Do you feel angry and frustrated sitting in your windowless cubicle grinding away at a dead-end job? Recent research (published in the journal Environment and Behavior) indicates there may be an easy way to brighten your mood, at least if you're a man. Hang a few art posters.
Researchers at Texas A&M University conducted an experiment in a simulated office. Participants were told that the researchers were investigating performance on a variety of computer tasks. In reality, the computer tasks were designed to "provoke stress and anger." The question was whether the artwork hanging on the wall (abstract art, nature posters, abstract and nature posters, or no art) would modify people's moods. The conclusion:
We found that nature and abstract art posters have a significant influence on state anger and stress for male participants but not for female participants. Male participants experienced less state anger when there are art posters on the wall of the office setting than when no art posters are present. They also experienced less stress when there were mixed abstract and nature art posters or all nature art posters.
It's not clear why men are calmed by wall art, but not women. Maybe men are just simpler creatures.
Given the recent startup of the Large Hadron Collider, it seems timely to remember the tale of Anatoli Bugorski.
On July 13, 1978 Bugorski leaned down to check a part in a U-70 synchrotron particle accelerator. He saw a brilliant flash of light. He had just become the first man to be shot through the head by a particle beam. Miraculously, he survived, although the left side of his face was paralyzed. The beam was highly radioactive, but also very focused, and therefore the radiation didn't disperse into his body. More details at Forgetomori.
What would happen if someone were hit by the LHC's particle beam? I doubt they'd fare as well as Bugorski. To put its power in perspective, Scientific American calculated that it could defrost a pizza in 30 nanoseconds (billionths of a second), assuming the beam energy could be spread across the entire surface of the pizza.
The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva may not have caused the end of the world, but some believe it's attracting extraterrestrial visitors. The Louth Leader is on top of this important story:
sightings of 'orange lights' UFOs near Louth have been pouring into the Leader – with some wondering if recent UFO activity is connected to the Large Hadron Collider experiment in Geneva. A man called Anthony from Wales emailed a similar account of what he saw:
"I was having a cigarette outside my front door on Saturday at around 9pm and I looked over the roof tops and saw two orange-red glowing lights coming from over the hill where I live... We live in a little village in Swansea and after 47 years of looking up at night this is the first UFO I have ever seen."
He added: "Could it be something to do with that experiment they are doing under ground in Geneva letting out pockets of energy or something?"
To be fair to "Anthony from Wales," it's not clear to me whether he's suggesting that the collider is attracting ETs, or if it's releasing visible flashes of energy into the atmosphere. Not that one option would be any more logical than the other.
The most comprehensive weather study ever has confirmed what we all suspected - the weather really is worse at weekends.
Meteorologists at the University of Karlsruhe evaluated 6.3 million pieces of climate data from across Europe between 1991 and 2005.
Their conclusion: On weekends the weather is worse than on weekdays.
But even if the weather had been good, we would have suffered from this campfire phenomenon. As we are told in The Complete Book of Fire by Buck Tilton:
Q: Why does the smoke from a campfire seem to blow into your face no matter where you sit or how many times you change position around the fire?
A: Your body blocks the flow of fresh air drawn to the flames. You are then creating a low air pressure area with your body and the warm smoke moves toward the lowest air pressure. With no wind, no matter where you sit in relation to the fire, the smoke will be drawn toward you.
Here's another strange book I purchased but have not yet read. The real author is Joseph K. Heydon, using the pen-name of Hal Trevarthen. Time has swallowed up all details related to Heydon and his book, leaving us only with the text itself.
Here's the description from the amazingly ugly dustjacket.
Here's the title page, followed by a sample of the actual bafflegab inside.
My high-school pal Sherry Mowbray, who grew up to be a top-flight biologist, points me with glee to this video illustrating how powerful is the slime secreted by the awesome hagfish.
What famous Victorian-era scientist does this passage describe? (Follow the "extended" link for the answer.)
He suffered from incessant retching or vomiting, usually brought on by fatigue; and from painful bouts of wind that churned around after meals and obliged him to sit quietly in a private room until his body behaved more politely. Reading between the lines, his guts were noisy and smelly. "I feel nearly sure that the air is generated somewhere lower down than stomach," he told one doctor plaintively in 1865, "and as soon as it regurgitates into the stomach the discomfort comes on." He was equally forthright with his cousin...: "all excitement & fatigue brings on such dreadful flatulence that in fact I can go nowhere." When he did go somewhere, he needed privacy after meals, "for, as you know, my odious stomach requires that."
He also had trouble with his bowels, frequently suffering from constipation and vulnerable to the obsession with regularity that stalked most Victorians. He developed crops of boils in what he called "perfectly devilish attacks" on his backside, making it impossible to sit upright, and occasional eczema. There were headaches and giddiness. He probably had piles as well.
In this NEW YORK TIMES article from today, scientists reveal their latest findings about which brain cells are excited during the recall of memories, and how closely memory tallies with literally re-enacting the events. And they use a tantalizing example:
After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report “what comes to mind.” The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.
Why is Homer Simpson singled out as the test case? Obviously because the human brain has specific neurons that emulate or actually induce and compel Homer-Simpson-style behavior.
And there in a nutshell you have the whole basis for ninety-nine percent of the contents of WEIRD UNIVERSE.
Do you feel angry and frustrated sitting in your windowless cubicle grinding away at a dead-end job? Recent research (published in the journal Environment and Behavior) indicates there may be an easy way to brighten your mood, at least if you're a man. Hang a few art posters.
Posted By: Paul | Date: Thu Sep 11, 2008 | Comments (11) 
Category: Animals, Photography and Photographers, Science, Books