Human Behavior, features and articles | Educational Science

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...

Jun 30, 2013

Gateway to the Plains | Wallpaper

This wallpaper shows Pecos National Historical Park in New Mexico. In the midst of piñon, juniper, and ponderosa pine woodlands in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains not far from Santa Fe, the remains of an Indian pueblo stand as a meaningful reminder of a people who once prevailed here. Now...

Jun 30, 2013

Coldhearted Psychopaths Feel Empathy Too

Psychopaths may be capable of empathizing with others in some situations, a new study has found. The study's researchers investigated the brain activity of psychopathic criminals in the Netherlands. As expected, the psychopaths' brains showed less empathy than mentally healthy individuals while watching others experience pain or affection. But when...

Jun 30, 2013

What Is Pink Noise?

Pink noise is a color of noise, not entirely unlike white noise. Both white noise and pink noise contain all the frequencies that are audible to humans — 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz — but the way their signal power is distributed among those frequencies differs. White noise has equal...

May 31, 2013

Photos Could Prove Amelia Earhart Lived as Castaway

An array of detailed aerial photos of the remote island where Amelia Earhart may have survived for a time as a castaway, has resurfaced in a New Zealand museum archive, raising hopes for new photographic evidence about the fate of the legendary aviator. Found by Matthew O'Sullivan, keeper of photographs...

Apr 30, 2013

Science Experiment Gone Wrong Ends in Felony Charge

An apparent science experiment gone wrong ended in arrest in Bartow, Florida on Friday, as a mixture of household chemicals in a water bottle caused a minor explosion on school grounds. According to the Miami New Times, 16-year-old Kiera Wilmot was curious to see what would happen if she mixed...