If left unchecked, global warming will cause irreversible damage to marine life in the world's oceans, forcing fish to search for cooler waters and destroying valuable coral reefs, an international study said Thursday.
Keeping global average temperatures within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures is the only way to stave off the worst effects of climate change on the Earth's oceans, which provide 90 percent of the planet's habitable space, said the study in the journal Science.
The findings are based on the Ocean 2015 Initiative, which examined the latest studies on how climate change is projected to affect oceans, marine life and hundreds of billions of dollars in goods and services they provide each year.
"All the species and services we get from the ocean will be impacted," said co-author William Cheung, associate professor at the University of British Columbia.
The team considered a business-as-usual scenario, and compared that to the effect of introducing big cuts in carbon dioxide emissions in order to keep temperature rise below two degrees Celsius by 2100, as outlined by the Copenhagen accord.
"The condition of the future ocean depends on the amount of carbon emitted in the coming decades," said the study.
"Immediate and substantial reduction of CO2 emissions is required in order to prevent the massive and effectively irreversible impacts on ocean ecosystems and their services that are projected" with business-as-usual scenarios.
Unless changes are made, "fish will migrate away from their current habitats 65 percent faster, resulting in changes to biodiversity and ecosystem functions," said the study, led by Jean-Pierre Gattuso of the French National Center for Scientific Research.
Over time, the ocean will become less capable of absorbing carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
Such pollution leads to rising acidification and harms marine life.
Sea level rise, loss of oxygen in the waters and disease are also top threats linked to pollution.
Even though recent research has suggested certain types of corals may be able to adapt to warming waters, the study said it was "doubtful that corals will be able to adapt quickly enough to maintain populations under most emissions scenarios, especially where temperature keeps increasing over time."
Researchers said their findings should help inform the global climate talks being held in Paris later this year.
According to Phillip Williamson, science coordinator of the UK Ocean Acidification (UKOA) research program, the paper gives a "powerful and succinct summary" of science that is already well known to experts, "but it's good to have the evidence brought together."
Williamson, who was not involved in the study, pointed out that even the two-degree Celsius scenario was not a cure for the world's waters.
"Even the stringent emissions scenario for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not without risks," he said.
"Knowing that such risks might only be 'moderate' rather than 'severe', still gives considerable cause for concern."
Although results of first trial were ‘modest and variable’, second bigger trial aims to combine gene therapy with other treatments for longer term benefits
A treatment to help those with cystic fibrosis may be available within five years, say scientists who who have been working for decades to develop a gene therapy for the disease.
The results of a year-long trial showed only a small and variable improvement in the lung capacity of those children and adults who took part, but scientists now believe they have proved gene therapy is possible in treating cystic fibrosis. With more work, they say that by the end of the decade it will at least be possible to help stabilize patients.
Cystic fibrosis, the most common life-shortening inherited disease in the UK, was an early target for scientists excited by the concept of gene therapy when the mutated gene that causes it was identified some 25 years ago.
It is estimated that one in every 2,500 babies born in the UK will be born with cystic fibrosis, with the disease affecting about 10,000 people in the UK, and more than 90,000 worldwide. Those born with CF have a limited lifespan. Their body produces thick mucus, which affects the lungs and digestive system in particular.
Scientists and doctors from Imperial College London, Oxford and Edinburgh Universities, the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, and NHS Lothian came together in 2001 to try to develop a gene therapy, supported by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. They developed a technique to enable patients to breathe in molecules of DNA, delivering a normal copy of the defective gene to cells in the lung.
A trial of 136 patients, aged 12 and over, showed better lung function in most of those given gene therapy. “It is the world’s first demonstration that repeated gene therapy can improve lung function,” said Professor Eric Alton, the coordinator of the UK Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium from Imperial. But he said: “The effects were modest and variable. This is not yet ready for clinical use for those reasons.”
Half the patients treated at the Royal Brompton and at Western General hospital in Edinburgh were given the gene therapy and half given saline instead. Those who did best were those with the worst lung function. Alton explained that mucus was obstructing their smaller airways, so that most of the dose ended up in the larger airways. For those with milder respiratory problems, “we’re simply going to have to increase the dose,” he said.
The scientists have not found a way to make a permanent change to the faulty gene. In the trial, published in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine, they dosed patients once a month. Dosing them more often could improve the results, they say. In a bigger trial, they will also try combining the gene therapy with other treatments.
A second new trial is planned that will deliver the therapy through a specially engineered virus rather than encasing it in fat globules – the method used to date – which might give longer term benefits. Giving repeated doses via a virus is not usually possible, because the immune system recognizes and rejects it.
If the next trial shows a bigger benefit, said Alton, it would be feasible to have a treatment to improve lung function available for patients by the end of the decade. The aim would be to prevent damage to the lungs occurring.
Developing a gene therapy for cystic fibrosis has proved to be much more difficult than anybody imagined 25 years ago. “The lungs must be one of the worst possible organs to go for,” said Alton. “They are so extremely well-defended. With bone marrow you can take it out, do the gene transfer in controlled conditions in the laboratory and put it back in the patient. That is the low-hanging fruit. We have gone for the high-hanging fruit but I’m not at all sorry we have.”
Gene therapy remains largely an experimental technique, with some treatments available mostly for rare diseases. The aim has been to effect a cure, but the benefits have generally not been as long-lasting as hoped.
The cystic fibrosis trial was funded by the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research. Pledging to continue investment in health research, George Freeman, the government’s minister for life sciences, said: “Cystic fibrosis can have a devastating effect on patients and families and this is an excellent development for people living with the condition.”
Ed Owen, chief executive of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, said: “This is an extraordinary time for therapeutic development in cystic fibrosis and the need is urgent to stop so many young lives being cut short because of this cruel condition. We will therefore continue to invest in innovative genetic research and to work with academic and industry partners to develop advancements which will make further progress towards our goal of a life unlimited by cystic fibrosis.”
Researchers such as psychologist Marvin Zuckerman have long noted the morbid curiosity of humans; there’s just something about horror and terror that captures our attention.
Indeed, there may be nothing more horrifying – and fascinating – than murder. With my colleague Tom Bowers at Penn State Harrisburg, I’ve studied the crimes and characteristics of mass murderers for years, and still, I’m alarmed by every reread of each case.
But it wasn’t until last year when an undergraduate student, Erin Murphy, approached me about studying female serial killers (FSKs) that I realized how little scientific literature existed on this topic. Many routinely hear about male serial killers (MSKs) – the Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys of true crime lore – and one can indeed find volumes of literature analyzing their killing sprees.
On the other hand, few have heard of Belle Gunness and Nannie Doss, whose crimes were no less heinous: Gunness killed more than 25 people in the late 19th century, including her children and husbands. Doss killed 11 people in the first half of the 20th century, including her own mother and grandson.
After parsing the data, we found that female serial killers do tend to possess a number of unique characteristics.
Middle- and upper-class killers of kin
The research that did exist on FSKs provided some good insight. Fresno State criminologist Eric Hickey – author of Serial Murderers and their Victims – interviewed 64 FSKs in the US, yielding a disturbing portrait of women who poisoned, shot and stabbed countless men, women and children.
Most were white and typically killed between seven and 10 victims. They were more likely to murder family members than strangers. And even though the most prevalent motive for murder was money, most of the murderers were middle- and upper-class.
Other research used smaller samples, but had notable findings. For example, in a 2011 study, Amanda Farrell, Robert Keppel and Victoria Titterington reviewed newspaper reports of 10 American FSKs. They found that FSKs tended to operate for a substantially longer time than did MSKs, while 80% knew their victims. Farrell and her colleagues – along with Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, who interviewed eight FSKs in a 2000 study – pointed out that, ironically, nursing is an occupation that’s overrepresented among FSKs.
Fleshing out the profile
So when we decided to study FSKs, we approached the topic with two main goals.
First, we wanted to document the means, motives and histories of these criminals with a larger, more recent sample (the larger the sample size, the more likely the findings and patterns are to reflect true life). Moreover, being psychologists, we found a relative absence of research on the psychology of FSKs.
Like Farrell and her colleagues, we used the mass media approach to study female serial killers.
We found the internet site Murderpedia.org to be a valuable consolidation of media reports of murder, and we found it verifiable 100% of the time. In the end, we collected profiles of 64 female serial killers (the same number Hickey found) who committed their crimes in the US between 1821 and 2008.
Although our findings were limited to information that newspapers chose to include about these women and their crimes, our results lend validity to the mass media approach.
Along the lines of previous studies, we found that most FSKs were middle- and upper-class.
Almost all (92%) knew their victims, almost all were white, and their most common means to kill was poison, while the primary motive for murder was money.
Most of these women had earned college degrees or had attained at least some higher education. They held a wide variety of jobs, ranging from religious teacher to prostitute. Nearly 40% worked in health-related fields as nurses or aides, and about 22% worked in direct caregiving roles (mother and babysitter).
Most FSKs were married at some point. In fact, these serial killers were serial monogamists – married, on average, twice, and as many as seven times. Where we could ascertain appearance, most were reported to be average to above-average in attractiveness; where we could ascertain religion, 100% were Christian.
Nearly two-thirds were related to their victims, nearly one-third killed their significant others and about 44% killed their own biological children. More than half the sample killed children, and about one-quarter killed those who were elderly or infirm, those who had little chance of fighting back.
An aberration of unconscious drives?
From an evolutionary perspective, two important pictures emerged.
First, our data (in line with other studies) showed that female serial killers primarily kill for money. Previous research, such as Eric Hickey’s, has shown that male serial killers primarily kill for sex.
This aligns with evolutionary psychological theory. Robert Trivers' 1972 work pointed out that due to their limited reproductive potential (relatively few ova), women have evolved to place a premium on securing resources (likely through wise mate choices in the ancestral environment). Conversely, virtually unlimited reproductive potential (relatively unlimited sperm) has likely predisposed men to seek a vast number of sexual opportunities.
Of course, I’m not saying we evolved to be serial killers. What I am saying is that an aberration of genetically mediated unconscious drives might explain some of the reasons for these crimes. These urges could also explain some of the differences between male serial killers and female serial killers.
Second, research has shown that male serial killers tend to stalk and kill strangers. But FSKs tend to kill people they know. It seems, then, that MSKs are hunters and FSKs are gatherers. Although aberrant, this evinces the psyche operating much like the conditions of our ancestral environment.
So, do we know for sure what makes a woman turn into a serial killer? Sadly, no. Even though brain imaging studies, such as psychologist Adrian Raine’s, do point to some trends, we can’t predict this with certainty.
Nonetheless, we’re clearly fascinated by murder, and perhaps morbid curiosity operates from an innate drive to pay attention to phenomena that can ultimately harm us. Creating an informed profile of the “typical” female serial killer will, we hope, lead to further analysis and, possibly, prevention.
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss recently doubled down on his claim that teaching creationism to children was a form of child abuse during an appearance on the "The Weekly," an Australian satirical TV news show.
During the show, host Charlie Pickering recalled that Krauss had described telling children that evolution was a lie as child abuse in a 2013 video. "That's a fairly brutal way of putting it," he noted.
"Yeah, exactly, but it got some attention," Krauss replied, "cus if I hadn't [used that description] you wouldn't have read the line."
"But it's true. I mean, there are different levels of child abuse," Krauss added. "It's like not allowing your children to have medicine, not allowing you children to be vaccinated, for example, is child abuse, because you are doing them harm."
"In some sense, if you withhold information from your children because you would rather them not know what reality is really like, for fear that it is going to affect their beliefs, then you are doing them harm."
The interview with Pickering ended with Krauss warning viewers that the universe was often counterintuitive.
"What science has taught us is that things that make sense to us may not be right. The universe doesn't care what makes sense to you. That's what's wonderful. In fact, it causes us to open our eyes and change what we think is sensible."
Watch video, uploaded to YouTube by The Weekly, below:
With a little help from Clint Eastwood, Jennifer Aniston and Josh Brolin -- or at least photos of them -- scientists have gained a new understanding of how memories of everyday events are formed in the brain.
Researchers said on Wednesday a study involving people with electrodes implanted in their brains has shown that individual neurons in a region called the medial temporal lobe play a central role in swiftly forming these memories.
The study involved 14 people with severe epilepsy. They had electrodes implanted to identify the brain location where their seizures arose. The devices also enabled the researchers to pinpoint individual neurons that encoded memories.
The subjects were shown about 100 pictures of celebrities including Halle Berry, Julia Roberts, Tiger Woods, Aniston, Eastwood and Brolin and places including the Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower of Pisa and White House.
The researchers identified individual neurons that fired to a specific person, like Brolin, but not to a place, like the Eiffel Tower, and created composite images of the person at that place.
The subjects then were shown the composite images and the researchers tracked the activity of individual neurons as the patients processed new associations between people and places. The individual neuron that earlier had responded to Brolin's image, for example, immediately began responding to the Eiffel Tower as well.
"This study goes into the heart of the neural code underlying one of the most fundamental aspects of human cognition and memory, namely the formation of associations," said neurosurgeon Dr. Itzhak Fried of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and the Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"The astonishing finding was that this basic code is so explicit at the level of individual neurons in the human brain," Fried added, noting the researchers were able to record the activity of "one lonely cell in a multitude of billions of neurons in the brain."
Neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience at Britain's University of Leicester said the findings could be important for helping people with neurological diseases like Alzheimer's.
"In order to understand and treat such pathologies it is always good to understand how the normal brain process of forming and encoding new memories works to then try to understand what may go wrong in the pathology and how to potentially treat it," Quiroga said.
Many people didn't notice, but the last day in June was just a little bit longer than in years past.
A "leap" second was added Tuesday to compensate for the slowing speed of the Earth's rotation around the Sun.
"Earth's rotation is gradually slowing down a bit, so leap seconds are a way to account for that," said Daniel MacMillan from NASA.
A typical day lasts 86,400 seconds, but June 30 got a little extension because of a gravitational brake being applied by the moon onto the Earth's orbit, scientists said.
That force means the rotation of the Earth around the Sun actually has been two milliseconds slower for hundreds of years.
Scientists add in a leap second to compensate for the delay, and keep high-precision time keeping systems synchronized, either on June 30 or December 31.
Such additions, which occur about once every three years, can be complicated due to computer systems' reliance on exact time measurements.
Debate has intensified in recent years over making the addition of seconds to Coordinated Universal Time more predictable, particularly following technology disruptions after the last modification in 2012.
But experts say that level of predictability may be hard to achieve.
"In the short term, leap seconds are not as predictable as everyone would like," said Chopo Ma at NASA.
Sticking to a vegan diet could be one of the best ways to lose weight, according to a new study that suggests vegans lose an average of two kilograms more on the short term than individuals on other diet plans.
The review analyzed the results of 12 studies about veganism with data from a total of 1,151 dieters spanning between nine and 74 weeks of slimming efforts.
It's the first study to compare data from vegan plans against that of the Atkins diet and others recommended by the American Diabetes Association and the US National Cholesterol Education Program.
Dieters on a vegetarian or vegan plan lost an average of 2.02 kg (4.45 lbs.) more than those who consumed meat and other animal products.
Of the non-meat-eating group, the vegans edged out the vegetarians, losing an average of 2.52 kg (5.55 lbs.).
Vegetarians whose diet permits eggs and other dairy products lost an average of 1.48 kg (3.26 lbs.) more than their meat-eating counterparts.
Those who followed a calorie-restricted vegetarian diet lost more weight than those who simply avoided meat.
Whole grains, fruits and vegetables emerge as the driving forces behind the favorable results, says lead author Ru-Yi Huang of E-Da Hospital in Taiwan.
They have a low glycemic index and thus prevent blood sugar levels from spiking, according to Huang.
Too many spikes in blood sugar levels could bring upon type 2 diabetes, according to the Harvard School of Public Health, as the process produces so much insulin that the body stops responding to it overtime, ceasing production.
Fruits rich in fiber, antioxidants, minerals and plant-based chemicals circumvent excess blood sugar spikes, says Huang.
Whole grain products contain soluble fiber -- the "good" fiber that makes for slow, smooth digestion, according to Huang, who remarks that studies have demonstrated that fiber consumption promotes weight loss.
"Vegetarian diets are more effective than non-vegetarian diets for weight loss," says Huang, emphasizing the need for long-term intervention trials to thoroughly investigate the benefits of vegetarian and vegan diets.
The study was published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Cuba on Tuesday became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis, the World Health Organization said.
"Eliminating transmission of a virus is one of the greatest public health achievements possible," said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan.
"This is a major victory in our long fight against HIV and sexually transmitted infections, and an important step towards having an AIDS-free generation."
Universal health coverage, improved access to tests and increased attention to maternal care were credited with the success, defined by health authorities as fewer than 50 cases of mother-to-child transmission of syphilis or HIV per 100,000 live births.
A small number of cases are allowed to persist, despite the certification, because antiretroviral treatment to prevent mother-to-child-transmission of HIV is not 100 percent effective.
Rather, WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) define the milestone as "a reduction of transmission to such a low level that it no longer constitutes a public health problem."
Health authorities have been working in Cuba since 2010 to "ensure early access to prenatal care, HIV and syphilis testing for both pregnant women and their partners, treatment for women who test positive and their babies, caesarean deliveries and substitution of breastfeeding," said a WHO statement.
"Cuba's success demonstrates that universal access and universal health coverage are feasible and indeed are the key to success, even against challenges as daunting as HIV," said PAHO Director Carissa Etienne.
"Cuba's achievement today provides inspiration for other countries to advance towards elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis."
Each year, 1.4 million women living with HIV around the world become pregnant.
Left untreated, they have a 15 to 45 percent chance of passing the virus to their children during pregnancy, labor, delivery or breastfeeding.
But the risk of transmission is just over one percent if antiretroviral medicines are given to both mothers and children.
The number children born annually with HIV was 400,000 in 2009.
By 2013, the number was down to 240,000 in 2013.
But intense effort is needed to meet the global target of less than 40,000 new child infections per year by 2015, health authorities say.
"It shows that ending the AIDS epidemic is possible and we expect Cuba to be the first of many countries coming forward to seek validation that they have ended their epidemics among children," said Michel Sidibe, executive director of the United Nations AIDS agency.
Jesus has been described as the best known figure in history, and also the least known. If you mentioned the name “Jesus” and someone asked Jesus who?, you might blink. Or laugh. Even people who don’t think Jesus was God, mostly believe they know a fair bit about him. You might be surprised that some of your most basic assumptions about Jesus are probably wrong.
We have no record of anything that was written about Jesus by eyewitnesses or other contemporaries during the time he would have lived or for decades thereafter, and as best scientists can tell, all physical relics of his life are later fakes. Nonetheless, based on archeological digs and artifacts, ancient texts and art, linguistic patterns, and even forensic science, we know a good deal about the time and culture in which the New Testament is set. This evidence points to some startling conclusions about who Jesus likely was—and wasn’t.
Cropped hair, not long. Jewish men at the time of Christ did not typically wear their hair long. A Roman triumphal arch of the time period depicts Jewish slaves with short hair. In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he addresses male hair length. “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?” (1 Corinthians 11:14 NRSV). During the 1960’s conservative Christians quoted this verse to express their disgust against the hippy movement and to label it as anti-Christian.
Married, not single. In 2012, when an ancient papyrus scrap came to light referring to the wife of Jesus (most likely a forgery), some Catholics and Evangelicals were scandalized at the very thought. But unlike the Catholic Church, Jews have no tradition of celibacy among religious leaders. Ancient writers documented exceptions like the Apostle Paul or the Essene sect precisely because they violated the norm. In the Gospels, Jesus is called rabbi; and all great rabbis that we know of were married. A rabbi being celibate would have been so unusual that some modern writers have argued that Jesus must have been gay. But a number of ancient texts, including the canonical New Testament, point to a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. For example, the non-canonical Gospel of Phillip says, “[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her [word missing].”
Hung on a pole, not necessarily a cross. For centuries scholars have known that the Greek New Testament word “stauros,” which gets translated into English as cross, can refer to a device of several shapes, commonly a single upright pole, “torture stake” or even tree. The Romans did not have a standard way of crucifying prisoners, and Josephus tells us that during the siege of Jerusalem soldiers nailed or tied their victims in a variety of positions. Early Christians may have centered in on the vertical pole with a crossbeam because it echoed the Egyptian ankh, a symbol of life, or simply because it was more artistically and symbolically distinctive than the alternatives. Imagine millions of people wearing a golden pole on a chain around their necks.
Short, not tall. The typical Jewish man at the time of the Roman Empire was just over five feet tall, which makes this a best guess for the height of Jesus. That he is typically depicted taller likely derives from the mental challenge people have in distinguishing physical stature from other kinds of stature. Great men are called “big men” and “larger than life.” In ancient times they often were assigned divine parentage and miraculous births, and the idea that Jesus was uniquely divine has created a strong pull over time to depict him as taller than is likely. A good illustration of this is the Shroud of Turin, which is just one of many such Jesus-shrouds that circulated during medieval times and which bears the (now reproduced) image of a man closer to six feet in height.
Born in a house, not the stable of an inn. The miraculous birth story of Jesus is a late, maybe 2nd century addition to the gospels, and consequently it contains many fascinating mythic elements and peculiarities. But the idea that Jesus was born in a stable got added to the Christmas story even later. In the original narrative, Joseph and Mary probably would have stayed with relatives, and the phrase “no room for them in the inn (gr: kataluma)” is better translated “no room for them in the upper room.” Later storytellers did not understand that people of the time might bring animals into their ground floor, as in Swiss housebarns, and they assumed that the presence of a manger implied a stable.
Named Joshua, not Jesus. The name Joshua (in Hebrew Y’hoshuʿa meaning “deliverance” or “salvation”), was common among Jews in the Ancient Near East as it is today. Joshua and Jesus are the same name, but are translated differently in our modern Bible to distinguish Jesus from the Joshua of the Old Testament, who leads the Hebrew people to the Promised Land. In actuality, though, the relationship between the two figures is fascinating and important. Some scholars believe that the New Testament gospels are mostly updated retellings of the more ancient Joshua story, remixed with episodes from stories of Elisha and Elijah and Moses. A modern parallel can be found in the way that Hollywood writers have reworked Shakespearean tropes and plot elements into dozens of modern movies (though for a very different purpose).
Number of apostles (12) from astrology, not history. Whether Jesus had 12 disciples who ranked above his other devotees is an open question, as their names vary from list to list. Since the Gospels echo the story of Joshua, the “12” apostles most immediately mirror the 12 tribes of Israel. But the number 12 was considered auspicious by many ancient people, including the Israelites, and the 189 repetitions of the number 12 in the Bible ultimately may derive from the same pre-historical roots as the 12 signs of the zodiac and 12 months of the year. Astrotheology or star worship preceded the Hebrew religion, and shaped both the Bible and Western religions more broadly. One might point to the 12 Olympian gods or 12 sons of Odin, or the 12 days of Christmas or 12 “legitimate” successors to the prophet Mohammed.
Prophecies recalled, not foretold. Even people who aren’t too sure about the divinity of Jesus sometimes think that the way he fulfilled prophecies was a bit spooky, like the writings of Nostradamus. In reality, Scooby Doo could solve this one in a single episode with four pieces of information: First, Old Testament prophecies were well known to 1st century Jews, and a messianic figure who wanted to fulfill some of these prophecies could simply do so. For example, in the book of Matthew, Jesus seeks a donkey to ride into Jerusalem “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet” (Matthew 21:4). Second, “gospels” are a genre of devotional literature rather than objective histories, which means that the authors had every reason to shape their stories around earlier predictions. Third, scholars now believe that some Bible texts once thought to be prophecies (for example in the Book of Revelation) actually relate to events that were past or current at the time of writing. Finally, a psychological phenomenon known as the “Barnum Effect” ensures that those who want to believe in prophecies (or astrology, for that matter) will find amazing coincidences if they look hard enough.
Some Jesus quotes not from Jesus, others uncertain. Lists of favorite Jesus sayings abound online. Some of the most popular are the Beatitudes (Blessed are the meek, etc.) or the story of the woman caught in adultery (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone) or the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which, we are told, sums up the Law and the Prophets.) Which words actually from Jesus? This question has been debated fiercely by everyone from 3rd century Catholic Councils to the 20th Century Jesus Seminar. Even Thomas Jefferson weighed in, but much remains unclear. The New Testament Gospels were written long after Jesus would have died, and no technology existed with which to record his teachings in real time, unless a he wrote them down himself, which he didn’t. We can be confident that at least some of the wise and timeless words and catchy proverbs attributed to Jesus are actually from earlier or later thinkers. For example, the Golden Rule was articulated before the time of Christ by the Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who similarly said it was the “whole Torah.” By contrast, the much loved story of the woman caught in adultery doesn’t appear in manuscripts until the 4th century. Attributing words (or whole texts) to a famous person was common in the Ancient Near East, because it gave those words extra weight. Small wonder, then, that so many genuinely valuable insights ended up, in one way or another, paired with the name of Jesus.
The person of Jesus, if indeed there was a single historical rabbi at the root of our traditions, is shrouded in the fog of history leaving us only with a set of hunches and traditions that far too often get treated as knowledge. The “facts” I have listed here are largely trivial; it doesn’t really matter whether Jesus was tall or short, or how he cut his hair. But it does matter, tremendously, that “facts” people claim to know about how Jesus saw himself, and God and humanity are equally tenuous. In the words of Mark Twain: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
The teachings attributed to Jesus mix enduring spiritual and moral insights with irrelevancies and Judaica and bits of Iron Age culture, some of which are truly awful. That leaves each of us, from the privileged vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and a responsibility to consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is real and how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little more recognition that we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to think, and a lot of what we know for sure is probably wrong.
Researchers such as psychologist Marvin Zuckerman have long noted the morbid curiosity of humans; there’s just something about horror and terror that captures our attention.
Indeed, there may be nothing more horrifying – and fascinating – than murder. With my colleague Tom Bowers at Penn State Harrisburg, I’ve studied the crimes and characteristics of mass murderers for years, and still, I’m alarmed by every reread of each case.
But it wasn’t until last year when an undergraduate student, Erin Murphy, approached me about studying female serial killers (FSKs) that I realized how little scientific literature existed on this topic. Many routinely hear about male serial killers (MSKs) – the Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys of true crime lore – and one can indeed find volumes of literature analyzing their killing sprees.
On the other hand, few have heard of Belle Gunness and Nannie Doss, whose crimes were no less heinous: Gunness killed more than 25 people in the late 19th century, including her children and husbands. Doss killed 11 people in the first half of the 20th century, including her own mother and grandson.
After parsing the data, we found that female serial killers do tend to possess a number of unique characteristics.
Middle- and upper-class killers of kin
The research that did exist on FSKs provided some good insight. Fresno State criminologist Eric Hickey – author of Serial Murderers and their Victims – interviewed 64 FSKs in the US, yielding a disturbing portrait of women who poisoned, shot and stabbed countless men, women and children.
Most were white and typically killed between seven and 10 victims. They were more likely to murder family members than strangers. And even though the most prevalent motive for murder was money, most of the murderers were middle- and upper-class.
Other research used smaller samples, but had notable findings. For example, in a 2011 study, Amanda Farrell, Robert Keppel and Victoria Titterington reviewed newspaper reports of 10 American FSKs. They found that FSKs tended to operate for a substantially longer time than did MSKs, while 80% knew their victims. Farrell and her colleagues – along with Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, who interviewed eight FSKs in a 2000 study – pointed out that, ironically, nursing is an occupation that’s overrepresented among FSKs.
Fleshing out the profile
So when we decided to study FSKs, we approached the topic with two main goals.
First, we wanted to document the means, motives and histories of these criminals with a larger, more recent sample (the larger the sample size, the more likely the findings and patterns are to reflect true life). Moreover, being psychologists, we found a relative absence of research on the psychology of FSKs.
Like Farrell and her colleagues, we used the mass media approach to study female serial killers.
We found the internet site Murderpedia.org to be a valuable consolidation of media reports of murder, and we found it verifiable 100% of the time. In the end, we collected profiles of 64 female serial killers (the same number Hickey found) who committed their crimes in the US between 1821 and 2008.
Although our findings were limited to information that newspapers chose to include about these women and their crimes, our results lend validity to the mass media approach.
Along the lines of previous studies, we found that most FSKs were middle- and upper-class.
Almost all (92%) knew their victims, almost all were white, and their most common means to kill was poison, while the primary motive for murder was money.
Most of these women had earned college degrees or had attained at least some higher education. They held a wide variety of jobs, ranging from religious teacher to prostitute. Nearly 40% worked in health-related fields as nurses or aides, and about 22% worked in direct caregiving roles (mother and babysitter).
Most FSKs were married at some point. In fact, these serial killers were serial monogamists – married, on average, twice, and as many as seven times. Where we could ascertain appearance, most were reported to be average to above-average in attractiveness; where we could ascertain religion, 100% were Christian.
Nearly two-thirds were related to their victims, nearly one-third killed their significant others and about 44% killed their own biological children. More than half the sample killed children, and about one-quarter killed those who were elderly or infirm, those who had little chance of fighting back.
An aberration of unconscious drives?
From an evolutionary perspective, two important pictures emerged.
First, our data (in line with other studies) showed that female serial killers primarily kill for money. Previous research, such as Eric Hickey’s, has shown that male serial killers primarily kill for sex.
This aligns with evolutionary psychological theory. Robert Trivers' 1972 work pointed out that due to their limited reproductive potential (relatively few ova), women have evolved to place a premium on securing resources (likely through wise mate choices in the ancestral environment). Conversely, virtually unlimited reproductive potential (relatively unlimited sperm) has likely predisposed men to seek a vast number of sexual opportunities.
Of course, I’m not saying we evolved to be serial killers. What I am saying is that an aberration of genetically mediated unconscious drives might explain some of the reasons for these crimes. These urges could also explain some of the differences between male serial killers and female serial killers.
Second, research has shown that male serial killers tend to stalk and kill strangers. But FSKs tend to kill people they know. It seems, then, that MSKs are hunters and FSKs are gatherers. Although aberrant, this evinces the psyche operating much like the conditions of our ancestral environment.
So, do we know for sure what makes a woman turn into a serial killer? Sadly, no. Even though brain imaging studies, such as psychologist Adrian Raine’s, do point to some trends, we can’t predict this with certainty.
Nonetheless, we’re clearly fascinated by murder, and perhaps morbid curiosity operates from an innate drive to pay attention to phenomena that can ultimately harm us. Creating an informed profile of the “typical” female serial killer will, we hope, lead to further analysis and, possibly, prevention.
As we harvest ever more human genomes one fact remains unshakeable: race does not exist
Barely a week goes by without some dispiriting tale of racism seeping into the public consciousness: the endless stream of Ukip supporters expressing some ill-conceived and unimaginative hate; football hooligans pushing a black man from a train . I am partly of Indian descent, a bit swarthy, and my first experience of racism was more baffling than upsetting. In 1982, my dad, sister and I were at the Co-op in a small village in Suffolk where we lived, when some boys shouted “ Coco and Leroy ” at us. Fame was the big hit on telly at the time, and they were the lead characters. My sister and I thought this was excellent: both amazing dancers and supremely attractive: we did bad splits all the way home.
As someone who writes about evolution and genetics – both of which involve the study of inheritance, and both of which rely on making quantitative comparisons between living things – I often receive letters from people associating Darwin with racism, usually citing the use of the words “favoured races” in the lengthy subtitle to his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species . Of course, Darwin doesn’t discuss humans in that great book, and “races” was used to describe groups within non-human species. Contemporary use of language must be taken into account.
Obviously, these views are as absurd as they are unacceptable today, as bewildering as calling two half-Indian kids the stage names of two African-American actors. Galton is a problem figure, simultaneously a great scientist and a horror. Among his myriad contributions to science, he invented statistical tools we still use today, and formalised biometrics on humans in new ways. He coined the phrase “nature versus nurture”, which has persistently blighted discussions of genetics, implying that these two factors are in conflict, when in fact they are in concert. It was Galton who gave us the word “eugenics”, too, an idea that didn’t carry the same poisonous stigma it does today. He was enthusiastic about improving the British “stock”, prompted by the paucity of healthy recruits for the Boer war .
Genetics has a blighted past with regards to race. Even today important figures express unsupportable racist views
Many prominent figures were influenced by Galton: Marie Stopes argued forcefully for the compulsory “sterilisation of those unfit for parenthood”. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Churchill desired the neutering of the “feeble-minded”, as was the parlance in Edwardian days. At University College London, Galton founded the Eugenics Records Office, which became the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. By the time I studied there in the 1990s, it had long since dropped that toxic word to become the Galton Laboratory of the Department of Human Genetics.
Genetics has a blighted past with regards to race. Even today, important figures from its history – notably James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix – express unsupportable racist views . The irony is that while Galton spawned a field with the intention of revealing essential racial differences between the peoples of the Earth, his legacy – human genetics – has shown he was wrong. Most modern geneticists are much less like Galton and more like Darwin. A dreadful book published last year by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade espoused views about racial differences seemingly backed by genetics. As with Watson, the reaction from geneticists was uniformly dismissive, that he had failed to understand the field, and misrepresented their work.
We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them. Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease , once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on.
We harvest thousands of human genomes every week. Last month, the UK launched the 100,000 Genomes project to identify genetic bases for many diseases, but within that booty we will also find more of the secret history of our species, our DNA mixed and remixed through endless sex and continuous migration. We are too horny and mobile to have stuck to our own kind for very long.
Race doesn’t exist, racism does. But we can now confine it to opinions and not pretend that there might be any scientific validity in bigotry.
• This article was amended on 29 June 2015. An earlier version said Darwin did not think human races might be separate sub-species. In fact he did refer to human races as sub-species.
An unmanned SpaceX rocket exploded about two minutes after liftoff from Florida on Sunday, destroying a cargo ship bound for the International Space Station in the latest in a string of mishaps in supplying the orbiting outpost.
The 208-foot-tall (63-meter) Falcon 9 rocket had flown 18 times previously since its 2010 debut, all successfully. Those missions included six station cargo runs for NASA under a 15-flight contract worth more than $2 billion.
However SpaceX, a company founded and owned by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, has twice previously tried and failed in an experiment to land the rocket on a platform in the ocean.
Sunday's accident soon after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was the second successive botched mission to resupply the space station. A Russian Progress cargo ship failed to reach the outpost in April following a problem with its Soyuz launcher.
The cause of Sunday’s explosion was not yet clear, officials said.
"This was a blow to us. We lost a lot of research equipment on this flight," NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier told a news conference.
The explosion also marks a setback for SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies. The company was poised to compete for the first time against United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp <LMT.N> and Boeing Co <BA.N> and the current sole launch provider for military and spy satellite launches, to launch a GPS III satellite.
An investigation into the explosion will ground the Falcon 9 rockets for "a number of months or so" but less than a year, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told the news conference.
A preliminary analysis indicated a problem with the rocket's upper-stage engine, Musk said on Twitter.
The company had hoped to use the rocket’s discarded 14-story-tall first stage in an innovative landing test, part of its overall goal to refurbish and refly its rockets, slashing launch costs.
A platform had been stationed in the Atlantic Ocean in hopes of serving as a landing pad. Instead, the rocket broke apart in mid-air. Recovery teams were dispatched to attempt to collect debris for analysis.
Two previous experiments, in January and April, came close to succeeding but technical problems caused the rockets to crash into the platform.
SPACE STATION SUPPLIES
The International Space Station crew - two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut - has about four months of food and supplies on board, so the loss of the cargo shipment does not pose an immediate problem for them, said NASA station program manager Mike Suffredini.
The station is expected to be returned to its full, six-member crew in July. But if food or water supplies dwindled to 45 days, some of the crew could return home via the Russian Soyuz capsules that are parked at the outpost.
Sunday’s accident leaves the United States temporarily dependent on Russia and Japan to resupply the station. NASA’s second cargo transporter, run by Orbital ATK <OA.N>, remains grounded following a launch accident in October.
Russia hopes to return its troubled Soyuz rocket and Progress cargo ship to flight on Friday. Japan is slated to fly its HTV capsule to the station in August.
Sunday’s problem started about two minutes and 19 seconds after liftoff when SpaceX lost contact with the Falcon, NASA launch commentator George Diller said.
The accident occurred just before the rocket was to discard its first stage two minutes and 39 seconds after liftoff.
Despite the explosion, one SpaceX customer voiced support in the company and the Falcon 9.
"One inevitable failure for such a young system should not in any way shake anyone's faith in the rocket or the team. What's amazing is that it took this long to happen," said Mike Gold, business operations director with Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace.
The Dragon capsule was loaded with 5,461 pounds (2,477 kg) of food, clothing, equipment and science experiments for the space station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 260 miles (420 km) above Earth.
Dragon is the only one of the four cargo ships flying to the station that can return science experiments and gear to Earth. The other spacecraft - Russia’s Progress, Orbital’s Cygnus and Japan’s HTV - burn up in the atmosphere after they make their deliveries and are released back into space.
Equipment lost aboard Dragon include a spacesuit, water filtration equipment, an oxygen tank and a docking system so space taxis under development by SpaceX and Boeing can park at the station. NASA hopes to turn over crew transportation to the U.S. companies before the end of 2017, breaking Russia’s monopoly.
Including its station cargo runs for NASA, SpaceX has a backlog of nearly 50 missions, worth more than $7 billion, including dozens of commercial communications satellites.
The company last month won U.S. Air Force certification to fly military and national security missions on the Falcon 9.
SpaceX holds a second NASA contract, worth up to $2.6 billion, to upgrade its Dragon capsule to fly astronauts to the station. Boeing’s contract is worth up $4.2 billion.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington; Editing by Eric Beech and Frances Kerry)
Disney/Pixar’s newest film, Inside Out, tells the story of 11-year-old Riley and her difficulty dealing with a family move to San Francisco. The film is getting a lot of attention for its depiction of emotion and memory.
The filmmakers consulted with neuroscientists and psychologists to help make sure they got the science right. As a cognitive psychologist who studies memory, I was excited to see how the film showed the relationship between memory and emotion.
The action primarily takes place within Riley’s mind, with anthropomorphic emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – as the main characters. Riley’s mind is shown to be vast, comprising many individual units (Imagination Land and Abstract Thought, for instance). The central location of the story is Headquarters, which corresponds to the current contents of Riley’s consciousness – what she is perceiving from the world around her and what the emotions and other “mind workers” choose to show her in the form of memories or ideas.
In some respects, the movie captures the science behind memory and emotion really well, such as how remembering past events can regulate emotion. Memories allow us to mentally time travel and to relive the past in the present. The character of Joy frequently recalls past memories of pleasant events in order to make Riley happy in the moment.
One recurring plot point is how memories can be changed when they are remembered. In the movie, memories are shown as translucent globes encapsulating events. Each globe takes on a different hue depending on the primary emotion of the event. A golden-hued joyful memory starts to turn blue when held by Sadness, showing the transformation of a previously happy memory to one that becomes bittersweet with the acknowledgment of loss. It’s well-established that the emotional character of events is sometimes altered as we recall them. Although certainly some events become more negative over time (which is depicted in the film), more often memories become more positive in retrospect. This positivity bias in remembering the past has been called the Pollyanna Principle, and it is a normal, healthy aspect of remembering.
The relationship between sleep and memory is also portrayed well. Sleep is presented as a time for moving the day’s memories into long-term storage. We know that sleep is an active part of the consolidation process which makes memories of all types more durable. And, dreams are shown to comprise components of the days’ events, only distorted and with the addition of fantastical and absurd elements. This seems to reflect how our minds consolidate memories and make sense of what we learn.
Inside Out does well when it comes to the interplay of memory and emotion, but the memory basics are a bit misleading.
When we remember something, we put the pieces back together.
The film shows memories as stable and complete representations of actual events – something we know is not the case. The events of Riley’s day are automatically “encoded” into a single globe. Each memory globe is “stored” somewhere on a shelf in a vast long-term storage library. Memories are “retrieved” and sent intact and exact, back to Headquarters and, therefore, to consciousness.
That might be a handy visual metaphor for memory, but it’s not actually how memory works. We do encode events from our daily life without a deliberate intention to learn or remember them. For instance, you remember what you had for breakfast today even though you did not have to try to remember that information. But, our brain doesn’t store each memory as an individual whole unit.
Instead scholars believe that the components of events are processed by individual neural modules. Our brain has separate systems for basic cognitive functions: vision, hearing, language, emotion and so on. Visual components are processed by the visual system, auditory components by the auditory system, emotional components by the limbic system. Memories are stored in bits and pieces all over your brain. There is no globe sitting on a shelf that can be retrieved and used to reproduce the event exactly as it happened.
When we retrieve a memory, we reconstruct it from those component pieces. We use the same neural systems that encoded the components to see the event in our mind’s eye, hear it in our mind’s ear and re-experience the emotions associated with the event. That reconstructive process is influenced by what we know about the world around us, our current thoughts and beliefs, and our ongoing goals. So our memories can change over time, just as we do through the years.
In fact, each time we remember an event, we are simultaneously re-encoding that event, making it less likely to be forgotten.
The brain doesn’t discard old memories
Forgetting is another area where the movie represents a common but unsupported theory. The memory globes are shown as becoming less colorful and more dim as they grow older and are not retrieved. They eventually turn dark and gray and are sent to the “memory dump” where they turn to dust and disappear forever. This corresponds to a decay theory of forgetting, which suggests that time leads to permanent loss of information.
But psychologists tend to think of forgetting more as a temporary lapse in memory. There is much research to show that although some information cannot be recalled at will, there is still evidence of prior learning. The information may come to mind with the right reminder, or it may be more quickly recognized, or it may take less time to re-learn that information. Full-fledged memories may fade, but they leave some trace behind.
In the film, memories are stored on shelves, each in a single space like books in a library. This doesn’t capture how interconnected our memories are. Memories are stored in component parts. Each individual memory shares features with many other memories – such as the processing components that encode each element, the content details like who was there, where the event took place, or when the event occurred, and the abstract themes like spiritual experiences, romantic moments, or professional accomplishments.
The movie tries to capture our ability to identify overarching themes and causal chains among our memories by showing how “core memories” fuel aspects of Riley’s personality, but this serves to emphasize individual memories rather than constellations of interrelated memories. Although we may have specific self-defining memories, these are typically quintessential examples of larger patterns in our lives. Our memory is less like the public library with many books on the shelves and more like Wikipedia with its many linked pages of information.
Overall, the movie does a great job of showing the complexity of the human mind. Even if not all of the details are completely accurate, the metaphors are grounded in a real understanding of psychological science. Yes, it perpetuates some myths about memory, but to be fair, the focus is on feelings, and it conveys the relationship between memory and emotion well. Plus, it’s a fun adventure story with a terrific message that is well worth watching.
