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The joys of parenthood: Father?s day
WILL fatherhood make me happy? That is a question many men have found themselves asking, and the scientific evidence is equivocal. A lot of studies have linked parenthood?particularly fatherhood?with lower levels of marital satisfaction and higher rates of depression than are found among non-parents.Biologically speaking, that looks odd. Natural selection might be expected to favour the progeny of men who enjoy bringing them up. On the other hand, the countervailing pressure to have other children, by other women, may leave the man who is already encumbered by a set of offspring dissatisfied.To investigate the matter further Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, decided both to study the existing literature, and to conduct some experiments of her own. The results, just published in Psychological Science, suggest parenthood in general, and fatherhood in particular, really are blessings, even though the parent in question might sometimes feel they are in disguise.Dr Lyubomirsky?s first port of call was the World Values Survey. This is a project which...
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Bionics (I): A mind to walk again
ANYONE who saw Claire Lomas complete this year?s London marathon on May 7th cannot fail to have been impressed by her grit and determination. Ms Lomas, once a show jumper, was paralysed from the chest down by a riding accident in 2007, so finishing a marathon, albeit at walking pace, was a dramatic feat. Some of the adulation, however, should be reserved for the technology that helped her do so: a pair of bionic legs.Ms Lomas?s legs were designed by Amit Goffer, an Israeli engineer who is himself paralysed. They have various modes (?sit?, ?stand? and ?walk?, and ?ascend? and ?descend? for staircases) and are controlled by a keypad worn on the wrist. Walking also requires the assistance of a pair of crutches. But Dr Goffer?s legs allowed Ms Lomas to travel the 42.195km (26 miles and 385 yards) of the marathon course in stages, over a period of 16 days.That record may not last long, however. Another engineer, José Contreras-Vidal of the University of Houston, in Texas, has what may prove an even better design: a pair of bionic legs that respond directly to signals from the brain. (An early version is...
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Bionics (II): I think I?d like some coffee
HELPING yourself to a cup of coffee may seem like a small, everyday thing. But not if you are quadriplegic. Unlike paraplegics, for whom the robotic legs described in the previous article are being developed, quadriplegics have lost the use of all four limbs. Yet thanks to a project organised by John Donoghue of Brown University, in Rhode Island, and his colleagues, they too have hope. One of the participants in his experiments, a 58-year-old woman who is unable to use any of her limbs, can now pick up a bottle containing coffee and bring it close enough to her mouth to drink from it using a straw. She does so using a thought-controlled robotic arm fixed to a nearby stand. It is the first time she has managed something like that since she suffered a stroke, nearly 15 years ago.Arms are more complicated pieces of machinery than legs, so controlling them via electrodes attached to the skin of someone?s scalp is not yet possible. Instead, brain activity has to be recorded directly. And that is what Dr Donoghue is doing. Both his female participant and a second individual, a man of 66 also paralysed by a stroke, have...
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Geoengineering: Implicit promises
FOR the past few years, a European collaboration called IMPLICC (Implications and Risks of Novel Options to Limit Climate Change) has been looking at what it might mean to engineer the climate, by reducing the amount of sunshine that reaches the Earth?s surface. A lot of IMPLICC?s work, like much else in climate science, has taken the form of computer modelling. In its case the models try to mimic the effects of things like putting veils of reflective particles into the stratosphere, or brightening the clouds over the oceans.This week the IMPLICC team and other interested parties met in Mainz, Germany, to discuss the results?for the various models have turned out to agree far better than many of their creators expected. In particular, they suggest that particles in the stratosphere can indeed stop rising levels of greenhouse gases raising the overall global temperature, though in doing so they slightly cool the tropics while the poles warm a bit. Other things being equal, the models also agree that geoengineering tends to suppress the hydrologic cycle, with less evaporation and less rainfall.Some researchers, however, want to go beyond modelling. They wish to experiment in the real world. The highest-profile of these schemes has been part of a programme called SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), which is paid for mainly by Britain?s Engineering...
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Modern alchemy: Turning a line
ONE of the first inklings that chemistry has an underlying pattern was the discovery, early in the 19th century, of lithium, sodium and potassium?known collectively as the alkali metals. Though different from each other they have strangely similar properties. This was one of the observations that led a German chemist called Johann Döbereiner to wonder if all chemical elements came in families.It took decades to tease out the truth of Döbereiner?s conjecture, and thus to construct the periodic table?in which the alkali metals form the first column. And it took decades more to explain why the table works (it is to do with the way electrons organise themselves in orbit around atomic nuclei). But it is a fitting tribute to Döbereiner?s insight that, if all goes well, some time in the next few months will bring the creation of a new alkali metal, element number 119, by his countryman Christoph Düllmann of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt. With that addition the table will do something which has never happened before. It will grow a new row.Come in number 119An element?s...
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