| The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world. |
| They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money. They invented a disease so that they could sell the cure. |
| Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—Read more at www.newyorker.com |
US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday. |
He cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere. |
Only four positions were found possible without “mechanical assistance”. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag. |
Mr Kohler says: “One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.” |
| he Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place.Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
And after that blame has been passed, look again. In sci-fi, ideas often take precedence over form, which can be a great advantage. It is, after all, a literature of ideas—wild ideas that infect the world with wonder, speculation, and the shock of estrangement. On my sagging bookshelf of paperbacks, I have androids, floating ecosystems in space, secret drugs, tyrannical computers, and body-snatchers. I have one million years of the future, sentient clouds, and talking newts. I have entire experimental worlds, rich with notions that are as independent from the mainstream lexicon as they are unencumbered by its literary norms. |
| Isaac Asimov observed that, “science-fiction writers and readers didn’t put a man on the Moon all by themselves, but they created a climate in which the goal of putting a man on the Moon became acceptable.” |
| t’s a living, breathing tradition that informs the very world it critiques, inventing new myths, words, and realities just as we catch up to its old onesRead more at seedmagazine.com |
Areas of their brains that light up in anticipation of using tools like screw-drivers and spanners are activated (No puns intended) Men are more likely to think of women as objects if they have looked at sexy pictures of females beforehand, psychologists said yesterday. Researchers used brain scans to show that when straight men looked at pictures of women in bikinis, areas of the brain that normally light up in anticipation of using tools, like spanners and screwdrivers, were activated. |
“When there are sexualised images in the workplace, it’s hard for people not to think about their female colleagues in those terms. It spills over from the images to the workplace,” she said. |
The brain scans showed that when men saw the images of the women’s bodies, activity increased in part of the brain called the premotor cortex, which is involved in urges to take action. The same area lights up before using power tools to do DIY. “It’s as if they immediately thought to act on theses bodies,” Fiske said. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
| When viewing complex scenes, East Asians attend more to contexts whereas Westerners attend more to objects, reflecting cultural differences in holistic and analytic visual processing styles respectively. This eye-tracking study investigated more specific mechanisms and the robustness of these cultural biases in visual processing when salient changes in the objects and backgrounds occur in complex pictures.Read more at www.plosone.org |
| How do human beings decide when to be selfish or selfless? In this study, we gave testosterone to 25 men to establish its impact on prosocial behaviors in a double-blind within-subjects design. We also confirmed participants’ testosterone levels before and after treatment through blood draws. Using the Ultimatum Game from behavioral economics, we find that men with artificially raised T, compared to themselves on placebo, were 27% less generous towards strangers with money they controlled (95% CI placebo: (1.70, 2.72); 95% CI T: (.98, 2.30)). This effect scales with a man’s level of total-, free-, and dihydro-testosterone (DHT). Men in the lowest decile of DHT were 560% more generous than men in the highest decile of DHT. We also found that men with elevated testosterone were more likely to use their own money punish those who were ungenerous toward them. Our results continue to hold after controlling for altruisRead more at www.plosone.org |
Those are a few of the questions addressed in a trove of history-making papers published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and released in their entirety to celebrate the 350th birthday of the world’s oldest scientific body. |
Can one species be transmuted into another just by swapping their blood? What are those funny little things swimming in my water? Did this Einstein guy get his math right? |
The 60 papers are a testament to human curiosity, and the power of ingenuity and rigorous observation to overcome ignorance. Here’s a few of Wired Science’s favorites: Read more at www.wired.com |
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The talk of depression and prescribing anti-depressants is a conspiracy by the pharma sector to make money
