How fear skews our spatial perception

"Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us," says psychologist Stella Lourenco. By Carol Clark, That snake heading towards you may be further away than it appears. Fear can skew our perception of approaching objects, causing us to underestimate the distance of a threatening one, finds a study published in Current Biology. “Our results show that emotion and perception are not fully dissociable in the mind,” says Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco, co-author of the study. “Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us. This has clear implications for understanding clinical phobias.” Lourenco conducted the research with Matthew Longo, a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London. People generally have a well-developed sense for when objects heading towards them will make contact, including a split-second cushion for dodging or blocking the object, if The more fearful someone reported feeling of spiders, the more they underestimated time-to-collision of a looming spider. necessary. The researchers set  up an experiment to test the effect of fear on the accuracy of that skill. Study participants made time-to-collision judgments of images on a computer screen. The images expanded in size over one second before disappearing, to...

Read More........→October 27, 2012

Global warming – to be or not to be

The UN Climate Change Conference will be kicked off in the capital of Qatar, Doha in late November. The global warming is continuing and no one knows how to stop it. At the same time, some scientists support the idea that there is no need to fight global warming. Experts who are well aware of the caprices of nature have shared their opinions on the scale of the issue at their meetings with our correspondents. By Nikita Sorokin, Global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, which is being emitted into the atmosphere in huge volumes as a result of human activity. At the same time, there is an opinion that people cannot in principle radically influence the planet’s climate, and all talks about warming are a “conspiracy” of alarmists, politicians and industrialists. One can answer the question whether carbon dioxide emissions have an impact on the atmosphere: yes, there is an influence as well as no, the is no impact, head of the laboratory studying global energy problems at the Moscow Power (Electrical) Engineering Institute, Professor Vladimir Klimenko said in an interview with the Voice of Russia correspondent. “Can you imagine that in the past 15 years, emissions to the atmosphere have increased about 20 percent, while the temperature has fallen. What does it mean? This does not mean that emissions have no impact on...

Read More........→October 27, 2012

Dengue fever's growing range and virulence

. Emory disease ecologist Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec writes about the growing threat of the dengue virus, for the journal Future Microbiology: We are still losing our global battle against dengue virus (DENV). After half a century since the beginning of its rampant spread, and despite decades of continued vector control efforts, DENV has re-emerged to become the most important human mosquito-borne viral infection. Currently, approximately 70–100 million cases of classic DENV infection are reported every year (most of them in tropical and subtropical countries), with an estimated 2.1 million cases of life-threatening disease in the form of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever/Dengue Shock Syndrome. Over the last two decades, the number of dengue fever epidemics has increased exponentially, and the dramatic range expansion of the endemic and hyper-endemic areas is indisputable. Moreover, the global incidence of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever and Dengue Shock Syndrome has increased 30-fold since the 1950s, and both severe manifestations are a leading cause of hospitalization in parts of Southeast Asia. Increases in human population, rapid and unplanned urbanization, and human travel have contributed to the resurgence and spread of DENV infections. However, it is the inadequacy of our current tools to combat the virus carrying mosquito vectors...

Read More........→October 27, 2012

Democracy works for Endangered Species Act

The Bald Eagle, a living symbol of democracy as the national bird of the United States, was on the "threatened" list for the lower 48 states until 2007. Photo by Saffron Blaze via Wikipedia Commons. By Carol Clark: When it comes to protecting endangered species, the power of the people is key, an analysis of listings under the U.S. Endangered Species Act finds. The journal Science is publishing the analysis comparing listings of “endangered” and “threatened” species initiated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that administers the Endangered Species Act, to those initiated by citizen petition. “We found that citizens, on average, do a better job of picking species that  are  threatened  than The "threatened" gray wolf. Photo by FWS. does the Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s a really interesting and surprising finding,” says co-author Berry Brosi, a biologist and professor of environmental studies at Emory University. Brosi conducted the analysis withEric Biber, a University of California, Berkeley School of Lawprofessor who specializes in environmental law. Controversy has surrounded the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since it became law nearly 40 years ago. A particular flashpoint is the provision that allows citizens to petition the...

Read More........→October 25, 2012

"Love"...can it be quantified?

"What Science and Philosophy Tell Us About Love":By Massimo Pigliucci, October 2nd, 2012, The Huffington Post Suppose you are in love. More specifically, you have been in love with your partner for a couple of years now, and you are beginning to ask yourself a number of crucial questions: Why do I not feel as head over heel for him as I distinctly remember I used to until recently? Since we have been together for a while now, how should I approach the prospect of a long-term, potentially life-long relationship? At least, you would be asking those questions if you were reflecting on your feelings and on your attitude toward an important person in your life. Traditionally, you had two places to look for meaningful answers: the folk wisdom (a.k.a. "common sense") of your friends and relatives, and religion. I will be blunt here: common sense has so often been proven wrong, or at the very least misleading, that it ought to come with a gigantic warning label. As for religion, well, it mostly boils down to made up stories to justify whatever it is that a given society's commonsense maintains to be true (e.g., that women are intellectually inferior to men, that gay life is an abomination, that slavery is good for the slaves, and so on). What then? Enter what I have come to call "sci-phi," the congruence...

Read More........→October 03, 2012