The Helper

ANN ARBOR—Some people feel so "creeped out" that they would decline an organ or blood that came from a murderer or thief, according to a new University of Michigan study.

In addition, they express concern that their personality or behavior may change to become more like that of the donor, as a result of the donation.

Recipients prefer to get an organ or DNA transplant or blood transfusion from a donor whose personality or behavior matches theirs, said Meredith Meyer, the study's lead author and a research fellow in psychology. People think that people's behaviors and personalities are partly due to something hidden deep inside their blood or bodily organs, she said.

What surprised Meyer and colleagues were that the results from blood transfusions were just as strong as the results from heart transplants.

"Since blood transfusions are so common and relatively straightforward, we had expected people might think that they have very little effect," Meyer said.

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A DOLPHIN has died in China after tourists hoisted it out of the water to pose with it for photographs, state media said Tuesday, provoking outrage online.

Images posted online showed a group of tourists manhandling the grey creature, which washed ashore on a beach Sunday in the southern Chinese province of Hainan, the state-run Shanghai Daily reported, adding that it later died of "excessive bleeding.''

The dolphin might have collided with a fishing boat before it became stranded, the paper quoted an expert as saying.

But instead of trying to help the distressed animal, a crowd of bathers gathered in the water to pose with it, images posted online showed. Several men lifted the dolphin above the water as one of them flexed his muscles for the camera.

Users of China's Twitter-like social media service Sina Weibo reacted with outrage at the photographs.

"When even the basic respect of life is lost, I just want to say, how can I be proud of you, China?'' one user said in a typical comment.

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Kim Dotcom has accused the US government and Leaseweb, one of the hosting providers of former file-sharing site Megaupload, of deleting millions of personal files "without warning."

The information stored on the dormant servers – “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property” – was what Dotcom called evidence in the case US authorities launched against him in January 2012. Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale.

“This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,” Dotcom wrote on Twitter.

Lawyers representing his former company “have repeatedly asked Leaseweb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the US,” he added.
Dotcom, who made a fortune from his file-sharing service Megaupload, is currently under a federal investigation launched by the US Department of Justice after by police raided his home. He is currently free on bail in New Zealand, and is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale, racketeering and money-laundering, which carries maximum sentence of 20 years. His extradition trail is set for August.
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Honoré de Balzac is said to have consumed the equivalent of fifty cups of coffee a day at his peak. He did not drink coffee, though—he pulverized coffee beans into a fine dust and ingested the dry powder on an empty stomach. He described the approach as “horrible, rather brutal,” to be tried only by men of “excessive vigor.” He documented the effects of the process in his 1839 essay “Traité des Excitants Modernes” (“Treatise on Modern Stimulants”): “Sparks shoot all the way up to the brain” while “ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.”

Balzac’s novels and plays endure, but modern science is challenging his view of caffeine causing ideas to “quick-march into motion.” While caffeine has numerous benefits, it appears that the drug may undermine creativity more than it stimulates it.

When we drink a caffeinated beverage, the caffeine quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier—an interface of sorts between the brain and the body’s circulatory system, designed to protect the central nervous system from chemicals in the blood that might harm it—and proceeds to block the activity of a substance called adenosine. Normally, a central function of adenosine is to inhibit the release of various chemicals into the brain, lowering energy levels and promoting sleep, among other regulatory bodily functions. When it’s blocked, we’re less likely to fall asleep on our desks or feel our focus drifting. According to a recent review of some hundred studies, caffeine has a number of distinct benefits. Chief among them are that it boosts energy and decreases fatigue; enhances physical, cognitive, and motor performance; and aids short-term memory, problem solving, decision making, and concentration.

But all of that comes at a cost. Science is only beginning to unravel the full complexity behind different forms of creative accomplishment; creativity is notoriously difficult to study in a laboratory setting, and the choice of one approach over another limits the way that creativity can be measured. Still, we do know that much of what we associate with creativity—whether writing a sonnet or a mathematical proof—has to do with the ability to link ideas, entities, and concepts in novel ways. This ability depends in part on the very thing that caffeine seeks to prevent: a wandering, unfocussed mind.

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Newswise — DURHAM, N.H. – “It’s not fair!” “ “You’re not the boss of me.” “She hit me!” “He started it.”

Fights between siblings – from toy-snatching to clandestine whacks to being banished from the bedroom – are so common they’re often dismissed as simply part of growing up. Yet a new study from researchers at the University of New Hampshire finds that sibling aggression is associated with significantly worse mental health in children and adolescents. In some cases, effects of sibling aggression on mental health were the same as those of peer aggression.

“Even kids who reported just one instance had more mental health distress,” says Corinna Jenkins Tucker, associate professor of family studies at UNH and lead author of the research, published in the July issue of the journal Pediatrics. “Our study shows that sibling aggression is not benign for children and adolescents, regardless of how severe or frequent.”

The study, among the first to look at sibling aggression across a wide age and geographic range, is unique in its size and scope. Tucker and her co-authors from UNH’s Crimes against Children Research Center – center director and professor of sociology David Finkelhor, professor of sociology Heather Turner, and researcher Anne Shattuck – analyzed data from the center’s National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), a national sample of 3,599 children, ages one month through 17.

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Some strange pottery found at an ancient settlement in southeastern Utah contains the oldest known traces of chocolate in the United States, an anthropologist says.

The site dates back to the 8th century -- 200 years earlier than the only other known evidence of the food, found at Chaco Canyon, the famous ceremonial and trade center of the Ancestral Puebloans.

The residents of the Utah settlement, known as Alkali Ridge, were also Pueblo ancestors, but the chocolate found in so many of their jars, pitchers, and bowls -- as well as the pottery itself -- suggests that they might not have been alone.

Dr. Dorothy Washburn, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, studied the residues in 18 vessels first unearthed at one of the settlement's sites in the 1930s. She and her team -- including her husband, a chemist for Bristol-Meyers Squibb -- found that 13 of the artifacts contained traces of cacao, also known as cocoa.
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It's often said that money corrupts. But a new study says that just the thought of getting some hard cash will do the trick.

The report by University of Utah and Harvard researchers found that individuals who could gain monetarily through unethical behavior were more likely to demonstrate that behavior than those who weren't offered a financial gain.

"Were were interested in why good people would do bad behavior," said Kristin Smith-Crowe, a management professor and co-author of the study released last month.

"We certainly found that the love of money is corrupting and just the mere exposure to it makes people do bad things," Smith-Crowe said.

Read more about it here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100810791