Lola Gayle, STEAM Register Astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have discovered five of the most distant gamma-ray blazars yet known, and two of them are hiding huge monsters at their centers. The light coming from the most distant object began its journey to us when the universe was 1.4 billion years old. To put…
An internal email encourages EPA staff to ignore the press pexels The future of the EPA remains murky On Monday, Senior White House Advisor Don Benton sent an email to all EPA employees regarding public scrutiny of the EPA transition. Benton, a retired Republican state senator from Vancouver, Washington, was chosen by the Donald Trump Administration…
Several new ant-parasitoid wasp species have been discovered by UC Riverside graduate student Judith Herreid, and she's named one of them Orasema difrancoae - after her favorite musician Ani DiFranco. This particular group of wasps - which belong to the family Eucharitidae - is of particular interest because they could potentially control invasive ant populations, including…
Say hello to great-great-great-great … grandpa Artist reconstruction by S Conway Morris / Jian Han This creature lived 540 million years ago, and may be our very distant ancestor. In a paper in Nature, scientists claim to have found humanity's oldest known ancestor. This horrifying, bag-like sea creature lived about 540 million years ago and was…
Sometimes life just finds a way Pixabay A plethora of meteorites rained down upon Earth 468 million years ago, but they probably weren't responsible for an explosion of life. A modern evolutionary myth may have been dispelled. Some 470 million years ago, a wealth of meteorites started falling to Earth, filling the sky with shooting stars.…
Lola Gayle, STEAM Register Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Zooniverse are asking for the public's help in learning more about Mars' ancient, watery past. Through the Planet Four: Ridges project, armchair scientists can comb through images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to help find evidence of large polygonal ridges. Why search for these…
By Brandon Stark, Director of the University of California Center of Excellence on Unmanned Aircraft System Safety, University of California, Merced. Drone via shutterstock.com The once-small community of drone hobbyists has transformed into a worldwide phenomenon. In 2016 especially, significant technology improvements and regulatory clarity have paved the way for even more dramatic changes in the…
Climate Change crusader Al Gore has agreed to host a summit on climate change and health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to a report from The Hill, the original summit was organized by many different non-profit groups that teamed up with the American Public Health Association. The groups expected to discuss the impact global climate change can have on Americans' health.
The CDC canceled the summit out of caution following President Donald Trump's inauguration without giving a reason. The scientific community accused the CDC of canceling because they're afraid of Trump and his stance denying climate change and blaming the "hoax" on China.
“They tried to cancel this conference but it is going forward anyway,” former Vice President Gore said in a statement. “Today we face a challenging political climate, but climate shouldn’t be a political issue. Health professionals urgently need the very best science in order to protect the public, and climate science has increasingly critical implications for their day-to-day work. With more and more hot days, which exacerbate the proliferation of the Zika virus and other public health threats, we cannot afford to waste any time.”
The CDC is a department that falls under Health and Human Services that is soon expected to be lead by Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) if he is confirmed by the Senate. Price is also a climate change denier.
In a statement supporting legislation to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide, Price said: “This decision goes against all common sense, especially considering the many recent revelations of errors and obfuscation in the allegedly ‘settled science’ of global warming.”
Price frequently voted against tax cuts or incentives for renewable energy and instead has favored more oil exploration and drilling. He's also pledged to the Koch Brother's organization Americans for Prosperity to oppose climate change legislation.
Gore has made it his life's mission to help save the Earth from climate change. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," won two Academy Awards and Gore is in talks about a possible sequel.
Pig embryos that had been injected with human stem cells when they were only a few days old began to grow organs containing human cells, scientists reported on Thursday, an advance that promises - or threatens - to bring closer the routine production of creatures that are part human and part something else. These human-pig "chimeras"…
New research helps explain why the effects of acid last so long Robin Betz An artist's depiction of LSD bound to a serotonin receptor. The way it sits and gets stuck inside the receptor may explain why the drug's hallucinogenic effects last so long. LSD’s hallucinogenic effects last an unusually long amount of time; 12 to…
A tiny device invented by Australian National University (ANU) physicists is capable of creating the highest quality holographic images ever, which they say opens the door to imaging technologies seen in science fiction movies such as Star Wars. Lead researcher Lei Wang said the team created complex holographic images in infrared with the invention that could…
Donald Trump is a historic first in American history in that he is a President who lies more often than he tells the truth.
On Thursday, Politico's Maria Konnikova wrote about the effect this could potentially have on cognition and the struggle to remain fact-based and objective while living under a leader who appears to be largely untethered from concepts like truth and objective reality.
"All presidents lie," Konnikova said. It comes with the territory. Nixon, Reagan and Bill Clinton all got caught diverging from the truth during their presidencies, but Donald Trump's lying is on a different scale than that.
"A whopping 70 percent of Trump’s statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true," wrote Konnikova .
Lying appears to be a deeply "ingrained habit" in Trump. Konnikova noted that reporters, biographers and others who have followed him closely over the decades say that he lies fluidly, frequently and about needlessly minor things.
Now that Trump is installed in office and has been telegraphing untruths from virtually the moment he was sworn in, the U.S. has entered a new phase in its history and the basic fabric of common understanding is at risk.
"Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people’s sense of themselves, which Trump’s clearly do," Konnikova warned.
Harvard University researcher Daniel Gilbert says that a lie arrives in the brain in two stages. We instinctively believe statements and assertions in order to comprehend them. The "wait, that isn't true" moment comes after and, as Konnikova said, it "can be easily disrupted."
"We must accept something in order to understand it," Konnikova said. It happens "effortlessly and automatically." The second step involves cognitive work. We must affirm or reject every statement.
Gilbert wrote that human minds, “when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension.”
"When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything," Konnikova explained. "It’s called cognitive load -- our limited cognitive resources are overburdened. It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true."
Trump also makes use of repetition to drive a false point into people's minds. The phenomenon of "illusory truth" is when people have heard a false statement enough times, their minds begin to interpret it as true.
It was, Konnikova said, "first discovered in the ’70s and most recently demonstrated with the rise of fake news. "
Furthermore, even repeating the phony assertion to disprove it only convinces people further of its truthfulness.
In politics, these principles are particularly dangerous, not least because people tend to automatically believe lies that comfort them by reaffirming their existing biases and beliefs.
"If false information comports with preexisting beliefs -- something that is often true in partisan arguments -- attempts to refute it can actually backfire, planting it even more firmly in a person’s mind," Konnikova said. "Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs, has found that when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies."
When Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, his assertions resonated with people who were already afraid of immigrants taking their jobs.
Konnikova said, "If you already believe immigrants put your job at risk, who’s to say the chastity of your daughters isn’t in danger, too? Or as Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, once Trump makes that emotional connection, 'He could say what he wants, and they’ll follow him.'”
He concluded, "The distressing reality is that our sense of truth is far more fragile than we would like to think it is -- especially in the political arena, and especially when that sense of truth is twisted by a figure in power."
"False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible."
By Mathew Wallenstein, Associate Professor and Director, Innovation Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Colorado State University. By unlocking phosphorus from soil, microbes help plants like these sugar beets take it up and boost plant growth. www.Shutterstock.com Walk into your typical U.S. or U.K. grocery store and feast your eyes on an amazing bounty of fresh and processed…
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