The Space Shuttle Endeavour blasts off on March 11, 2008. (NASA)

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The Space Shuttle Endeavour blasts off on March 11, 2008. (NASA)
For worriers, expressive writing cools brain on stressful tasks
Chronic worriers, take note: Simply writing about your feelings may help you perform an upcoming stressful task more efficiently, finds a Michigan State University study that measured participants’ brain activity.
The research, funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, provides the first neural evidence for the benefits of expressive writing, said lead author Hans Schroder, an MSU doctoral student in psychology and a clinical intern at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital.
“Worrying takes up cognitive resources; it’s kind of like people who struggle with worry are constantly multitasking – they are doing one task and trying to monitor and suppress their worries at the same time,” Schroder said. “Our findings show that if you get these worries out of your head through expressive writing, those cognitive resources are freed up to work toward the task you’re completing and you become more efficient.”
Schroder conducted the study at Michigan State with Jason Moser, associate professor of psychology and director of MSU’s Clinical Psychophysiology Lab, and Tim Moran, a Spartan graduate who’s now a research scientist at Emory University. The findings are published online in the journal Psychophysiology.
For the study, college students identified as chronically anxious through a validated screening measure completed a computer-based “flanker task” that measured their response accuracy and reaction times. Before the task, about half of the participants wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings about the upcoming task for eight minutes; the other half, in the control condition, wrote about what they did the day before.
While the two groups performed at about the same level for speed and accuracy, the expressive-writing group performed the flanker task more efficiently, meaning they used fewer brain resources, measured with electroencephalography, or EEG, in the process.
Moser uses a car analogy to describe the effect. “Here, worried college students who wrote about their worries were able to offload these worries and run more like a brand new Prius,” he said, “whereas the worried students who didn’t offload their worries ran more like a ’74 Impala – guzzling more brain gas to achieve the same outcomes on the task.”
While much previous research has shown that expressive writing can help individuals process past traumas or stressful events, the current study suggests the same technique can help people – especially worriers – prepare for stressful tasks in the future.
“Expressive writing makes the mind work less hard on upcoming stressful tasks, which is what worriers often get “burned out” over, their worried minds working harder and hotter,” Moser said. “This technique takes the edge off their brains so they can perform the task with a ‘cooler head.’”
Are any of my followers African American graduate women in physics?
Did you know about The List: https://www.aawip.com/the-physicists
Are you on the list? Do you want to be added?
This is incredibly cool!
Journal paper here.
Holy crap this is awesome!
Fabulous!
Wuat!
That’s so cool!
Ruth Hubbard (1924-2016) was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship in biology at Harvard University. Her lifelong research brought important contributions to the understanding of vision in vertebrates and invertebrates.
Born in Vienna, she moved to the US as a teenager fleeing from Nazism. She obtained her PhD in biology from Radcliffe University in 1950. She was a strong critic of the biological theory of women’s inequality, as demonstrated by her book The Politics of Women’s Biology.
Scientists stumble across a huge group of previously unknown Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Numbering more than 1.5 million birds, they were first noticed when great patches of their poo, or guano, showed up in pictures taken from space.
Beautiful and turbulent Jupiter, observed by the Voyager 1 space probe on March 1, 1979. (NASA)
Astronaut Mae Jemison, first African-American woman in space, seen here aboard the Shuttle Endeavour, September 1992.
(National Archives)
This tweet from scientist Jacquelyn Gill (@JacqelynGill) went viral, and for good reason. The war on science continues, and she summed up this story perfectly into 3 sentences on Twitter.
Read the full article: http://bit.ly/2AxVBf3
Take action to keep standing up for science: http://bit.ly/2gOFm5N
A sign in front of the Antares launch pad at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility
via reddit
TODAY IN HISTORY: A Navy helicopter hoists Gemini 12 astronaut Buzz Aldrin out of the water, November 15, 1966.
NIST Researchers Develop Nanoscale Devices That Respond to the Angle of Incident Light
Imagine a miniature device that suffuses each room in your house with a different hue of the rainbow—purple for the living room, perhaps, blue for the bedroom, green for the kitchen. A team led by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has, for the first time, developed nanoscale devices that divide incident white light into its component colors based on the direction of illumination, or directs these colors to a predetermined set of output angles.
Viewed from afar, the device, referred to as a directional color filter, resembles a diffraction grating, a flat metal surface containing parallel grooves or slits that split light into different colors. However, unlike a grating, the nanometer-scale grooves etched into the opaque metal film are not periodic—not equally spaced. They are either a set of grooved lines or concentric circles that vary in spacing, much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. These properties shrink the size of the filter and allow it to perform many more functions than a grating can.
For instance, the device’s nonuniform, or aperiodic, grid can be tailored to send a particular wavelength of light to any desired location. The filter has several promising applications, including generating closely spaced red, green and blue color pixels for displays, harvesting solar energy, sensing the direction of incoming light and measuring the thickness of ultrathin coatings placed atop the filter.
Read more.
NGC 2841 is a striking spiral galaxy located in Ursa Major, teaming with cosmic dust & gases dancing around its center. Older, yellow stars reside in the galaxy’s heart, whereas the younger, blue stars live along the twisting spirals. It was discovered by William Herschel in the late 1780′s. (from the book Hubble’s Universe: Greatest Discoveries and Latest Images)
Researchers, building on findings from work involving the Large Hadron Collider, have found a theoretical new form of energy. This new, renewable option is more powerful than nuclear by fusing quarks into baryons.
To reduce the emissions fueling climate change and develop more efficient ways of generating energy, while focusing on the bottom line, governments and private institutions all over the world have been turning to renewable energy. And while solar and wind energy advance and become more widely accepted, scientists continue to explore the possibility of stabilizing nuclear fusion as a truly renewable energy source that far outperforms current options.
But what if there’s an even better source of energy that’s also potentially less volatile than nuclear fusion? This possibility is what researchers from Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago proposed in a new study published in the journal Nature.
Continue Reading.
Carl Sagan holding one of the two Pioneer plaques he helped design with astronomer and astrophysicist, Frank Drake. The artwork was prepared by Linda Salzman Sagan, Sagan’s wife at the time. NASA gave them only 3 weeks to prepare the message. 1972
via reddit
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ON THIS DAY: Earth, Moon, and the Space Shuttle Discovery on November 6, 1998.
(NASA)
The Genius of Marie Curie
Growing up in Warsaw in Russian-occupied Poland, the young Marie Curie, originally named Maria Sklodowska, was a brilliant student, but she faced some challenging barriers. As a woman, she was barred from pursuing higher education, so in an act of defiance, Marie enrolled in the Floating University, a secret institution that provided clandestine education to Polish youth. By saving money and working as a governess and tutor, she eventually was able to move to Paris to study at the reputed Sorbonne. here, Marie earned both a physics and mathematics degree surviving largely on bread and tea, and sometimes fainting from near starvation.
In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium spontaneously emitted a mysterious X-ray-like radiation that could interact with photographic film. Curie soon found that the element thorium emitted similar radiation. Most importantly, the strength of the radiation depended solely on the element’s quantity, and was not affected by physical or chemical changes. This led her to conclude that radiation was coming from something fundamental within the atoms of each element. The idea was radical and helped to disprove the long-standing model of atoms as indivisible objects. Next, by focusing on a super radioactive ore called pitchblende, the Curies realized that uranium alone couldn’t be creating all the radiation. So, were there other radioactive elements that might be responsible?
In 1898, they reported two new elements, polonium, named for Marie’s native Poland, and radium, the Latin word for ray. They also coined the term radioactivity along the way. By 1902, the Curies had extracted a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride salt from several tons of pitchblende, an incredible feat at the time. Later that year, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel were nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics, but Marie was overlooked. Pierre took a stand in support of his wife’s well-earned recognition. And so both of the Curies and Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize, making Marie Curie the first female Nobel Laureate.
In 1911, she won yet another Nobel, this time in chemistry for her earlier discovery of radium and polonium, and her extraction and analysis of pure radium and its compounds. This made her the first, and to this date, only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Professor Curie put her discoveries to work, changing the landscape of medical research and treatments. She opened mobile radiology units during World War I, and investigated radiation’s effects on tumors.
However, these benefits to humanity may have come at a high personal cost. Curie died in 1934 of a bone marrow disease, which many today think was caused by her radiation exposure. Marie Curie’s revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. For good or ill, her discoveries in radiation launched a new era, unearthing some of science’s greatest secrets.
From the TED-Ed Lesson The genius of Marie Curie - Shohini Ghose
Animation by Anna Nowakowska
Happy Birthday to Marie Curie!