Science News for Writers

I came across this study four days ago, and haven't posted it because it really surprised me, and I wanted to think it through a little.  In short, this innovative research finds that our brains appear to be hardwired to believe in life before birth and after death.  Not based on evidence or religious belief, mind you.  But an intuition present in the youngest of us, children. I like to think I'm rational, but. . . For years I scoffed at stories friends told of seeing ghosts, until I had two experiences with something that made me wonder what I had plainly seen and heard. I've always thought ESP and precognitive recognition where, well, questionable at best.  Until, I had several experiences that shook my skepticism. These experiences haven't changed my thinking as much as opened me up to other possibilities or explanations.  To at least consider them. After all, physicists and mathematicians tell us there is convincing evidence that there are eleven d...

A ccording to a new study by researchers at the University of Montreal, nightmares have greater emotional impact than bad dreams do, and fear is not always a factor. In fact, it is mostly absent in bad dreams and in a third of nightmares. What is felt, instead, is sadness, confusion, guilt, disgust, etc. For their analysis of 253 nightmares and 431 bad dreams, researchers obtained the narratives of nearly 10,000 dreams. Suggested Reading Click on image "Physical aggression is the most frequently reported theme in nightmares. Moreover, nightmares become so intense they will wake you up. Bad dreams, on the other hand, are especially haunted by interpersonal conflicts," write Geneviève Robert and Antonio Zadra, psychology researchers at the Université de Montréal, in the last issue of Sleep. "Death, health concerns and threats are common themes in nightmares," says Geneviève Robert, first author of the article, which formed part of her doctoral thesis. "B...

Cueva de El Mirón in the Rio Asón valley of eastern Cantabria, Spain. The cave opening is about 260 metres above sea level. No, I'm not obsessing about our human ancestors.  Reading the scientific press I've notice that stories seem to run in cycles, and for the last few days most of the research reports that a writer might find interesting have been about our most ancient ancestors. To see or to be seen? This is the question that humans inhabiting the Cantabrian coast of Spain during the Palaeolithic era had to ask themselves. Suggested Reading Click on image "We discovered that the nomad hunters and gatherers that inhabited these lands between 17,000 and 10,700 years ago swapped caves and refuges in the middle of hillsides or at high altitude for others in the depths of valleys and at the bottom of hills," explains Alejandro García Moreno from the University of Cantabria, the main author of the study. The oldest sites tend to be located on conica...

  Image courtesy of Weizmann Institute of Science Qesem Cave near present-day Rosh Ha'ayin, Israel.   Upper left: Infrared spectrum of the grey sediments, right, showing that the dominant material is calcite, the mineral of which the wood ash is composed. Lower left: Photograph of the cave during excavation; arrow pointing to the hearth. Upper right: micro-morphological image of the grey sediment showing dark grey particles and patches corresponding to the remains of wood ash. Lower right: Scan of a micro-morphological, thin section showing the layered burnt bones (yellow, brown and black fragments), intermixed with grey sediments. H umans, by most estimates, first used fire over a million years ago*. But when did we really begin to control fire and use it for their daily needs? That question -- one which is central to the subject of the rise of human culture -- is still hotly debated. Suggested Reading Click on image A team of Israeli scientists recently dis...

January 26, 2014 Dear Ms. Auel: We all know what a stickler you are for thorough and accurate research, so I think it appropriate to drop you a (public) note about new research out of Spain that concludes:   7,000 Years Ago European hunter-gatherers had Blue Eyes but Dark Skin. So the Cro-Magnon characters in your series, Earth's Children, which is set 25,000 years ago, may have had blue eyes, but today, they would probably be described as black as the DNA that controls color of their skin is African.  Not to say that this changes anything but the descriptions of the Cro-Magnon folks, a minor point really. Who knows what color the Neandertals were.  Probably black as well, but until this is proved, we can only speculate.  I enjoy your books and marvel at the detail while you carried on an interesting story line. Just thought you'd want to know. Respectfully, Jim La Braña 1, the name given a 7,000 years old individual from the Mesolithic, wh...

Source:  huffingtonpost.co.uk Convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy asked for fried chicken, shrimp, chips and strawberries for his last meal before execution . Those who deny guilt are 2.7 times more likely to decline a last meal than those who admit guilt. Suggested Reading Click on image Can last meals reveal more about individuals on death row than their taste preference? Some have argued there is significance embedded in death row last meal decisions. Famously, Ricky Ray Rector asked to save his untouched pecan pie for after his execution. This request sparked significant discussion about Rector's competency -- on the basis of his food request. Similarly, in a documentary film about last suppers, Swedish artists Bigert and Bergstrom claimed a connection between whether or not an individual chooses to have a last meal and his or her guilt. In each case, there is an assertion that last meals are relevant to the legitimacy of an execution. It is these signals ...

(Credit: Illustration: Annica Thomsson) Is the English term alcohol and and the Arabic word kohl related? Yes.  Our word is a direct adoption from the Arabic  al-kuhl.  Now a major project is underway to create an  etymology of the language.      As a reader I've noticed a change in where many popular works are set - you've probably seen this as well.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the growth of terrorist groups, more and more western literature takes place in the Arabic speaking world.  I've often wondered how much many of these authors actually know about that part of the world. A key to understanding any culture is to study the language, something difficult at best since, unlike English and many other world-wide languages, there is no standard etymology of  Arabic, no single source one could visit for definitions and history of the language.  That is now changing.  More below: The culture and history of Ar...

Men forgetting anniversaries or birth dates is a cliché of cliché's in life as in fiction.  Unlike many givens based on common experience, this tendency is now validated by research out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  To put it in simplest terms, whether due to hereditary or enculturation, men are far more forgetful than women.  Much more forgetful.  Much, much more.  All  men.  Across the board. The perfect gift for the man in your life. Before you kill him. This explains why we men can never find our keys.  It's a wonder that we can find our way home after work.  Yet I can tell you who threw the key block on Cowboy's defensive tackle Jethro Pugh that sprang Packer quarterback Bart Starr for the winning touchdown in the historic 1966 Ice Bowl football game.  Center Kenny Bowman and right guard Jerry Kramer.  Go figure.  Where are my car keys?  Another question. What were we talking ...

Source:  Guardian.UK A victim unknown the past 83 years was "smashed over the head and burned to death" in this Morris Minor.  In 1931 Alfred Rouse, who apparently killed in an effort to fake his own death, was convicted of the murder and hanged. . . but took the victim's name to his grave. When Dorothy Sayers wrote the Lord Peter story, "In the Teeth of Evidence," published in 1939, she used a similar plot, which, of course, Lord Peter solves with the help of dental records, a fairly new technique at the time.  This real mystery has lingered for 83 years.  Not of who committed the crime, but who the victim was.  This report details the latest, published January 20th. *  *  *  *  * Recommended Reading Click on Image A forensic team from the University of Leicester and Northumbria University has spearheaded an investigation to try and identify the victim of a gruesome murder case from 1930. Results from DNA analysis have con...

Investigators show that adolescent smoking would be reduced by 18 percent if smoking in PG-13 movies is eliminated . I can hear some of my screenwriter friends responding, "but smoking is a part of this character.  It shows this, that and the other thing about. . ." Recommended Reading Four Star on Goodreads Click on image for more That may be true.  But as authors and screenwriters, don't we also have some social responsibility for how we frame our characters and the actions we have them take?  I could take the stance that if you don't how to make a character or your story interesting without stooping to violence, drinking, drugging, and smoking, how good a writer are you?  These are unnatural activities that project a wrong message. (Relationships, including sex, are natural, and are fair game for exploration.) Here's the story The connection between smoking in films and its influence on adolescent behavior is well established by research and its imp...

Much has been written about the competition between print and digital media, and how difficult it is for magazines to compete and even survive. Recommended Reading Click on image As it is work, often a lot of work, to find a magazine that will print your fiction, non-fiction or poetry, wouldn't it be nice if you, the writer, had a simple way to judge whether a print magazine will survive? Look for print magazines with companion websites New research from the University of Toronto Scarborough offers just such a method.  As researchers conclude, there is a ray of hope for magazines that do it right. While print media continue to suffer at the hands of their online counterparts, researchers conclude that print magazines with companion websites are able to attract more advertising dollars. "Targeting is as important as ever," says Ambarish Chandra, Assistant Professor at UTSC's Department of Management. In a study of magazines in Germany, Prof. Chandra and Pro...

In the not too distant future you may hear the hum of a drone's rotors as it descends upon you and be filled with a sense of relief, not panic. After all, it's coming to save you, not harm you. Suggested Reading Click on image Research at the University of Cincinnati could soon enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) -- similar to U.S. military drones patrolling the skies of Afghanistan -- to track down missing persons on search-and-rescue missions, to penetrate curtains of smoke during wildfire suppression or possibly even to navigate urban landscapes on delivery runs for online retailers like Amazon. And it all could be done autonomously with a human acting only as a supervisor. "Drones have gotten a very bad rap for various reasons," says Kelly Cohen, associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UC. "But our students see that unmanned systems can have a positive impact on society." In this study, researchers used sp...

The brakes of your car fail suddenly and on your path are five people who will certainly be hit and killed. You can steer, but if you do another pedestrian will find himself on your course. Just one. What do you do: do you take action and kill one person or do you do nothing and cause five people to die? Suggested reading Click on image This is an example of a "moral dilemma," the type of problem cognitive psychologists use for studying the cerebral foundations of moral behavior. Obviously, such experiments can only be conducted in a hypothetical manner, and not "in the field," but could this limitation have led cognitive psychologists to incorrect theoretical interpretations? An alternative to "real" reality is virtual reality: a group of researchers has carried out experiments involving virtual reality and found that human behavior might be very different from what is seen in conventional tests relying on moral dilemmas. In fact, with virtual re...

" A very short visit to (a high crime) neighborhood appeared to have much the same effects on trust and paranoia as long-term residence there ." In real life, members of the police such as detectives and other people who visit high crime neighborhoods on a regular basis seem more cynical and even a little paranoid compared to those of us who rarely enter the seedier parts of our cities, a fact mirrored in fiction and film. Suggested Reading Click on image Now research in the UK demonstrates that anyone spending as little as 45 minutes in a high-crime, deprived neighborhood has measurable effects on people's trust in others and their feelings of paranoia.  If anyone's attitudes can change with as little as 45 minutes exposure, then the effect on regular visitors will be greater. Researchers in the UK studied two neighborhoods of the same city only a few kilometres apart, one economically deprived and relatively high in crime, and the other affluent and rel...

Source: onthejob.45things.com   Cell phone and instant messaging addictions are driven by materialism and impulsiveness and can be compared to consumption pathologies like compulsive buying and credit card misuse, experts say .  Wow, really?  Have we become addicted to our cell phones?  Can it really be?  Oops, gotta a call coming in.  Just a moment. . . Okay,  Just a friend asking what I'm doing right now. Recommended Reading Miss Manners on Business Etiquette. Click on image Where were we?  Oh, cell phone addiction.  According to a 2012 study out of Baylor University, we are and more to the point, this is driven by "materialism and impulsiveness." Worse yet, this addiction can be "compared to pathologies like compulsive buying and credit card misuse."  Pathologies.  Whoof. "Cell phones are a part of our consumer culture," said study author James Roberts, Ph.D., professor of marketing and the Ben H. Williams ...