MRI images of happy brains
Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a team of Japanese scientists have located the part of the brain linked to feeling happy.
Do we really know what happiness is, and most importantly, where it’s located? To answer this universal question, Waturu Sato, a researcher at Kyoto University in Japan, and his team undertook a study. They discovered that the combination of positive emotions and satisfaction derived from life events had an impact on the precuneus, which is part of the parietal lobe.
From a neurological point of view, happiness can be defined as a subjective experience based on a feeling that varies in intensity from person to person.
Psychologists have attempted to find out the neural mechanism behind happiness. This is an area clouded in mystery, particularly for neurologists who, up until now, had been unable to precisely identify the parts of the brain involved in happiness.
The neuroscientists in Dr. Sato’s team used an MRI to analyze the brains of 51 participants and to measure their subjective happiness as well as […]
Credit: Shutterstock
Scientists believe that they’ve cracked the seeming conflict between their research that shows pesticides can harm honeybees and the fact that in field tests larger colonies of bees seem to be able to survive pesticide exposure.
The pesticide industry has long used this as a reason why governments shouldn’t ban the pesticide family called neonicotinoids because, they say, the discrepancy shows that the lab tests are unreliable and have toxicity rates that are not reproduced in the wild. However, the lab results have been fairly consistent so clearly neonicotinoids were having an effect on bees, it just wasn’t translating into a real world setting the way that scientists had expected. Now, scientists think they have the answer as to why.
Writing in the journal Royal Society journal Proceedings B French researchers say their tests prove that honeybees foraging around neonicotinoid areas do indeed die off faster than their counterparts who haven’t been exposed to these pesticides. Lab tests have shown that neonicotinoids appear to alter the bees’ ability to navigate, weakens their immune system […]
A worker sprays water at India’s first 1 megawatt canal-top solar power plant.
Credit: phys.org
The price of solar power in India fell at a faster-than-expected rate this year. Now, some experts suggest that by 2020, renewable energy in Asia’s third-largest economy may become up to 10% cheaper than coal power.
The “stolen election” controversy over this month’s officially defeated Ohio pot legalization referendum has gone to a new level.
“The results are not only impossible but unfathomable,” stated Ron Baiman, Assistant Professor of Graduate Business Administration at Benedictine University, where he teaches economics and statistics.
The Columbus Free Press asked Baiman to calculate the odds of the official vote count of Ohio’s Issue 3, to legalize marijuana, being correct – compared to the tracking polls charting voter preference leading up to this year’s November election. The Free Press supplied Baiman with poll results taken prior to the election by noted pollster Jon Zogby.
The polls leading into the November 3 vote showed the referendum passing. But the official results claim it lost by 2:1.
The standard assumption with such polling is that the undecided voters in the poll would have potentially gone 50-50. Thus half of them would be voting no and the other half would be voting yes on Issue 3. Baiman pointed out that with such an assumption being probable, the odds against the referendum losing 2:1 go through the […]
A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance has found that developing nations attracted a record $126 billion in clean energy investment in 2014.
Clean energy investment of $126 billion represents an increase of $35.5 billion, or 39%, on 2013 clean energy investment levels.
Most importantly, however, this figure eclipsed the amount of clean energy investment attracted by the world’s wealthiest countries. On top of that, developing nations made the most out of this investment by building more wind, solar, and other renewable power generation than ever before.
This, according to Climatescope, “the clean energy country competitiveness index, interactive report, and online tool supported by the UK government, US government, and the Inter-American Development Bank Group” and offering “a compelling portrait of clean energy activity in 55 emerging markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean” including “major developing nations China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.”
This is the second edition of Climatescope — which was originally announced back towards the end of 2013 — the first edition highlighting the tremendous surge in clean energy throughout the […]
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