Are the racial stereotypes that each of us holds rooted in social fear? That’s the question behind a study out in Current Biology in which researchers investigated children with Williams’ syndrome. This genetic disorder comes from the loss of 26 genes and is marked by, among other things, a lack of social fear in patients: Meeting strangers for the first time, they’ll treat them like old friends.

According to research by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues, those children seemed less given to racial stereotyping than the children without the condition they studied, and the researchers attribute that to the lack of social fear in the kids with Williams’. This result may jibe with previous brain-scanning studies of people with Williams’ syndrome which found unusual activity in their amygdalas, a brain center associated with fear. Interestingly, the children with Williams’ syndrome showed a similar gender bias as the other children, suggesting a different neurological cause for gender and race bias.

However, some scientists point to problems with the study. The sample size is quite small, which is difficult to avoid when studying a rare condition, but still casts doubt on the findings. For instance, 64 percent of the time the children with Williams’ syndrome gave answers that could indicate racial stereotyping, but the margin for error was so large that the researchers concluded 64 percent was not significantly different from 50 percent, a set of perfectly color-blind answers.

For deeper analysis, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear
80beats: Study: Damage to Brain’s Fear Center Makes People Riskier Gamblers
DISCOVER: How Not To Be a Racist

Image: Current Biology

With the scourge of Internet addiction growing ever more fearsome, a Boston-based company has designed a clever way to entice such addicts to once again join the outside world. The trick is allowing them to keep their eyes firmly glued to the screens of their iPhones.

The company’s app, called Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill, is built for a walking tour of that old neighborhood in Boston, kind of like a museum audio tour. But instead of hearing someone drone on drily about the various numbered stops, you follow the map and watch the place’s history unfold in a series of videos corresponding to their locations. The app has been so well-received that its videos are going to be screened on April 18th at the Boston International Film Festival–the first-ever app to make it to a film festival.

This particular app tells the story of the Parkman murder, in which wealthy Bostonian George Parkman is killed and his dismembered body is discovered under a dissecting vault at Harvard Medical School. Harvard instructor John Webster, who owed Parkman money, was convicted of the murder after a sensational trial and publicly hanged.

The app, with its tightly produced videos tells the story of the Parkman murder and, according to the creators, is a “page-turner mystery powered by your feet.”

Xconomy writes:

Normally, viewers experience the story of the murder as they travel a mapped route around Boston’s Beacon Hill, watching sections from the video at eight different stops. At the film festival, though, audiences will stay firmly in their seats, watching all 33 parts of the video in continuous order. “We were just blown away at how watchable the story is in a theatrical setting,” BIFF director Patrick Jerome said in a statement. “It’s quick-paced, full of juicy details, and, to our knowledge, it’s the first location-based application to screen at a film festival.”

The creators hope that this new app, with its high-quality videos will set the pace for development of other apps that can be used for enhanced walking and audio tours. The company is one of the many startups that is focusing on “mobile documentaries” and the creation of software that will force its users to look outward and learn about the world around them.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps, a compendium

Image: Walking Cinema

Did you have to memorize that 16th century nursery rhyme when you were a child?  I did, and it has proven surprisingly helpful to me as an adult.  I did find, however, that you only needed to know the first line, “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November” to be able to know immediately how many days are in any particular month.  You know if it doesn’t have 30 days, it has 31, except February, of course.  Knowing if it was a leap year came later, because if a year can be evenly divisible by 4, it’s a leap year and February has 29 days.

La mojarra inscription - Mayan calendar

That’s simple stuff, right?  You’ve probably known it all your life… although come to think of it, the old rhymes and tricks aren’t taught anymore.  Seems now there’s a whole generation of people who have to see a calendar to know how many days May contains, while flipping frantically around for February to see if it’s a leap year.  In our technological age, rhymes and tricks like this seem terribly outdated and simplistic.  Still, as smart as we are we must  remember that not everybody is literate, or has access to a computer, calculator, or calendar.  For them, this is magic.  You see, even if you spend your life in a cave, squatting around a campfire, you need some form of calendar.  You need to know when the weather will change; when the fruits will ripen; when the herds will move; when the winter will come.  The easiest way to do this originally was to look at the phases of the Moon; count the days in each lunar cycle, split it down to bite-sized chunks you can remember.  Now you know if you’re using your winter stores too fast, and need to ration your food out so nobody starves to death.  That’s the origins of the lunar calendar, and that’s when knowing the basics of astronomy would save your life.

Stonehenge, Image by Frederic Vincent, some rights reserved

The lunar cycle doesn’t correspond exactly with the solar cycle, as we all know.  There is an approximate 11-day difference there (the solar cycle is the longer), so if you use a lunar calendar every year you would have to tweak your calculations to factor in the solar gain.  While the lunar calendar does survive in modern times as more than a footnote (the Islamic calendar is lunar), almost all modern calendars are either solar/lunar hybrids (the Hebrew calendar), or purely solar calendars (the Gregorian calendar).

In Western culture, you’re probably most likely to use the Gregorian calendar, which is a standardized solar calendar.  It divides the tropical year into regular, predictable blocks of time called months, weeks, and days.  Every four years it adds a day in February.  Without even paying much attention to it, you probably divide your time using three or four different systems; you have a calendar year, a fiscal year, a year dividing religious observances (if practiced), and a school year, just to name four.  As we become more an more familiar with different cultures through the Internet, you’ll find yourself thinking in more and more calendar divisions.

Astronomical Clock, Prague - Image Maros M r a z, some rights reserved

As familiar as we all are with overlaying cultural, religious, and social issues onto a calendar, at rock-bottom it is still all based on the orderly progression of our planet and its moon through the solar system and the galaxy.  As long as we plan on eating, we need to know when the food will be available.  We need to know when it’s going to be cold.  So, what does astronomy have to do with a calendar?

Everything.

This week marks three related anniversaries.

April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space. That was 49 years ago today.

April 14, 1970: An oxygen tank disrupts on Apollo 13, causing a series of catastrophic malfunctions that nearly leads to the deaths of the three astronauts. That was 40 years ago this week.

April 12, 1981: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, launches into space. That was 29 years ago today.

I wasn’t yet born when Gagarin flew, and I was still too young to appreciate what was happening on board Apollo as it flew helplessly around the Moon instead of landing on it. But I do remember breathlessly awaiting the Shuttle launch, and I remember thinking it would be the next phase in our exploration of space. I was still pretty young, and hadn’t thought it through, but I’m sure had you asked me I’d have said that this would lead to cheap, easy, and fast access to space, and by the time the 21st century rolled around we’d have space stations, more missions to the Moon, and maybe even to Mars.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought it through. Of all these anniversaries, that one is the least of the three we should celebrate.

Don’t get me wrong; the Shuttle is a magnificent machine. But it’s also a symbol of a political disaster for NASA. It was claimed that it would be cheap way to get payloads to space, and could launch every couple of weeks. Instead, it became frightfully expensive and couldn’t launch more than a few times a year.

This was a political problem. Once it became clear that NASA was building the Shuttle Transport System, it became a feeding trough. It never had a chance to be the lean space machine it should’ve been, and instead became bloated, weighted down with administrative bureaucracy and red tape.

More than that, though, to me it symbolizes a radical shift in the vision of NASA. We had gone to the Moon six times — seven, if you include Apollo 13 — and even before the launch of Apollo 17 that grand adventure had been canceled by Congress, with NASA being forced to look to the Shuttle. Ever since then, since December 1972, we’ve gone around in circles.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for low Earth orbit. It is a fantastic resource for science, and I strongly think we should be exploiting it even more. But it’s not the goal. It’s like walking halfway up a staircase, standing on your tiptoes, and admiring the view of the top landing.

We need to keep walking up those stairs. In 1961, the effects of space travel were largely unknown, but Yuri Gagarin took that chance. He was followed by many others in rapid succession. Extrapolating from his travels, by now there should be a business making money selling tours of the mountain chains around Oceanus Procellarum by now. Of the three anniversaries, looking at it now, Gagarin’s is bittersweet.

In 1970 Apollo 13 became our nation’s "successful failure". A simple error had led to a near tragedy, saved only by the experience, training, guts, and clever thinking on their feet of a few dozen engineers. They turned catastrophe into triumph, and now, four decades later, we can’t repeat what they did. Think on this: when the disaster struck their ship, the crew of Apollo 13 were over 300,000 kilometers from Earth. Apollo 13 may have been a successful failure, but it’s a failure we can’t even repeat today if we tried.

I’ve written quite a bit about NASA’s future, including my support of Obama’s decision to cancel Constellation, the program that includes the next series of big rockets to take people into space. That may seem contradictory on its surface, but I support the decision because, in my opinion, Constellation was over budget, behind schedule, and had no clear purpose. The idea of going back to the Moon is one I very much strongly support, but I get the impression that the plan itself is not well-thought out by NASA. The engineering, sure, but not the political side of it. And it’s the politics that will always and forever be NASA’s burden.

It was a political decision to cancel Apollo. It was a political decision to turn the Shuttle from a space plane to the top-heavy system it is. It was a political decision to cancel the Shuttle with no replacement planned at all (that was done before Obama took office, I’ll note). It was a political decision that turned the space station from a scientific lab capable of teaching us how to live and explore space into the hugely expensive and bloated construction it is now.

NASA needs a clear vision, and it needs one that is sturdy enough to resist the changing gusts of political winds. I’m hoping that Obama’s plan will streamline NASA, giving away the expensive and "routine" duties it needs not do so that private industry can pick them up. The added money to go to science, again in my hopes, will spur more innovation in engineering.

And NASA needs a goal. It needs to put its foot down and say "This is our next giant step." And this has to be done hand in hand with the politics. I understand that is almost impossible given today’s political climate, where statesmanship and compromise has turned into small-minded meanness and childish name-calling on the Congress floor.

But I’m old enough to remember when NASA could do the impossible. That was practically their motto. Beating the Soviets was impossible. Landing on the Moon was impossible. Getting Apollo 13 back safely was impossible.

Of the three anniversaries, Apollo 13 is the one we should be celebrating. I’ll gently correct what Gene Kranz said that day: failure really was an option, but not an acceptable one.

Right now, at this very moment, those feats are all impossible once again. But for a time, they were not only possible, we made them happen.

It’s time to do the impossible once again.