Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

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How to Conjure a Ghost to Get a Murderer to Confess

May 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
ghost-prisoner

The proliferation of projection technology and electrical gadgets in the 1920s allowed people to conjure spirits. Well, spirits of a mechanical variety anyway. These ghoulish Jazz Age illusions entertained audiences and fooled ardent believers. But some thought that maybe this wave of high-tech ghosts could be put to use beyond the parlor tricks of supposed mystics. The November 1924 issue of Science and Invention magazine proposed using a slide projector and a little smoke to coax a confession out of alleged murderers—a "novel third degree method," as they put it. From the ... Read More

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Someone Else Owns Your Genes

May 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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On April 15, in the case of The Association for Molecular Pathology vs. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the United States Supreme Court heard arguments questioning the legitimacy of patents on human genes. A genetic testing company, Myriad Genetics, has patent claims on two human genes that influence a person’s risk for breast cancer. Myriad is being sued by a conglomerate of physicians, scientists, and patients who argue that Myriad has illegitimately patented a product of nature. While the lawyers and Justices delved into the arcana of patent law and molecular biology, many of the rest of us were ... Read More

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Thinking Cap

May 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Decades before Twitter, Snapchat, and viral cat videos, inventor Hugo Gernsback bemoaned the difficulty of concentrating on desk work. Even back in the 1920s, noise from the street and the frequency with which “a telephone bell or a door bell rings somewhere ... is sufficient, in nearly all cases, to stop the flow of thoughts,” he wrote. Even more perniciously: “You are your own disturber practically 50 percent of the time,” always willing to be distracted by the wallpaper’s pattern or a buzzing fly, he warned. Gernsback’s solution, presented in the July 1925 edition of Science ... Read More

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Churnalism Sorts Original Journalism From Repackaged Press Releases

April 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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"This is just a repackaged press release." That's one of the most common complaints about the way that most media outlets cover the social and behavioral sciences—and even the hard sciences, really. The primary reason for that? Most working journalists have a limited understanding of many of the subjects they're often asked to write about. I would even argue that this—the ability to explore and report and write about something new every day—is a key motivator for many of us in the profession. (It's certainly why I dumped my early ambitions of working as a particle physicist. Quarks, ... Read More

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What Does Your Sneeze Say About You?

April 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Are you one of those people who just sneezes out into the open air and then goes about living your life like nothing disgusting just happened? If so, you are sick, and it needs to stop. It also tells me that you are a germ-spraying bio-warhead who either does not concern him/herself with the health of others or delights in the pleasure of other people's immune systems breaking down. But, what does your actual sneeze—the sound, the volume, the frequency—say about you? A Chicago neurologist is trying to figure that out: “Sneezes are like laughter,” says Dr. Alan Hirsch, a ... Read More

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The Cult of Nutrition

April 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on RealClearScience, a Pacific Standard partner site. Listen closely. I'm going to tell you how you can change your life. Chances are, we've all heard that one before. It's a salesman's pitch, meant to play off our latent insecurities while evoking hopeful wonderment. Despite the statement's banality, to many, it's an irresistible call. Even the skeptical can be enticed. After all, there's no harm in listening.... But if you turn away, you could miss out on something spectacular, transformational, or even revolutionary. And when you listen, ... Read More

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The Dream Recorder (of 1926)

April 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Last week, new research was published that showed the first objective recording of the contents from a dream. Using an MRI machine and images from the Internet, researchers in Kyoto, Japan, devised a way to decode with some accuracy what people were visualizing while they slept. But scientists and science fiction folk alike have been targeting the elusive dream for capture since at least the 1920s. The cover of the September 1926 issue of Science and Invention magazine included concept art of the "dream recorder" machine. The device wasn't invented by sci-fi publishing pioneer Hugo ... Read More

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Hey, Come Try This Organic Corn Dog

April 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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We're fickle about what we eat. Whether our proscriptions are religious (no alcohol, no pork), dietary (no gluten, no dairy), ideological (no cages, no cruelty), environmental (no pesticides, no GMOs) or simply faddish (no carbs, no sugar), we know just what we want when we walk into Price Chopper. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean we know what we’re eating. New research from Cornell suggests that a “health halo” exists around organic products, including chips, cookies, and yogurt, which leads consumers to consistently underestimate their caloric content and overestimate ... Read More

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Thinking of Science Strengthens Moral Fiber

March 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Want to be a better person? Spend more time thinking about science. That’s the implication of newly published research, which finds people who study science—or even are momentarily exposed to the idea of scientific research—are more likely to condemn unethical behavior, and more inclined to help others. “Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms,” report psychologists Christine Ma-Kellams of Harvard University and Jim Blascovich of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research is published in the online journal PLOS One. The ... Read More

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Science Degrees Lacking Among Catholic Cardinals

March 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

In terms of their academic pursuits, the cardinals who will choose the next pope are a pretty monolithic bunch. That nugget of insight is courtesy of Anthony Judge, who has created an interesting chart on his website Laetus in Praesens. In it, he lists all of the current cardinals who are eligible to vote, and the discipline or disciplines they focused on during their years of higher education. The information is from Wikipedia, so it may not be entirely accurate; Judge labels details that haven’t been verified. The first thing that strikes you is that, in Judge’s words, “very few ... Read More

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