Monthly Archives: October 2012

Playing Dumb – Does being in a group setting affect your IQ?

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Marcia Malory began her academic career as a chemistry student but ended up receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Since then, she has worked in various industries in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is interested in how science, culture and politics interact.  Visit her website or follow her on Twitter @sciencefindout.  

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. Continue reading →

An Elevator Pitch for a Research Project

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Rena Katz graduated this June with a Bachelor of Science in Physics from MIT.  She received first place in the 2011-2012 DeWitt Wallace Prize for Science Writing for the Public, from the MIT Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies.  From June 2011 to May 2012 she was employed at the MIT Quanta Lab, an experience which inspired this post. 

Communication about science doesn’t need to be time-consuming or distracting from research — it can be as simple as being able to excite someone about your research in one sentence.  Scientific projects are often considered too complex to be understandable with only a short explanation.  While articles in national magazines are crucial for the distribution of scientific knowledge to the public, a quick chat with a prospective lab assistant, new acquaintance at a party, or your next door neighbor is also a great opportunity to disseminate information about cutting-edge research and the scientific process.  Continue reading →

It Sounds Almost Like Stereo: Elizabeth Bass on Improvisational Acting with Scientists

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Marc Kuchner is the author of Marketing for Scientists, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a country songwriter. He is the co-inventor of the band-limited coronagraph, a tool for finding planets around other stars that will be part of the James Webb Space Telescope. He is also known for his work on planets with exotic chemistries: ocean planets, helium planets, and carbon planets. Kuchner received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech. He was awarded the 2009 SPIE early career achievement award for his work on planet hunting. He has contributed to more than 100 research papers and published articles in journals including the Astrophysical Journal, Nature, and Astrobiology. He appears as an expert commentator in the Emmy nominated National Geographic television show “Alien Earths” and frequently writes articles in Astronomy Magazine. For more career tips for scientists, go to www.marketingforscientists.com. You can also follow Marc on Twitter @marckuchner.

Elizabeth Bass’s job title doesn’t sound odd; she is the director of the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.  But what she does may strike you as challenging to say the least.  Founded in 2009 at the urging of Alan Alda, the Center for Communicating Science helps scientists become better communicators using, among other things, exercises in improvisational acting. Continue reading →

Stem cells may be too young to accurately model age-related brain disorders

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JosephJoseph Jebelli is a Neuroscience PhD Candidate at University College London (UCL). His research involves studying the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

New research suggests that human embryonic stem cells, which are experimentally manipulated to develop into mature neurons to model brain diseases, may in fact more closely represent foetal brain cells than those seen in the ageing brains of disease sufferers.

Over the past 20 years, scientists have been exploring the potential of stem cells to provide therapeutic intervention in a variety of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and stroke.

The aims are twofold: 1. to harness them as a cellular transplantation therapy, effectively replacing the cells lost in disease, and 2. to generate particular types of neurons in isolation, and to examine what causes them to die in the brain in the first place. At present, the latter is a more realistic goal. Continue reading →