| Renewable energy also better for workers' health Mining is the second most dangerous occupation in the U.S., averaging roughly 27 deaths for every 100,000 workers per year. That's nearly nine times higher than the overall fatality rate for U.S. industry as a whole, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau ( pdf ). [More] rss.sciam.com |
How City Noise is Shaping Bird Song Did you know birds sing in dialect ? They do. The song of a great tit from the countryside is a far cry from that of his city cousin. And some song dialects can change nearly as fast as human slang--the Indigo Bunting changes tune from year to year. To investigate the cultural evolution of such songs researchers have recently completed a study of adjacent White-crowned sparrow dialects from 1969 to 1998 in San Francisco. Biologist David Luther of the University of Maryland and ornithologist Luis Baptista of the California Academy of Sciences hypothesized that the pressures of urban noise would tend, over time, to eliminate the lower ranges of the bird's song and cause the sparrows to prefer to learn songs at the higher range. Simply put, birds that sang too low would be drowned out by rumbling buses, honking cars, or other typical city noises. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Ten Science Letdowns of the New Millennium [Slide Show] Ever since the wildly optimistic projections of progress from the mid-20th century--robot companions, extra-orbital sojourns , 200-year life spans--scientists have been gently dialing back the public's expectations. So, perhaps it is no sobering surprise that many of the hopeful predictions for scientific advancements for the new millennium have yet to come to pass. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Playground ‘Jail,’ Drawing Outrage, Gets a Face-Lift Residents of a housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant see an insult in a jungle gym erected six years ago. nytimes.com |
Slackers Better at "Fun" Activities Every teacher knows there are students who always seem to be a step ahead of everyone else. And then there are the slackers, who are just as intelligent but who don’t seem to mind being mediocre. The difference seems obvious: some people are inherently motivated to succeed, whereas others simply don’t care. But a study conducted by psychologists William Hart, now at the University of Alabama, and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois suggests otherwise. Simply reframing a task as “fun” caused the underachievers to outperform those who usually excelled--indicating that the way an educator describes an activity might have a powerful influence on how well students do on it.The researchers first screened participants of comparable academic ability, categorizing them as interested in achievement or interested in fun. They then had the students look at a computer screen that flashed words related to high achievement (for instance, “win,” “excel” and “master”). In subsequent tests of ability such as a word-search puzzle, the participants who were interested in achievement performed significantly better than did those who were not. [More] University of Alabama - Word search - United States - Education - Musical ensemble rss.sciam.com |