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Wikipedia wants more contributions from academics
The Guardian: Mike Peel began editing Wikipedia – the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit – after a physics entry made him mad. It was 2005 and the then undergraduate was reading around a course when he became "irritated by a grammatical mistake". He hasn't looked back since. For Peel, now a 26-year-old post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank centre for astrophysics, is not only the secretary of Wikimedia UK – the local volunteer chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia project – but also one of the more prolific contributors among UK academics.
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To the brain, getting burned, getting dumped feel the same
CNN: Science has finally confirmed what anyone who's ever been in love already knows: Heartbreak really does hurt. In a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that the same brain networks that are activated when you're burned by hot coffee also light up when you think about a lover who has spurned you. In other words, the brain doesn't appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain. Heartache and painful breakups are "more than just metaphors," says Ethan Kross, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Read the whole story: CNN
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Broken Heart Burns Like Hot Coffee, Brain Study of Former Lovers Shows
Bloomberg: Heartache over lost love is similar to the physical pain of spilling hot coffee on your lap, scientists studying brain scans say. The sting of seeing photos of an ex-lover stimulated the same parts of the brain as intense heat applied to the arms of 40 people in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research builds on a 2010 study published in the journal Psychological Science that showed people who took the painkiller acetaminophen, sold by Johnson & Johnson as Tylenol, felt less rejected when excluded from a ball-passing game.
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What Choice Do We Have?
Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the U.S., important policy debates are often framed in terms of choice, such as whether people get to choose their own healthcare plan and a school for their children. "When Hurricane Katrina happened, people asked, why did those people choose to stay?" says Krishna Savani of Columbia University.
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Parents and Science: When Desires Trump Data
Many young couples face some version of this dilemma today: They’ve decided they want to have children in the near future—they’re not on the fence about that—but the financial reality is that they both have to work. They need both their earnings, not for a fancy lifestyle but just to pay the bills and save a bit. So when the day comes that they do become parents, they will almost certainly have to send their young child to some kind of day care, so that they both can continue to work. That’s their world. But in their hearts they believe that children are better off raised at home, by a stay-at-home parent.
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Hot Days Turn Pitchers Into Hot Heads
U.S. News & World Report: Baseball pitchers intentionally "bean" more batters in retaliation during hot weather, finds a new study. Researchers analyzed data from more than 57,000 Major League baseball games from 1952 through 2009 and found that pitchers whose teammates were hit by a pitch were more likely to nail an opposing batter when the temperature reached 90 degrees F than on cooler days. If the temperatures were in the 50s during a game, there was a 22 percent chance a pitcher would hit a batter if a teammate had been hit by a pitch during the first inning. But the likelihood of such retribution increased to 27 percent if temperatures were in the 90s. Read the whole story: U.S.