Science News for Writers

www.dailymail.co.uk    The new Viking settlement was found on the edge of Point Rosee in Newfoundland (illustrated above) 400 miles south of another site at L'Anse aux Meadows. They suggest that the Vikings' mastery of the seas allowed them to venture to North America.    There is so much speculation on possible discoverers of the Americas ranging from Polynesians, Japanese and Chinese to French Merovingians to a lost tribe of Israel, ancient Egyptians and sailors from the lost continent of Atlantis.  There are two statements that need to be said about this: An extended family group first crossed from Siberia to North America some 14,000 years ago, and survived, built sophisticated cultures and societies, and left undeniable evidence of their presence.  To give credit where credit is due, they discovered the Americas and no one else. Until solid scientific evidence establishing other groups as having visited the Americas is prod...

http://www.jta.org/ Is your political ideology in your head? The differences between conservatives and liberals may be psychologically fundamental Conservatives and liberals know there is a chasm between their policy and social ideals. A new study indicates that the thought processes of political conservatives gives greater weight to negative information. Conservatives are significantly more likely to remember images that evoke negative emotions. The research, led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Mark Mills, revealed that negativity bias -- where greater weight in our cognitive processes is given to negative information over positive or neutral information -- is stronger in political conservatives and that the negativity bias transfers to how well they remember stimuli. In other words, conservatives in the study were more likely to remember things that evoked negative emotions -- images of war, snakes, dead animals -- than their more liberal counterparts. Fi...