Radio waves might help protect us from space weather. Stray radio waves may push part of the Van Allen radiation belts away from Earth, which is good news for our satellites; the high-energy particles trapped in the belts can destroy a spacecraft's electrical equipment. JHUAPL/LASP When the Navy wants to send a message to an underwater…
News that three Russian kamikaze satellites have reawakened is spreading ripples of concern among scientists and defense officials -- particularly given that if these satellites are mobilized, they could cripple U.S. access to the Internet.
The Daily Beast reports that the trio of "killer satellites" are moving after more than a year of sitting idle.
After being launched into low orbit between 2013 and 2015, the satellites quickly demonstrated a remarkable degree of maneuverability during dramatic orbit changes.
The satellites -- Kosmos-2491, Kosmos-2499 and Kosmos-2504 -- may be a resurrection of the Cold War era program known as Istrebitel Sputnikov, or satellite killer.
Attempts to develop Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) was a major component of the Cold War.
The Daily Mail painted an alarming scenario as to what the satellites could potentially accomplish.
"If US satellites were disabled or destroyed, life on Earth could quickly become paralysed," the Daily Mail predicted. "The Internet would go dead, TV screens would be blank, missiles systems could be frozen and the business and banking institutions would descend into chaos."
If it weren't such a crazy week with Trump bombshells, cable news would likely have nonstop speculation as to why Vladimir Putin was reawakening killer satellites that could knock out the internet. Yet the investigations of Trump and Russia have overshadowed this development.
“Lucy,” a shy, intelligent six-year-old, missed three days of school because she had stomachaches. The symptoms started the day after Lucy witnessed a loud argument while waiting for the bus with her babysitter. A “scary man” shouted at people waiting: “Watch out, you’re all going to be deported now!” Lucy didn’t know what “deported” meant, but she knew it was very bad. People told the man to leave and shouted insults at him that Lucy didn’t understand. The man finally left, shaking his fist and threatening “police action.” Lucy held her babysitter’s hand, looked up and noticed tears in her sitter’s eyes. Lucy’s stomach started to rumble. Sadly, cases like Lucy’s are becoming increasingly common. 
I’m a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with expertise in anxiety disorders. Since November’s election and the general political upheaval that accompanied it, medical professionals across the country have observed an uptick in agitation and anxiety among our young patients.
What do we know about how anxiety develops in children? And what can parents do to reduce it?
Strong emotions are contagious – particularly anxiety. And while anxiety spreads easily among us all, children are the most vulnerable. Elementary school children lack a fully developed ability to solve problems on their own, making it difficult for them to separate other people’s worries (especially adults’) from their own frightening fantasies.
Unfortunately, although kids tend to take on their parents’ worries, it can be hard for parents to control anxiety – even in normal times. But these are not normal times: Politicians, the media and ordinary citizens on both sides are hurling heated rhetoric across the aisle, all of which is fueling anxiety.
When upset enough, people can start to think and behave in less rational, more primitive ways. Mental health professionals call this “regression”: when people go from adult, rational behavior to a more emotionally charged, less reasoned way of thinking and acting.
As a child psychiatrist, I’m concerned when I see emotionally charged language routinely expressed in public discourse, often in the form of intolerance toward those with differing political beliefs or divergent racial/ethnic/sexual orientation backgrounds.These days, I’ve personally observed this sort of overly emotional, regressive behavior more and more frequently – often in public places, like on the subway, where people seem more ready than in recent memory to dispense insults.
Times of emotional upheaval (and the regressive behavior that accompanies it) can effectively terrorize children, causing them to become traumatized, highly anxious or have difficulty sleeping, eating or focusing in school.
Before third or fourth grade, children haven’t yet formed the rational, organized thought processes that developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called “concrete operations.” Before reaching this stage of cognitive development, children don’t rely on cause and effect. Rather, magical (nonrational) explanations predominate. Noises in the middle of the night are as likely to come from monsters as heating pipes. The school bus is as likely to appear because they blinked and wished it as because it has a schedule. Conflicts unambiguously feature “good guys” and “bad guys.”
Anxious fantasies can feel as real as the everyday world. For Lucy, who experienced her worries as physical symptoms (stomachaches and even vomiting the next time she got on the bus), it required patience and attention to translate her symptoms back to language so she could feel more in control.
In general, adults rely on a routine ability to read their own emotions and those of others. These skills are newly developed in young children and can collapse in scary situations or in the face of parental upheaval. When children become anxious enough, this collapse can spiral into an impaired ability to understand the world and a growing sense of isolation.
How can parents navigate this flood tide of personal and community upset and raise relatively healthy kids? Parents always have a hard job, but I’ve seen the aggressive political climate complicate the ever-daunting task of raising children. Parents want to remain truthful to children to underscore trust, while also gauging what children can tolerate hearing without becoming overwhelmed. This can get more difficult when parents feel overwhelmed themselves.
Parents should reflect and reinforce their own values. Lucy’s parents couldn’t pretend that her bus stop incident didn’t happen, didn’t matter or wasn’t frightening. They needed to acknowledge how frightened she felt, while reassuring her that school had not become dangerous.
What parents tell children is important, but how parents act is also a crucial guide for kids. In today’s political climate, it’s more important than ever for parents to be good role models. That means that values like kindness, patience, respect for others, taking turns and sharing should be developed early and demonstrated often.
Listening to others is crucial, even when we’re angry. Bullying, violence and name-calling are behaviors that parents should take care not to model for their children. (One survey of 2,000 K-12 teachers suggested an increase in school bullying during the 2016 election.)
Parents’ roles are more important now than ever. How parents respond in these challenging times can shape a child’s ability to grow normally or become traumatized. How they channel anxiety and rage makes a difference.
Furthermore, the significant impact parents have on their children’s mental health and well-being may, in turn, be crucial to maintaining a rational society. In my view, this is the small, partial contribution that parents can make to this country’s current upheaval.
By Barbara Milrod, Professor of Psychiatry, Medical College, Cornell University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
By Paul Markowski, Professor of Meteorology, Pennsylvania State University and Yvette Richardson, Professor of Meteorology, Pennsylvania State University. Tornado seven miles south of Anadarko, Oklahoma, May 3, 1999. OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory/Flickr, CC BY Editor’s note: May and June are typically peak months for tornadoes in North America. We asked Penn State meteorology professors Paul Markowski…
By Federico Cheever, Professor of Environmental and Natural Resources Law, University of Denver and Annecoos Wiersema, Professor of International Law, University of Denver. A little protection over here, please? AP Photo/Harry Hamburg On April 19 of this year, five major wildlife protection groups petitioned the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to list the giraffe (Giraffa…
By Gary Li, Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Danielle DeLatte, Ph.D. Student in Aeronautics & Astronautics, University of Tokyo, Therese Jones, Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy, Pardee RAND Graduate School, Jerome Gilleron, Ph.D. Candidate in Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Samuel Wald, Ph.D. Student in Aeronautics and…
The collapse of a tunnel used to store radioactive waste at one of the most contaminated U.S. nuclear sites has raised concerns among watchdog groups and others who study the country's nuclear facilities because many are aging and fraught with problems.
"They're fighting a losing battle to keep these plants from falling apart," said Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Energy who was charged with making an inventory of nuclear sites under President Bill Clinton.
"The longer you wait to deal with this problem, the more dangerous it becomes," said Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he focuses on nuclear energy and disarmament.
The Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.
No radiation was released during Tuesday's incident at a plutonium-handling facility in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, but thousands of workers were ordered to take cover and some were evacuated as a precaution.
The state of facilities in the U.S. nuclear network has been detailed by the Department of Energy, Government Accountability Office and Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. They have noted eroding walls, leaking roofs, and risks of electrical fires and groundwater contamination.
In 2016, Frank Klotz, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department agency overseeing maintenance of nuclear warheads, warned Congress about risks posed by aging facilities.
Decontaminating and demolishing the Energy Department's shuttered facilities will cost $32 billion, it said in a 2016 report. It also noted a $6 billion maintenance backlog.
In the 1940s the U.S. government built Hanford and other complexes to produce plutonium and uranium for atomic bombs under the Manhattan Project.
“That was an era when the defense mission took priority over everything else," said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "We’re dealing with the legacy of that.”
RISKS DOCUMENTED
Many of those sites are now vacant but contaminated.
A 2009 Energy Department survey found nearly 300 shuttered, contaminated and deteriorating sites. Six years later it found that fewer than 60 had been cleaned up.
A 2015 Energy Department audit said delays in cleaning contaminated facilities "expose the Department, its employees and the public to ever-increasing levels of risk."
Risks identified at the sites included leaking roofs carrying radioactivity into groundwater, roof collapses and electrical fires that could release radioactive particles.
A 2014 Energy Department audit noted a high risk of fire and groundwater contamination at the shuttered Heavy Element Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is surrounded by homes and businesses near California's Bay Area.
Problems have also been identified at active facilities including the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation in South Carolina. A 2015 report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board found "severe" erosion in concrete walls of an exhaust tunnel used to prevent release of radioactive air.
A 2016 Energy Department audit of one of the United States' main uranium handling facilities, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, warned that "intense precipitation or snow" could collapse parts its roof, possibly causing an accident involving radioactivity.
"It sounds crazy, but it's true," said Don Hancock, who has studied the Tennessee facility in his work at the Southwest Information and Research Center, an Albuquerque nonprofit that monitors nuclear sites.
In Hanford's case, risk of a tunnel collapse was known in 2015, when the Energy Department noted wooden beams in one tunnel had lost 40 percent of their strength and were being weakened by gamma radiation.
Energy Department spokesman Mark Heeter in nearby Richland said in an email that the agency saw Tuesday's prompt discovery of the collapse as a success.
"The maintenance and improvement of aging infrastructure across the Hanford site ... remains a top priority," he said.
Nationwide, part of the risk comes from having to maintain and safeguard so many sites with different types of nuclear waste, said Frank Wolak, head of Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development.
"You’re asking for trouble with the fact that you've got it spread all over the country," he said. "The right answer is to consolidate the stuff that is highly contaminated, and apply the best technology to it."
(Reporting by Tom James; Editing by Ben Klayman)
A new study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.
Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.
Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.
To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War Veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.
Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.
Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.
According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.
The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.
These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.
The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.
By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.
Bobby Azarian is a freelance writer with a PhD in neuroscience. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, BBC Future, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and others. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.
Excerpt: The Evolution of Beauty The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us by Richard O. Prum. Doubleday Penguin Random House The following is an excerpt from The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us by Richard O. Prum. One…
I like to think that I am the master of my thoughts—that I generate and control them and that they serve my own purposes. But that is only one way to look at things.
It has been said that if alien scientists landed on earth they might report home that wheat, corn and rice were the master species, living comfortably on almost 600 million hectares of land, their every need tended by human servants. These grasses have enticed humans to spread their seed far and wide after preparing the most favorable soil conditions. The human servants provide extra nutrients and water when these are in short supply, fend off pests, and finally harvest and store seed, receiving a portion of the plants’ productive capacity as compensation for their faithful service—only to repeat the cycle during the next growing season.
Our relationship to ideas, too, seems very different when we flip the story around. Like corn and wheat, ideas help us survive, but one might also say that the opposite is true.
Ideas have a life of their own. Just as planet earth is host to millions of species in an intricate web that we call the biosphere, it is possible to think of an ideosphere a web of ideas as intricate and diverse as the web of life. These ideas evolve and reproduce not on a planet, but in the fertile world of conscious minds. Much like living organisms, they can be thought of as discrete entities, as self-replicators that have an existence all their own.
No analogy fits perfectly, but when it comes to the relationship between us, as human hosts, and our ideas, it may easiest to compare ideas to microbes, specifically those that live on or in other organisms. Like the microbes we carry around, ideas are contagious—some more than others. They get transmitted from one person to another through our contacts and communities. Scholars can trace the spread of a contagious idea—a new slang word like “woke” or a fashion fad like saggy pants the way that epidemiologists trace the spread of a disease.
Also like micro-organisms, ideas are subject to natural selection—pressures that cause them to flourish or evolve or to die out altogether independent of whether some of their hosts—meaning us—live or die.
In his book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to describe a unit of information that can get passed from person to person (host to host), evolving over time. Dawkins and other scientists of his generation had come to recognize that natural selection operates on a variety of media, not just DNA. In fact, it can operate on any medium in which information has the opportunity to replicate and mutate and then get passed on or not—including the internet (think computer viruses) or the interconnected network of human minds.
In Dawkins’ framework, individual religious dogmas can be thought of as memes, while whole religious ideologies, which comprise sets of ideas that are bound together and tend to travel in tandem are called meme complexes. Academic psychologist and biologist Susan Blackmore has built on Dawkins’ work to further clarify what memes are and how they function.
The phrase that Dawkins used in his title, the selfish gene, refers to the fact that—to put it in wildly anthropomorphic terms—a gene doesn’t give a damn if you survive, so long as it does. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s fine for the male black widow to get eaten after mating, because that helps his genes get passed on. By analogy, a viral idea or ideology may kill its human host (think Jihadis and martyrdom) so long as that helps it, in this case radical Islam, to spread.
Contagious ideas, like the idea of 72 virgins awaiting a Muslim martyr, may be selfish memes. They may be indifferent to our survival, but we are not. Your average Jihadi might think twice about suicide if he suspected those promised virgins were actually raisins (a less viral translation of the Arabic passage)—or worse, if he suspected the Christian version of the afterlife might be the real one.
Whether in this life or some anticipated afterlife, each of us wants to maximize our own pleasure and wellbeing and that of people we love—and to do that we must know what is real. That’s why we have evolved sophisticated mental defenses that detect and correct misinformation. Our finely-tuned bullshit detectors react to false ideas in much the same way that our immune system reacts to parasitic bacteria, viruses, prions, and fungi that have adapted to live in and on our bodies—by identifying potential harms and eliminating them.
But as we all know, immune systems are far from perfect. Pathogens evolve a variety of successful strategies to get around human immune defenses and then trigger us to do things that pass on their genes to other people—sneeze, for example. Some pathogens—like influenza—mutate rapidly, so that old antibodies won’t work. Others, like Herpes Simplex hide in places our immune system can’t reach and then emerge from time to time to get spread. Still others, like MRSA, develop into mutant “superbugs” capable of withstanding treatments that would have wiped out their ancestors. In his 2001 book, Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer described the fascinating arms race between biological hosts and parasitic organisms.
Like our biological immune systems, our psychological immune systems—what I called bullshit detectors—are far from perfect. And like microbes, false but viral ideas have a variety of successful strategies for getting passed on. They may seem so intuitively reasonable or so impressively complex that we defer when our authority figures spout them. They may elicit an appealing sense of clarity or an addictive sense of outrage. They may mimic other concepts that are indisputably real: I have a biological father, why not a father in heaven?
Some memes, like chain mail or Christianity, even have an explicit “copy me” command. If you care at all about people with cancer, hit share! – or – Go into the world and make disciples of every creature.
So, let’s put this all together: As viral self-replicators, ideas have a life of their own. Human beings have a cognitive immune system that seeks to identify and eradicate false ideas because misinformation tends to cause us trouble. Some false ideas evade our bullshit detectors and so get passed socially from person to person. In this context, when religious notions take root in human minds and get passed on despite containing maladaptive falsehoods that do us harm, they may be considered socially transmitted pathologies or, to use my earlier term, socio-pathologies.
But there is a catch. Did you notice all those qualifiers?
We now know who ‘Baby Louie’ really was Beibeilong sinensis likely incubated its two-foot-long eggs. Illustration by Zhao Chuang Big Bird is eight feet, two inches tall. That’s big. The ostrich, the largest living bird is bigger, topping out around nine feet tall. But neither fictional nor factual birds can hold a candle to a new…
As for what it does? That's still unspecified. X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle The X-37B is just 29 feet, 3 inches long, with a wingspan an inch shy of 15 feet. DoD photo courtesy of United Launch Alliance The Air Force has a secret space robot called the X-37B. We know this because the Air Force is…
The U.S. military's experimental X-37B space plane landed on Sunday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years, the Air Force said.
The unmanned X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, touched down at 7:47 a.m. EDT (1147 GMT) on a runway formerly used for landings of the now-mothballed space shuttles, the Air Force said in an email.
The Boeing-built space plane blasted off in May 2015 from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas 5 rocket built by United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co .
The X-37B, one of two in the Air Force fleet, conducted unspecified experiments for more than 700 days while in orbit. It was the fourth and lengthiest mission so far for the secretive program, managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.
The orbiters "perform risk reduction, experimentation and concept-of-operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies," the Air Force has said without providing details. The cost of the program is also classified.
The Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit group promoting the peaceful exploration of space, says the secrecy surrounding the X-37B suggests the presence of intelligence-related hardware being tested or evaluated aboard the craft.
The vehicles are 29 feet (9 meters) long and have a wingspan of 15 feet, making them about one quarter of the size of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s now-retired space shuttles.
The X-37B, also known as Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, first flew in April 2010 and returned after eight months. A second mission launched in March 2011 and lasted 15 months, while a third took flight in December 2012 and returned after 22 months.
Sunday’s landing was the X-37B's first in Florida. The three previous landings took place at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Air Force relocated the program in 2014, taking over two of NASA’s former shuttle-processing hangars.
The Air Force intends to launch the fifth X-37B mission from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, located just south of the Kennedy Space Center, later this year.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
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