Who’s the best leader: the saint or the scrooge?

Generosity is typically regarded as a virtue. But among leaders, it can be seen as a sign of weakness, according to a new study.

The research finds that generosity — in the sense of contributing to the public good — influences a person’s status on two critical dimensions: prestige and dominance.

“People with high prestige are often regarded as saints, possessing a self-sacrificial quality and strong moral standards,” said Robert Livingston, assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “However, while these individuals are willing to give their resources to the group, they are not perceived as tough leaders.”

The researchers define dominance as an imposed “alpha status,” whereas prestige is freely-conferred admiration from others. Al Capone, for example, can be viewed as a high-dominance individual, whereas Mother Theresa exudes high prestige.

The study argues that people with high prestige are perceived as desirable leaders in noncompetitive contexts, but that they are viewed as submissive in comparison to individuals who strive to maximize their personal gains. In times of competition, individuals who are less altruistic are seen as dominant and more appealing as leaders.

“Our findings show that people want respectable and admired group members to lead them at times of peace, but when ‘the going gets tough,’ they want a dominant, power-seeking individual to lead the group,” said Nir Halevy, lead author and acting assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Livingston and Halevy co-authored the research with Taya Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and Kellogg PhD student Eileen Chou. Their study highlights the need to distinguish between different types of status in groups as well as how intergroup conflict shapes followers’ leadership preferences.

via Who’s the best leader: the saint or the scrooge?.

A breath-takingly simple test for human exposure to potentially toxic substances

The search for a rapid, non-invasive way to determine whether people have been exposed to potentially toxic substances in their workplaces, homes and elsewhere in the environment has led scientists to a technology that literally takes a person’s breath away. Their report identifying exhaled breath as an ideal indicator of such exposure appears in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology.

Andrea M. Dietrich, Masoud Agah, and their students Heather Vereb and Bassam Alfeeli explain that scientists have known since the late 1970s that exhaled breath contains traces of any potentially toxic substances that people may have inhaled. Research has shown that those amounts are an accurate reflection of the levels that exist in a person’s blood. Those advances have positioned exhaled breath as the ideal substance to use in rapid, non-invasive, simple testing for human exposure to potentially harmful substances in the air. Sampling breath is less invasive than drawing blood, more convenient than taking urine samples and “shows promise as an inexpensive method with a fast turnaround time,” they state.

The article describes how advances in microelectronics have helped position breath analysis for more extensive use in the 21st century. Equipment for analyzing substances in human breath that once had to be housed in laboratories, for instance, have shrunk to hand-held size. The technology can detect minute amounts of substances in the breath and do so quickly — offering the promise of helping limit human exposure and improve health.

via A breath-takingly simple test for human exposure to potentially toxic substances.

Flocking with fixed-wing robots at EPFL

Flocking with fixed-wing robots at EPFL – YouTube.

UFOs Over London Friday 2011

UFOs Over London Friday 2011 – YouTube.

This is pretty well done, but the people in on it who are looking up and taking pictures don’t seem to be looking in the same direction as the UFOs added by CG.

Alzheimer’s protein kills nerve cells in nose

A protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease kills nerve cells that detect odors, according to an animal study in the September 28 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings shed light on why people with Alzheimer’s disease often lose their sense of smell early on in the course of the disease.

“Deficits in odor detection and discrimination are among the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that the sense of smell can potentially serve as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ for early diagnosis of the disease,” said Leonardo Belluscio, PhD, of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who led the study. “The changes taking place in the olfactory system as a result of Alzheimer’s disease may be similar to those in other regions of the brain but appear more rapidly” he added. …

via Alzheimer’s protein kills nerve cells in nose.

People learn while they sleep, study suggests

Kimberly Fenn – People may be learning while they’re sleeping – an unconscious form of memory that is still not well understood, according to a study by Michigan State University researchers.

The findings are highlighted in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

“We speculate that we may be investigating a separate form of memory, distinct from traditional memory systems,” said Kimberly Fenn, assistant professor of psychology and lead researcher on the project. “There is substantial evidence that during sleep, your brain is processing information without your awareness and this ability may contribute to memory in a waking state.”

In the study of more than 250 people, Fenn and Zach Hambrick, associate professor of psychology, suggest people derive vastly different effects from this “sleep memory” ability, with some memories improving dramatically and others not at all. This ability is a new, previously undefined form of memory.

“You and I could go to bed at the same time and get the same amount of sleep,” Fenn said, “but while your memory may increase substantially, there may be no change in mine.” She added that most people showed improvement.

Fenn said she believes this potential separate memory ability is not being captured by traditional intelligence tests and aptitude tests such as the SAT and ACT.

“This is the first step to investigate whether or not this potential new memory construct is related to outcomes such as classroom learning,” she said.

It also reinforces the need for a good night’s sleep. According to the National Sleep Foundation, people are sleeping less every year, with 63 percent of Americans saying their sleep needs are not being met during the week.

“Simply improving your sleep could potentially improve your performance in the classroom,” Fenn said.

via People learn while they sleep, study suggests.

Venus Weather Not Boring After All, NASA/International Study Shows

At first glance, a weather forecaster for Venus would have either a really easy or a really boring job, depending on your point of view. The climate on Venus is widely known to be unpleasant — at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket of sulfuric acid clouds and a crushing atmosphere more than 90 times the pressure of Earth’s. Intrepid future explorers should abandon any hope for better days, however, because it won’t change much.

“Earth has seasons because its rotation axis is tilted by about 23 degrees, which changes the intensity of sunlight and the length of the day in each hemisphere throughout the year. However, Venus has been tilted so much, it’s almost completely upside down, leaving it with a net tilt of less than three degrees from the sun, so the seasonal effect is negligible,” explains Livengood, who is stationed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Also, its orbit is even more circular than Earth’s, which prevents it from getting significantly hotter or cooler by moving closer to or further away from the sun. And while you might expect things to cool down at night — especially since Venus rotates so slowly that its night lasts almost two Earth months — the thick atmosphere and sulfuric acid clouds act like a blanket while winds move heat around, keeping temperatures pretty even. Finally, almost all the planet’s water has escaped to space, so you don’t get any storms or precipitation like on Earth where water evaporates and condenses as clouds.”

However, higher up, the weather gets more interesting, according to a new study of old data by NASA and international scientists. The team detected strange things going on in data from telescopic observations of Venus in infrared light at about 68 miles (110 kilometers) above the planet’s surface, in cold, clear air above the acid clouds, in two layers called the mesosphere and the thermosphere.

… although the surface temperature is fairly even, we’ve seen substantial changes – up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit (about 30 K change) – within a few Earth days in the mesosphere – thermosphere layers over low latitudes on Venus. The poles appeared to be more stable, but we still saw changes up to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (about 15 K change).”

… Although Venus is often referred to as Earth’s twin, since they are almost the same size, it ended up with a climate very different from Earth. A deeper understanding of Venus’ atmosphere will let researchers compare it to the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, giving insight as to why Earth now teems with life while Venus suffered a hellish fate …

via NASA – Venus Weather Not Boring After All, NASA/International Study Shows.

From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later

Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora’s box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it.

Stuxnet was specifically after Iran’s gas centrifuge nuclear fuel-enrichment program at Natanz.

After infiltrating Natanz’s industrial-control systems, Stuxnet automatically ordered subsystems operating the centrifuge motors to spin too fast and make them fly apart, Langner says. At the same time, Stuxnet made it appear random breakdowns were responsible so plant operators would not realize a nasty software weapon was behind it.

In the end, Stuxnet may have set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions by years. But it also could prove a Pyrrhic victory for its still-unknown creator – a sophisticated cyberweapons nation state that Langner argues could be the US or Israel. Like the Hiroshima bomb, Stuxnet demonstrated for the first time a dangerous capability – in this case to hackers, cybercrime gangs, and new cyberweapons states, he says in an interview.

With Stuxnet as a “blueprint” downloadable from the Internet, he says, “any dumb hacker” can now figure out how to build and sell cyberweapons to any hacktivist or terrorist who wants “to put the lights out” in a US city or “release a toxic gas cloud.” …

the best option we have to start to counter this threat is to start protecting our systems – control systems, especially – in important facilities like power, water, and chemical facilities that process poisonous gases. Funny thing is, all these control systems, if compromised, could lead to mass casualties, but we still don’t have any significant level of cybersecurity for them. …

It will be costly to fix the vulnerabilities in industrial-control systems. But it will be definitely more costly if we wait until organized crime, terrorists, or nation states make their move first. Most engineers are aware of the problem, it’s just that they don’t get the budget to fix the problem. The risk is just discounted. As long as management doesn’t see an immediate threat, there is a tendency to ignore it because it costs money to fix. …

What’s really worrying are the concepts that Stuxnet gives hackers. The big problem we have right now is that Stuxnet has enabled hundreds of wannabe attackers to do essentially the same thing. Before, a Stuxnet-type attack could have been created by maybe five people. Now it’s more like 500 who could do this. The skill set that’s out there right now, and the level required to make this kind of thing, has dropped considerably simply because you can copy so much from Stuxnet.  …

Could or should military contractors, instead of soldiers, wage cyberwar? What happens when cyberweapons dealers start selling sophisticated cyberweapons to terrorists? There is also the manner in which Stuxnet was used – which could be considered a textbook example of a “just war” approach. It didn’t kill anyone. That’s a good thing. But I am afraid this is only a short term view. In the long run it has opened Pandora’s box.

via From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later – CSMonitor.com.

Who are those five people?

NASA confirms: Robot photographed on Mars

The latest HiRISE view of Opportunity, on Endeavour’s rim

This HiRISE image, taken on September 10, 2011, shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity sitting atop some light-toned outcrops on the rim of Endeavour Crater, near a smaller crater informally named Odyssey. Opportunity travelled nearly three years to reach this rim because it contains rocks even more ancient than the rocks of Meridiani Planum, which the rover has been exploring since 2004, and hence may teach us something about an even more ancient era in Martian history.

Credit: NASA / JPL / U. Arizona

It’s easy to spot Odyssey crater in the center of the photo, near the southern tip of Cape York. There’s a little black dot on the eastern rim of Odyssey, and it’s tempting to think that’s Opportunity, but it’s not; that is a large block of rock named Ridout. Opportunity is a bit farther to the east. Here’s a zoomed-in view, with an arrow pointing to the rover, which clearly has tracks trailing behind it.

via The latest HiRISE view of Opportunity, on Endeavour’s rim – The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society.

Image: a Butterfly tongue

Stephen S. Nagy, M.D. submitted an image of the tip of a Butterfly tongue in polarized light

“taken for The Nikon Small World Competition which first started in 1974 as a means to applaud and recognise the efforts of those involved with photography through the light microscope, showcasing the beauty and complexity of life.”

via It’s a small world after all: Photographers capture microscopic light images allowing glimpse into world not seen by naked eye | Mail Online.