Human Behavior, features and articles | Educational Science

Nov 30, 2013

Anti-Science Riders Lurk in Pending Farm Bill (Op-Ed)

Celia Wexler is a senior Washington representative for the Scientific Integrity Initiative at UCS. An award-winning journalist, Wexler authored Out of the News: Former Journalists Discuss a Profession in Crisis (McFarland, 2012). This article is adapted from a post on the UCS blog The Equation. There's an old and well...

Nov 30, 2013

8 Ways Magic Mushrooms Explain Santa Story

The story of Santa and his flying reindeer can be traced to an unlikely source: hallucinogenic or magic mushrooms, according to one theory. Santa is a modern counterpart of a shaman, who consumed mind-altering plants and fungi to commune with the spirit world, said John Rush, an anthropologist and instructor...

Oct 31, 2013

Pansexual: A 'New' Sexual Orientation?

Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual — these are terms with which most people are familiar, but they aren't the only sexual orientations that exist in today's world. Pansexual, a relatively new category of sexual identity, is characterized by physical or romantic attraction to others, regardless of their gender identity or biological sex....

Oct 31, 2013

Who Killed JFK? TV Show Looks at New Evidence

Nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, debate and conspiracy theories linger over how he was killed, and who exactly was behind it. In a new television special on PBS' science documentary show NOVA, a team of experts look at the assassination in a new light, in some...

Oct 31, 2013

Humanity in the Age of Frankenstein's Cat (Op-Ed)

Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of the world's pioneering cognitive ethologists, a Guggenheim Fellow, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This essay is adapted from one that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today....

Sep 30, 2013

Government Shutdown Delivers Blow to BRAIN Initiative

In another casualty of the government shutdown, activities related to Obama's $100 million BRAIN initiative, due to launch in 2014, have ground to a halt. The Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative is an ambitious plan to map the human brain, from the level of individual cells up...

Sep 30, 2013

Shutdown Science: Furloughed Workers Feel the Burden of Boredom

Jennifer Wade is bored. A program director for the National Science Foundation, Wade normally spends her workdays managing grant proposals and wrangling the reviewers who will decide what research gets federal funding. But with the federal government shutdown pending a Congressional budget agreement, Wade is stuck at home — and...

Sep 30, 2013

Delayed Gratification – How the Hippocampus Helps Us Hold Off (Op-Ed)

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Would you prefer a beer right now or a bottle of champagne next week? So begins an interesting new study published today in the journal PloS Biology. Of course these...

Sep 30, 2013

How to Make a Zombie (Seriously)

The slouching, flesh-eating zombie has become one of the most in-vogue creatures in current TV and movie offerings, appearing in films like World War Z and in the AMC series The Walking Dead. Most rational people scoff at the suggestion that zombies are real, but a number of respected medical...

Aug 31, 2013

US Air Force Almost Detonated Atomic Bomb Over North Carolina

The U.S. Air Force came a hair's breadth from detonating two hydrogen bombs that were accidentally released over Goldsboro, N.C. on Jan. 23, 1961, according to newly declassified documents obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request filed by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser. The airplane, which took off from Seymour...

Jul 31, 2013

Can You Calculate the Impact of Cheating in Sports? (Op-Ed)

Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies. This article was adapted from one that first appeared in U.S. News & World Report. Nesbit contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. First, there was Barry Bonds. Then, there was Lance Armstrong....

Jul 31, 2013

Did Woman's 'Visions' Locate Missing Boy?

The search for a missing 11-year-old California boy came to a tragic end recently when the body of Terry Smith Jr. was found. The boy's mother reported him missing July 7, and his body was found three days later not far from his home in the rural town of Menifee,...

Jul 31, 2013

Baby Boom: Religious Women Having More Kids

After a drop in fertility during the global recession of 2007-08, women — especially religious women — are having more babies again, a new forecast suggests. The total fertility rate in the United States is predicted to climb from a 25-year low of 1.89 children per woman in 2012 to...

Jul 31, 2013

Senator's Policies Leave People and the Planet in Bad Health (Op-Ed)

Elliott Negin is the director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). This article is adapted from one that appeared on the Huffington Post on Aug. 22, 2012. Negin contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Virtually all U.S. medical-school students swear fealty...

Jul 31, 2013

Humans Can Learn to Echolocate

Blind humans have been known to use echolocation to see their environment, but even sighted people can learn the skill, a new study finds. Study participants learned to echolocate, or glean information about surroundings by bouncing sound waves off surfaces, in a virtual environment. Although the human brain normally suppresses...