Science News for Writers

Credit: Bob Elbert, Iowa State University   Iowa State researchers measured brain activity to better understand cybersecurity threats and identify what motivates employees to violate company policy. Scientists are making amazing and scary breakthroughs in predicting who may one day commit a criminal act.  In this study, researchers measured the activity in the brains of test subjects when presented with a variety of situations to see if there are measurable activity differences between people who may or may not commit a crime in the future. Sound like something out of a sci-fi movie? Stephen Spielberg's 2002 film, Minority Report, is based on the idea of being able to predict crime.  In the movie, based on a short story by  Philip K. Dick and adapted into a screenplay by Scott Frank, crime is predicted through the use of three psychic "pre-cogs" who work in unison in "PreCrime", a specialized police department. Without getting into the ...

  Credit: NOAA Map of Bering Sea. The Bering Strait is the  comparatively shallow area between Alaska and Siberia. One of the more interesting arguments in paleontology is between supporters of the theory that the first inhabitants of North American migrated from Asia across the Bering Sea (the majority view), and a small group of researchers who feel that the very first residents came along the edge of the Atlantic ice sheet from Europe. The research reported below focuses on one piece of evidence cited by supporters of the European immigrant theory:  an ancient stone blade recovered off the coast of Virginia in the early 1970s by the crew of the trawler Cinmar that establishes a European presence many thousands of years before Columbus, the Vikings, the Knight's Templar, or Frodo and the Elves. The headline, "Alternate theory of inhabitation of North America disproven,"  appears to me to be an overstatement of the researcher's ...

Credit: Staffan Larsson Ph.D. student Zakaryah Abdulkarim, M.D., shows how to create the illusion of invisibility in the lab (photomontage). Probably the most common cliche' writing teachers use is, "write what you know." Yet some of the greatest fiction ever written for any media is based on invisibility, a phenomena no one has yet to experience, as far as we know.  H.G. Wells Invisible Man and Frodo wearing the great ring in the Trilogy involve someone being invisible and how would someone experience that?  Yet the author's imagination fleshed out the experience based on conjecture in a way that it was believable. It's especially interesting that this is another case of a science fiction writer predicted future reality.  In the longer report, the authors note that, "In H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel The Invisible Man (1897), the protagonist invents a method to change a body’s refractory index to that of air, rendering it invisible, and t...

A recent post in SNfW received some heated reader criticism for publishing "bad science" with what some felt were conclusions that perpetuated a sexist viewpoint. Stereotypes, like clichés, are useful in our day to day lives.  We simply do not have the time or mental resources to get to know every person we meet or see and to make value judgments based on that individual's personality.  In the movies, television or the theater, the writer doesn't have the time to flesh out every character in a story, so we all use stereotypes to help the reader or viewer understand what a character is about and the role they play. We share stereotypes about good guys, bad guys, gang members, clowns, politicians, welfare recipients, bureaucrats, and on and on.  It helps us organize and understand the world around us.  We see a white hat on the screen, it's a good guy.  We see a black hat, it's a bad guy. For a writer, stereotypes save a lot of ba...

This is a test to see the effect of two different headlines on the same story posted to the Stage32 screenwriting stream.  One, I'd like to see the difference in the number of clicks, and, second, see what comments the posts gets.    The first headline was an information headline; this one plays on people's desire for gain.   Before you became outraged about the research supporting a sexist stereotype, I know that.  I didn't do the research or write the report. To me, this report explores how men in particular react to what can be considered a sexist technique.  It points out that for the most part, people are sexist or respond in a sexist manner without being aware of it.    Should you, the writer and producer of a project, use the main technique presented?  You have to make that call yourself.  I don't presume to tell anyone how to behave.   Please feel to leave a comment.   Her...

Credit: Raihani et al./Current Biology 2015 In competitive helping donations made to online fundraising pages, males respond competitively to donations made by other males, but only when giving to an attractive female fundraiser. Female donors do not compete in this way. These findings suggest a role for sexual selection in explaining conspicuous generosity. A recent SNfW post, Would You Kill Hitler if You Could? Men Say Yes. Women Say No. Why? , has drawn more than a few comments on Stage32, a social network website for people in the film industry.  Here are just a few of the comments: "Even that title is pigeon-holing people. Some men say Yes, Some women say no... although I read the link and it is wrong on so many levels."  ~ S.B. "The gender stereotyping does a disservice to men and women." ~ K.R. "This article takes an exaggerated, grandiose, hypothetical situation with layers and layers of complexities, and whittles it all down in...

Factoids guaranteed to make even the strongest say, "Huh?"  How to Build a Perfect Human Pyramid, Six Tiers High This is knowledge that could come in handy at your next family picnic.  Or office party.  Or while cheering for your favorite sports team. You never know, right?  The worst case would be trying to settle a bar bet.  Oy, the humanity.   Credit: © Andres Rodriguez / Fotolia   A Three-tier human pyramid.   University of Leicester physics students calculated how to build a perfect human pyramid -- and found that the best model is a group of men, women and children with an average weight of 83.6 kg for adult males, 70.2 kg for adult females and 32.2 kg for children.  (Okay.  Multiply kilograms (kg) by 2.2 to get these averages in pounds.  I am so tired of doing your homework for you.) In a student paper, 'Pyramid of Geezers', presented in the Journal of Physics Special...

Credit: M.D. Garralda et al Cut marks observed on the femur of the Neanderthal child.   As a species, we humans are fascinated with our history and pre-history, especially with our close relatives, the Neandertal, who differ from us genetically by just 0.12%   There is research into how they lived.  Research into whether Neandertals had a spoken language, or as novelist Jean Auel described in her Earth's Children series, they communicated with a series of gestures and vocalizations, i.e., grunts and growls.   The first remains of Neandertal, later named after the Neander Valley in Germany, were discovered in 1829 in the Engis Caves in today's Belgium.  More remains were found in Forbes' Quarry, Gibraltar, in 1848, both prior to the type specimen discovery in a limestone quarry of the Neander Valley in Erkrath near Düsseldorf in August 1856   It has been established that a percentage of European...

Source: ucsdnews.ucsd.edu Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the undersides of a synesthete's and a control subject's brains, while viewing a black- and-white letter or number. The color-selective hVR region of the cortex is shown in pink. Brain "activation" is shown in shades of red, orange and yellow, with brighter colors meaning more activity. The brain of the synesthete shows activity in the color-selective region, while the brain of the non-synesthete does not.  It's called synesthesia, and it effects one out of every 100 people. A synesthete is a person with the ability to hear colors or to see a sound.  No, they're not deaf with highly developed other senses.  These are folks much like you and me, only where you and I might see a color, red, they also hear and / or taste the color red as they see it. Fascinating, to quote Spock. To paraphrase another well-known sci-fi guru, "Imagine, if you will, a det...