others tend to change throughout a person’s life.

“Similar to other animals, humans can extract signals from body odors that allow us to identify biological age, avoid sick individuals, pick a suitable partner and distinguish kin from non-kin,” said Johan Lundström, senior report author, who is a sensory neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Penn.

Scientists have theories regarding how these age-related odors relate to mating and how they help animals choose their suitable mates.  For example, certain scents might suggest that older males are more desirable because they contribute genes that allow offspring to live longer, while older females might be avoided because their reproductive systems are more fragile.

In conducting the research for the study, scientists collected samples of body odor from people in three age groups. Those between 20 and 30 years old were considered to be the young group, those 45 to 55 were the middle-age group and the old age group was made up with people between 75 and 95 years-old, with 12 to 16 people per group.

Each test subject slept in an unscented t-shirt that contained underarm pads for five nights.  These pads where then cut into four pieces and placed into separate glass jars.

A group of 41 young (20 to 30 years old) people served as evaluators and were each given two of the test jars in nine combinations and were asked to identify which of the samples came from older people and evaluate the odors based on  intensity and how pleasant each one was.   These young evaluators were then asked to give an estimate as to the age of the donor of each sample.

The evaluators were able to differentiate people in each of the three donor age groups based strictly on odor.  Odors from the old-age group drove the evaluator’s ability to discern age.  The researcher also said that they found that the young evaluators rated the old-age body odors as being less intense and not as unpleasant as the odors from the young and middle-age groups.

“Elderly people have a discernible underarm odor that younger people consider to be fairly neutral and not very unpleasant,” said Lundström. “This was surprising given the popular conception of old age odor as disagreeable. However, it is possible that other sources of body odors, such as skin or breath, may have different qualities.”

In future studies, the researchers will try to identify the primary biomarkers that evaluators use to identify age-related odors and to determine how the brain is able to identify and measure this information.

(Images: Jossifresco via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons)

People who consider themselves highly religious are less motivated by compassion than non-believers, according to a new study from the University of California at Berkeley

After conducting three experiments, social scientists found that people who considered themselves to be “less religious” were consistently driven by compassion to be more generous to those in need.

As far as those described as being “highly religious”, researchers found that their measure of generosity was largely unrelated to how generous they were.

Compassion is defined by the study “as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.”

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study. “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”

Although the Berkeley study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, examined the connection between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly study the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others.

Researchers involved with the study do theorize however, that a sense of moral obligation, rather than compassion, drive religious people more strongly than those who are more non-religious.

Size matters to female crickets

(Image: Open Clip Art Library)

It turns out the size of a male cricket matters to female crickets, and the male crickets aren’t above faking it to attract a mate, according to a new study from England’s University of Bristol.

To attract females, male crickets sing loud and repetitive songs at night by rubbing their wings together. This sets the wings into a resonant vibration, which produces a loud and intense sound, allowing the female crickets to find them.  The lady crickets also listen for this sound in order to find the hottest guys.

The male cricket mating song contains many cues females can use to assess their desirability. However, most have thought the one attribute that couldn’t be faked or augmented was the sound which indicates the cricket’s size.

Males communicate their size through their mating song.  Lower pitched sounds are usually produced by larger males, while the sounds the smaller guys produce have a higher pitch. So, the females – who prefer larger male crickets – simply listen for those lower-pitched sounds to find the guy cricket of their dreams.

Experts have always thought the smaller males were stuck with making the high pitched, squeaky sounds.  But the study found that tiny and nearly transparent tree crickets, said to be highly unusual creatures, use temperature to change the pitch of their song making them sound much bigger than they really are.

Warmer temperatures made the tree crickets livelier and they called faster, producing sounds in a higher frequency mode. However, when it was cooler, the crickets behaved in the opposite manner, producing lower-pitched sounds making them sound much bigger than they really were, allowing the little guys to attract females.

Speaking more than one language fine-tunes hearing and enhances attention

(Image: Flickr/Creative Commons)

Speaking more than one language can enhance attention and working memory, according to a new study from Northwestern University, by fine tuning a person’s auditory nervous system, allowing them to manipulate verbal input.

The study’s research, led by Northwestern University’s bilingualism expert Viorica Marian and auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus, found that speaking more than one language changes how the nervous system responds to sound.

“People do crossword puzzles and other activities to keep their minds sharp,” Marian said. “But the advantages we’ve discovered in dual language speakers come automatically simply from knowing and using two languages. It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound.”

The researchers, working with 23 bilingual (English and Spanish speaking) teenagers along with 25 teens who only spoke English, recorded their subjects brain-stem responses to complex speech sounds under loud and quiet conditions.

Both groups had the same response when the listening conditions were quiet.  But, when it wasn’t so quiet, and there was a bit of background noise, the researchers found that the brains of the bilingual teens were much better a picking up and detecting speech sounds.

“Bilinguals are natural jugglers,” said Marian. “The bilingual juggles linguistic input and, it appears, automatically pays greater attention to relevant versus irrelevant sounds. Rather than promoting linguistic confusion, bilingualism promotes improved ‘inhibitory control,’ or the ability to pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others.”

View of a section of Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator from above (Photo: DOE/Fermilab)

The search for the mysterious sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs boson may soon be over.

Two teams at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory report they’ve seen hints of a Higgs boson and that the results of their experimentation are consistent with those conducted with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

A few months ago, two independent teams of scientists, working with the LHC at CERN, announced they have a good idea where the Higgs boson might be found and that a discovery could happen sometime in 2012.

The two teams from the U.S. Department of Energy made their findings by examining extensive data from Fermi’s Tevatron accelerator, which has since been shut down.

“The end game is approaching in the hunt for the Higgs boson,” said Jim Siegrist, DOE associate director of Science for High Energy Physics. “This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent measurements in the quest to understand the building blocks of nature.”

Stay tuned – will we soon have an exciting conclusion in the quest for the Higgs boson?

>>> Read more…

When it comes to social media, a picture is worth 1,000 words

Having fun with friends (Photo: orangeek via Flickr/Creative Commons)

If you post the right profile photo at your favorite social media site, the accompanying text  really doesn’t matter, according to a new study from the US mid-west state of Ohio.

Researchers have found your profile photo  already tells visitors all they need to know to form an impression of you.

In other words,  a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

A group of college students was shown four phony Facebook profiles. Each included a photo and written autobiographical sketch.

One of the profiles showed a photo of someone socializing with friends along with the text – “I’m happiest hanging out with a big group of friends.”

Another profile had a picture of a person sitting alone on a park bench with the text, “I’m happiest curled up in my room with a good book.”  The two other profiles mixed the photo impression with the text statement.

The researchers wanted to discover whether the photo or the text helped the viewer decide whether the person was an extrovert or an introvert. And the results showed that the photo was indeed most important.

If a person was perceived to an extrovert in the profile picture, the test subjects assumed that they were, despite what the  accompanying text communicated.

The study is headed by Brandon Van Der Heide, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, who says, “Photos seem to be the primary way we make impressions of people on social networking sites.”

>>> Red more…

California lab working on new radiation contamination treatment

A baby born four days after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, is tested for possible nuclear radiation at a local evacuation center. (REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

As we close in on the one-year anniversary of the Japan earthquake, which triggered a tsunami and resulting nuclear crisis, the U.S. Department of Energy has announced its scientists are working on a new, more effective radiation decontamination treatment, which can be quickly administered in the form of a pill.

Last year, with the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant nearing meltdown stage and rates of radiation rapidly increasing, Japanese officials needed to quickly develop ways to treat possibly thousands of people for nuclear radiation contamination. But their solutions were limited.

Current treatment methods are considered outdated and limited in scope.  The only chemical agent now available for decontamination is a compound known as DTPA, which must be administered intravenously and, even then, only partially removes some of the deadly radioactive chemical elements which pose the greatest health threats to people.

Officials at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, say the new pills being developed would excrete about 90 percent of the most serious deadly radiation contaminants within 24 hours.

Taking one pill daily for two weeks should be enough to remove virtually all of those contaminants from a person’s system.

>>> Read more…

Chimpanzees police officers keep the peace

A gathering of chimpanzees (Photo: Klaus Post via Flickr/Creative Commons)

It turns out that humans aren’t the only living creatures who turn to law enforcement to help maintain peace and order.

A new study reveals that our evolutionary cousin, the chimpanzee, also takes advantage of an uninvolved third party to keep the peace and help mediate conflicts.

The study’s authors say this behavior can be taken as an early evolutionary form of morality.

Study leaders, Carel van Schaik and Claudia Rudolf von Rohrthe, both anthropologists from the University of Zurich, say their research confirms chimpanzees impartially intervene in resolve conflicts in order to guarantee peace and stability within their communities.

Van Schaik and von Rohrthe say this activity and involvement exhibits pro-social behavior based on an interest in community concern.

The researchers found that this policing activity was rare and is usually done by high-ranking members of a chimpanzee group or community.

They also found that these arbiters appeared to be more willing to impartially get involved with mediating a conflict if the dispute involved several quarrelers, probably because such conflicts are more likely to jeopardize group peace.

“The interest in community concern that is highly developed in us humans and forms the basis for our moral behavior is deeply rooted. It can also be observed in our closest relatives,” says von Rohr.

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