Blogs / Discoblog

Feeling stressed or sad? Before you succumb to the blues, try standing under a blue light. Several cities around the world claim to have reduced suicides, crime, and even traffic accidents by installing blue lights in the public spaces.

In Glasgow, Scotland, blue streetlights installed in 2000 have reduced street crimes noticeably. In Japan, a country notorious for its high suicide rates—authorities say in 2007 alone there were 640 suicides attempted by jumping in front of oncoming trains—two railroad companies have turned to light therapy. After blue lights were installed on station platforms and near railway crossings, the number of suicide attempts dropped to zero. Also in Japan, hundreds of blue lights have been installed along highways and rest stops. An expressway operator said trash cans near blue lights received 20 percent less garbage.

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Your mom always told you that it’s the thought that counts. And when it comes to pain, scientists appear to have shown that intentions really do matter. Harvard researchers report that people experience more pain if they perceive that the pain is intentionally inflicted.

“When someone steps on your toe on purpose, it seems to hurt more than when the person does the same thing unintentionally. The physical parameters of the harm may not differ—your toe is flattened in both cases—but the psychological experience of pain is changed nonetheless,” the researchers report in Psychological Science [pdf].

The researchers enrolled 43 participants in a study in which they were each paired with partner. Little did they know that the partner was actually a researcher running the study. The participant was hooked up to a machine and told that the partner, located in a separate room, would control whether or not to deliver an electric shock through the machine. In some cases, however, the partner’s choice would be reversed by the machine. The participant could see what the partner had chosen—shock or no shock—and whether the machine would follow the choice or reverse it. Even though the participants always knew they were about to be shocked, they rated the intentional shocks as more painful than the unintentional ones—3.62 versus 3.00 on a 7-point scale.

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Defense lawyers take note: Be sure to have some Purell to offer the jury before they deliver the verdict—their clean hands could help your case.

New research in Psychological Science [pdf] suggests that outer cleanliness can loosen people’s moral judgment. While many of us may have experienced the “Macbeth effect,” in which people feel the need to purify themselves after a sinful act, researchers now find that people who had first scrubbed their hands rated sinful acts less harshly.

Researchers asked 40 participants to rate morally questionable situations on a scale from one (perfectly OK) to nine (extremely wrong). The situations ranged from taking money from a found wallet, to eating the family dog to avoid starvation, to “using a kitten for sexual arousal” (seriously). The researchers prepped the participants by asking them first to unscramble sentences. One group was given sentences containing “clean” words like “pure,” “washed,” and “pristine,” while another group was given sentences with neutral words. The clean group gave lower ratings to the objectionable situations—6.7 for some kinky kitten play compared to 8.3 from the neutral group, for example.

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Here’s one for the Holden Caulfields of the world: If you’re good at spotting fake smiles, you’ve probably been given the cold shoulder a lot in the past. Scientists at Miami University in Ohio found that the memory of social rejection makes a person more wary of phony goodwill.

The researchers enlisted 32 people and asked some to write down a situation in which they’d felt accepted, while others were asked to note a situation in which they’d felt excluded. A football player, for example, wrote about an injury that prevented him from playing, and the subsequent rejection he felt from his football buddies.

The subjects, now primed with either fuzzy feelings of acceptance or chilly feelings of rejection, were shown video clips of “happy” people. The acceptance group spotted fake smiles about 60 percent of the time, while the rejection group spotted them about 80 percent of the time.

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Do you dream in color, or black and white? The answer may depend on the TV you watched as a child. New research shows that baby boomers who grew up watching black and white TV still often dream in grayscale while their kids dream only in color.

Eva Murzyn of the U.K.’s University of Dundee asked 60 people, half over age 55 and half under 25, to keep detailed dream diaries. She also collected information about the kind of TV and films they watched as children. More than 20 percent of the older group reported having black and white dreams, but less than 5 percent of the younger group reported them. A few of the older subjects who’d been exposed to color film and TV as children also rarely dreamed in black and white. The shift in dream palette directly coincided with the popularization of color TV in the 1960s. (It also means that pre-TV generations would have dreamed only in color.)

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We make snap judgments about strangers based on their faces. We even do this with inanimate objects, conjuring up human-like faces in furniture, appliances, and office supplies. A new study finds that when it comes to cars, we like their “expressions” angry and mean.

Researchers in Vienna asked people to rate “headshots” of 38 cars using a list of 18 traits, including childlike, hostile, happy, and neurotic. The participants were also asked to draw the facial features they saw in the cars. Vehicles with wide stances, tapered windshields, and wide-set, angled headlights were the most liked (Lightning McQueen from Cars seems to qualify—as does Stephen King’s Christine) and scored high on traits associated with power, such as adult, dominant, arrogant, angry, masculine, and hostile. A typical “power” car was the scowling BMW 5 Series, while a smiling Toyota Prius ranked the fourth lowest on the list.

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Talk to your grandparents about the Internet.  Tell them that surfing the web is like yoga for their aging brains.  Point them to a new study by UCLA scientists which found that web-savvy seniors registered double the brain activity during Internet searching than seniors who had no experience using the Internet – suggesting that technology can enhance the way we think. 

A group of 24 seniors, ages 55 to 76, were hooked up to a functional MRI while reading a book or surfing the web.  Both activities triggered brain areas involved in language, memory and visual abilities, but Internet searching also stimulated brain areas involved in decision-making and complex reasoning.  That’s because the Internet requires more active engagement, like choosing what to click on in order to pursue more information. 

Apparently, there’s a learning curve with Web surfing:

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In the category of “conclusions we can’t believe needed to be reached,” Australian researchers who studied 299 women over eight years—including during their pregnancies—found that they were no mentally worse for wear after bearing children. Neither pregnancy nor motherhood had any detrimental effect on each mother’s cognitive capacity, said Helen Christensen, director of the Center for Mental Health Research at Australian National University.

Christensen says previous studies may have linked cognitive deficits to pregnancy because they were comparing pregnant women with other non-pregnant women. In this study, they were able to compare a woman’s mental capacity to herself, by measuring it before, during, and after her pregnancy.

The researchers did find, however, that the mothers were slightly less well-educated than women of the same age who didn’t have children (the study followed a total of 2,500 women’s lives in detail). Future studies will reveal whether this small difference, attributed to an interruption in education, will give mothers a long-term disadvantage—although there is indication that delaying motherhood increases earnings.

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Ig Nobel Prize winners don’t get a photo-op with the King of Sweden, or their own petition for Obama, but their discoveries are worth a good laugh and some serious consideration. Here’s some of the wackiest science honored by this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes. The full list of winners, announced last week by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), can be found here.

Biology: Fleas living on dogs jump higher than fleas living on cats. Three French scientists measured fleas jumping out of plastic pipes; the dog fleas outjumped the cat fleas by an average of 2.3 centimeters.

Physics: “String theory” agrees with Murphy’s Law. Two Americans tumbled string in a make-shift clothes dryer and identified all the different knots that came out by their Jones polynomial. They mathematically proved that if you shake up a bunch of loose strings (or hair or shoelaces or headphone cords) they will inevitably get tangled.

Chemistry: Coca-Cola may or may not be bad for your sperm. Three researchers at Harvard Medical School reported that Coke significantly reduces sperm motility and that Diet Coke just about wipes them out. Two years later, Taiwanese researchers reported that Coke has little effect on sperm motility. Both teams shared the prize.

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· Jailbirds for conservation: Britain recruits prisoners to build bird houses and survey threatened species.

· Virgin Galactic rejects $1 million proposal to shoot sex-in-space video on its commercial spacecraft, the WhiteKnightTwo.

· Bikers go green: Honda shrinks the hybrid engine and will offer hybrid motorcycles by 2011.

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