Existential crisis? There's a drug for that. And it's available over the counter. I've taken acetaminophen for various forms of physical pain a number of times, but I had no idea that it also eased the pain of social rejection. But that's not the weird part—that's simply mentioned as an aside during the introduction of this paper. Apparently, acetaminophen also eases the pain inflicted by surrealist films. And it eases the fear of death.
As the title of the paper itself implies, there's a "common pain of surrealism and death," namely an existential threat to whatever meaning we've assigned to our lives. Challenge that threat, and people tend to get, well, a bit grumpy. In the experimental condition here, those who weren't given any drug were more likely to demand harsh punishment for rulebreakers after watching a surrealist film or writing an essay regarding their own death. A placebo did not ease the pain, but acetaminophen did, reducing the levels of punishment doled out down to that of the control group.
It's not how much I'm getting, it's how little you are. Lots of things contribute to people's sense of happiness, including some obvious ones like money and sex. But money doesn't only contribute directly to happiness; it also lets you feel better simply because you have more than your fellow citizen. Apparently, sex works the same way. People are happier if they're having more sex, but happier still if they think they're having more than their peers. Or, as the authors put it, happiness is "inversely correlated with the sexual frequency of others."
I'm so depressed, I can't even bother to fly. Being stuck in unpleasant or painful circumstances isn't any fun. But learning that you can't do anything about it is even worse. That's what we've concluded from studying a phenomenon called "learned helplessness" in animals like rats. When the animals can't escape a painful or stressful situation, they'll often just give up, which involves everything from sleep disorders to problems with the immune system. These symptoms make learned helplessness a model for studying depression in humans.
You might think that this complex suite of learning and behavior would require a fairly large and complex nervous system to support it. But you'd apparently be wrong, since scientists have now found that fruit flies also experience learned helplessness. Normally, when flies land on a hot surface, they move quickly to get away from it. A perverse group of researchers arranged it so the fly kept getting heated no matter what it did. So, just as with rats, the flies more or less gave up, and stopped trying to move much at all.
A left-hand turn powerful enough to make the Earth move. The National Science Foundation has funded the creation of the Earthscope Transportable Array, a collection of over 400 mobile seismometers that are gradually being moved across the country, sampling the Earth below them. And, at the same time, sampling the ocean. When ocean waves are energetic enough, they create "microseisms," small bits of seismic energy that can be detected well inland. Researchers have now found evidence that the westward shift of Hurricane Sandy—the one that sent it straight at New Jersey—made such a noticeable change in wave activity, that the Earthscope was able to detect it, even though most of its detectors were closer to the Mississippi than they were to the Hurricane.
Passing out may be in your genes, but what makes you pass out is in your environment. A common form of loss-of-consciousness called vasovagal syncope has a genetic root. Inherit just a single copy of the wrong region of the genome, and you're going to be prone to passing out (in technical terms, it's an autosomal dominant disorder). But that region was found in one large family of fainters, and the genetics of two other large families indicate that some other region must be responsible for their problems. Which suggests there may be multiple "fainting genes" scattered throughout the human genome. The authors suggest that as many as one in four people suffer from vasovagal syncope at some point in their lives, so the genetics may be rather complex.
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