Author Archives: Guest Post

Psychological Effects of BP Oil Spill Go Beyond Residents of Impacted Shorelines

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The psychological effects of the BP oil spill, the largest recorded environmental disaster in human history, extend far beyond people living around the areas of the Gulf of Mexico that were directly impacted by the spill, a new study finds.

Writing in the online edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, a publication of the National Institutes of Health, the researchers reported that even in areas that did not have oil exposure, people still experienced elevated levels of anxiety and depression and reduced ability to show resilience in difficult emotional and financial situations because of the disaster. (more…)

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Regrowing Hair: UCLA-VA Researchers May Have Accidentally Discovered a Solution

It has been long known that stress plays a part not just in the graying of hair but in hair loss as well. Over the years, numerous hair-restoration remedies have emerged, ranging from hucksters’ “miracle solvents” to legitimate medications such as minoxidil. But even the best of these have shown limited effectiveness. 

Now, a team led by researchers from UCLA and the Veterans Administration that was investigating how stress affects gastrointestinal function may have found a chemical compound that induces hair growth by blocking a stress-related hormone associated with hair loss — entirely by accident.  (more…)

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Shiller Paper Cited As One of the Century’s Top Economic Articles

An article written by Robert J. Shiller, the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, was recently named one of the “top 20” articles in the 100-year history of the American Economic Review (AER), the premier journal in the field of economics.

“Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?” was published in the June 1981 edition of the AER and became a focal point of debate and research over the question of whether changes in stock market prices are driven by rational expectations — what’s called the efficient markets hypothesis — or by other forces. (more…)

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NASA Releases Images of Man-Made Crater on Comet

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.

The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet’s atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006. (more…)

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Iceland Volcano’s Molten Rock Could Become Source of High-Grade Energy

*Krafla volcano gives geologists unique, unexpected opportunity to study magma*

Geologists drilling an exploratory geothermal well in 2009 in the Krafla volcano in Iceland met with a big surprise: underground lava, also called magma, flowed into the well at 2.1 kilometers (6,900 feet) depth.

It forced the scientists to stop drilling. (more…)

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‘Was Doing’ Versus ‘Did’: Verbs Matter When Judging Other People’s Intentions

Your English teacher wasn’t kidding: Grammar really does matter. The verb form used to describe an action can affect how the action is perceived—and these subtle variations could mean the difference between an innocent or guilty verdict in criminal law, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

William Hart, of the University of Alabama, was inspired to conduct the study by research on how people think about narratives. “Research was showing that when you describe somebody’s actions in terms of what they’re ‘doing,’ that action is way more vivid in [a reader’s] mind” than if the action is described in terms of what the person ‘did.’ At the same time, other researchers had found that when people imagine action vividly, they were more likely to think the person performing the action was doing it intentionally. (more…)

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Astronomers Identify Thick Disc of Older Stars in Nearby Andromeda Galaxy

An international team of astronomers has identified for the first time a thick stellar disc in the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way. 

The discovery of the thick disc, a major result from a five-year investigation, will help astronomers better understand the processes involved in the formation and evolution of large spiral galaxies like ours, according to the team, which includes UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich and colleagues from Europe and Australia.  (more…)

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