New York research facilities feel Sandy’s wrath
Brendan Borrell and Helen Shen discuss in the News Blog the devastating damage that Hurricane Sandy has had on research institutes in and around NYC:
Although New York University (NYU) was clearly the research facility hardest hit by this week’s storm, others were also affected. Leslie Vosshall, who studies the olfactory system of mosquitoes at Rockefeller University, located about 35 blocks further up river from NYU, shut down a computer server in the basement on Sunday, but fears it could have been damaged from flooding. She has had to wait for the university to pump out the water, before she can check on it. “We do have some of the data backed up elsewhere, but it would set us back significantly.”
Asian elephant says “hello” in Korean
An Asian elephant named Koshik can produce several recognizable Korean words, reports Ewen Callaway in the News Blog:
Watch the video above and continue to the post to find out more.
Playing Dumb – Does being in a group setting affect your IQ?
This week’s Soapbox Science guest blogger is Marcia Malory, who questions whether being in a group setting affects your IQ?
Do you ever downplay your intelligence when you are around others? Recently, an experiment was performed to determine how being in a group setting affects IQ test results. University students took pencil and paper IQ tests to determine their baseline IQ scores. They were not told their results.
Afterwards, the subjects had to take another IQ test – a multiple-choice exam given on a computer. Subjects were divided into groups of five. After answering a question, each was told how she or he ranked compared with the other four members of the group and the relative rank of one other group member. The researchers focused on subjects who had scored about the same on the baseline IQ test; they had a mean IQ of 126.
Although all of the subjects had similar baseline IQs, the results on the computer test varied widely. The IQs of some subjects stayed about the same, but the IQs of other subjects dropped dramatically. The researchers divided the test takers into two groups – “high performers”, who scored above the new median, and “low performers”, who scored below that median. The IQs of the low performers dropped by an average of 17.4 points.
Find out more about the relationship between social status and expressed intelligence in this guest blog post.
Bird of the week!
This week’s bird, featured by Eric Sawyer over at Scitable, is the Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker:
If you see an orderly row of holes drilled into a tree, they could well be the aftermath of the strikingly beautiful yellow-bellied sapsucker.
Global vaccination coverage improves, but rotavirus gap is wide
Elie Dolgin explains in the Spoonful of Medicine blog that according to the latest global survey of routine vaccine coverage, tens of millions of children last year missed out on some or all of the basic recommended immunizations:
The rotavirus vaccine as well as the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, which protects against Streptococcus pneumoniae, were administered to less than 15% of all kids outside the Americas and Europe, the report found. Similarly, global coverage of the Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine, which protects against a bacterium responsible for bacteremia and pneumonia, among other diseases, was only 43% last year among youngsters, despite the shot being recommended in routine childhood vaccination schedules in more than 90% of the world’s nations.
More details can be found in Elie’s post.
Ultimate Writing Challenge: Science Writing for Kids
SciLogs blogger, Matt Shipman suggests in his latest post, if you want to challenge yourself as a writer, write about science for kids:
Specifically, try to explain a basic science concept to children under the age of eight. I tried it recently and learned a few things along the way.
I’m writing about this here because getting people excited about science is a lot easier if you catch their interest as children – and because science communication includes science communication for kids.
Happy Halloween
In his latest cartoon, Viktor Poór reveals that even the Mars rover Curiosity celebrates Halloween in his/her own way:
