Robert L. Spitzer retired years ago but his influence has not. That’s why his recantation last month of his own paper, research purporting to show that therapy could turn some homosexuals into heterosexuals, has such extraordinary resonance. The work of Dr. Spitzer, a psychiatrist and Columbia University emeritus professor–who actually got homosexuality removed from the medical list of mental disorders in 1973–rippled across society.
Robert Spitzer has recanted his paper claiming homosexuality can be changed.
This is not the usual apology for a scientific error. “I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy,” Dr. Spitzer has written in a letter to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which published his paper in 20…
Two phantoms have come back to life, making their presence felt in the real world. One is a phantom body locked in a paralyzed patient’s mind, which has taken control of a robot arm. The other is a research venture, locked into a company that vanished in the economic disaster of 2008, only to reappear as academic science, supported by major universities, that today scored a dramatic success.
But what’s truly amazing here are the patients, doing what you see in this photo: A woman named Cathy, who hasn’t been able to move anything below her neck for 15 years, is drinking coffee from a bottle she lifted to her lips, with a computerized arm that is wired into her brain. The connection, a plug in the top of her head, is called BrainGate, and it was developed by the Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue and his team. What BrainGate and Cathy have done, along with similar feats by a…
Forget that visit to the Army-Navy store for camouflage gear. Researchers at the University of Bristol are developing plastics that change colors as fast as flicking a switch, and do it in the same way that squid and zebrafish hide themselves from predators. Check out this easily-seen, nondisguised video:
The first approach mimics what squids do: The animals’ cells have pigment sacs that squeeze and expand to create large blotches of color. The Bristol scientists created polymer bands that squeeze in the same way when triggered by an electric current, seen in the first part of the video.
Zebrafish use a different tactic for disguise. They pump pigment out to their skin from a central holding tank. Again scientists used electricity-driven polymers, but this time—as shown in the second video segment—they constructed one pump that squirts out a mixture of black ink and water, …
Birds navigate incredibly long distances using what the neuroscientist David Keays calls “a sixth sense”: the ability to detect how the earth’s magnetic field changes at different locations around the planet. The scientist, from the Institute of Molecular Pathology, in Vienna, has been hunting in vain for the cells responsible. But in what Mr. Keays calls “a stunning piece of work,” two other researchers have found cells in the pigeon brain that respond to specific changes in magnetism.
The cells, in the most primitive brain region, the stem, “encode the direction, intensity, and polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field,” one of those scientists, David Dickman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, told me. “These cells have the key ingredients to form maps of spatial directional heading and location, similar to the GPS in your car or cellphone.” He and his colleague…
The swallows will still come back to Capistrano, albatrosses will wing their way across vast oceans, and homing pigeons will still arrive at home. But scientists are no longer sure how they do it.
Until last week, some thought they had a pretty good idea. Birds had both a magnetic compass and a map that they followed over impossibly long distances. But research published in the latest issue of Natureshows that map-sensing cells that were supposedly built into a bird’s beak don’t really exist. The cells that researchers thought were there are actually of a completely different kind.
“They are immune cells called macrophages, and not neurons that communicate with the brain,” says David Keays, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Molecular Pathology, in Vienna, and lead author of the new paper. “They can’t detect magnetic fields.”
There’s a whole lot of cheating going on. More than 60 percent of college undergraduates, and more than 40 percent of graduate students, admit to cheating in some way on their written work, according to a national survey by Clemson University’s International Center for Academic Integrity. Now one graduate student has come up with a reason for all this: income inequality.
Lukas Neville, a doctoral student at Queen’s University in Ontario, reports in the latest issue of Psychological Science that there’s more evidence of academic dishonesty in U.S. states with bigger gaps between the rich and the poor. Those gaps, he speculates, erode trust among people—something that’s been found by other researchers—and less trust means more cheating.
The evidence in the paper has limits. For starters, it’s circumstantial, based on the frequency of Google searches for things that seem…
Though not from a gorilla, the new fossils fit into an outline of a gorilla foot
Standing and striding on two feet has long been viewed as a hallmark of humanity. One of the strongest claims for Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton, as a direct human ancestor was that her feet and hips looked decidedly bipedal. But today scientists announced evidence for another forerunner, living at the same time as Lucy’s species, that spent most of its time in trees but also could walk.
The new fossil, a fragment of a right foot, bolsters the notion that before our genus, Homo, stepped from the mists of antiquity, there was a flourishing period of experimentation, as several creatures tried different ways of getting out of the trees and onto the ground. “Our evolution was not characterized by a single…
It’s not a real jellyfish, but an incredible simulation made of advanced flexible material. And it’s powered not by gas or electricity, but by the simple combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Robojelly is just a prototype now, but its developers at the University of Texas at Dallas and at Virginia Tech say in a new paper that the six-inch robot could harvest its fuel directly from the ocean and be used to monitor ecosystems. It could also be used for surveillance work; the machine was developed with U.S. Navy money.
Right now Robojelly is powered by tanks of hydrogen and oxygen. The atoms combine with a platinum catalyst to produce heat, which in turn causes the robot’s artificial muscles to contract, squeezing like a real jellyfish and propelling the mechanism through the water. Eventually the scientists think they can jettison the tanks and use hydrogen and oxygen from the water…
Why bar flies are drawn to booze. / Photo courtesy Bernt Rostad, Creative Commons license
It’s the ultimate seedy bar scene: Late in the evening, a guy makes a move on a woman sitting on the next bar stool, who turns him down. Rebuffed, he turns to the bartender and drowns his sorrows in another beer. That scene has now been played out, not in a bar, but in a modern lab at the University of California at San Francisco, and not with people but with flies.
Male fruit flies, rejected in their attempts to mate, turn to alcohol-soaked food, researchers reported today in the journal Science. Scientists think the discovery, along with evidence that the behavior seems to be driven by a small molecule in the brain, may open a window onto the self-destructive actions of alcoholics and drug addicts.
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