| Groups as Therapy?--Socializing and Mental Health (preview) You have turned up for your annual medical checkup. The doctor has taken your blood pressure, inquired about your diet and exercise patterns, and asked whether you smoke. Then come some rather pointed questions about your social life: Do you have many friends? Do you socialize? Which groups do you belong to? How diverse are they? How important are these groups to you?Even though these questions are unexpected, you go through the long list of your active memberships: your book club, volleyball team, hiking group, work colleagues, and so on. Your doctor congratulates you and says that you are doing exactly the right things. You even learn that because you belong to so many social groups you should not worry if you skip your gym visit every now and then. [More] rss.sciam.com |
No Kidding: Getting Goats to Graze on Tinder Puts a Damper on Fires Dear EarthTalk: I heard that goats are being used to prevent some of those catastrophic fires that seem to happen increasingly. What’s the story with that? --Ali B., New Canaan, CT [More] rss.sciam.com |
Will U.S. Government Crackdown on "Greenwashing"? The Federal Trade Commission is expected to crack down on " greenwashing " when it updates its environmental marketing guidelines for the first time since 1998.The agency's Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims , or Green Guides, define terms such as "recyclable" and "biodegradable" and explain how businesses should back up environmental assertions. Though FTC cannot force businesses to adopt greener practices, Section 5 of the FTC Act authorizes the agency to intervene when businesses are misrepresenting their practices to clients -- in other words, turning greenwashing into fraud. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Uncanny Sight in the Blind (preview) The video my colleagues and I shot is amazing. A blind man is making his way down a long corridor strewn with boxes, chairs and other office paraphernalia. The man, known to the medical world as TN, has no idea the obstacles are there. And yet he avoids them all, here sidling carefully between a wastepaper basket and the wall, there going around a camera tripod, all without knowing he has made any special maneuvers. TN may be blind, but he has “blindsight”--the remarkable ability to respond to what his eyes can detect without knowing he can see anything at all. [To see the film of the experiment, go to www.ScientificAmerican.com/may2010/blindsight .]TN’s blindness is of an extremely rare type, caused by two strokes he suffered in 2003. The strokes injured an area at the back of his brain called the primary visual cortex, first on his left hemisphere and five weeks later on the right. His eyes remained perfectly healthy, but with his visual cortex no longer receiving the incoming signals he became completely blind. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Deepwater site shifts from gusher to underwater laboratory BP's Gulf of Mexico gusher may finally be dead, but its months-long release of oil and gas has created quite an in situ oceanic laboratory that scientists will be studying for years. Even as scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) quibble with those from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts over the existence of oil plumes , a team of researchers has recently returned from the Deepwater site with what they hope is a treasure trove of information about how large quantities of hydrocarbons behave deep beneath the ocean surface. [More] National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution - Gulf of Mexico - Massachusetts - BP rss.sciam.com |