Science Confirms The Obvious, 2010 edition

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1. Blowing Up Mountains Is Bad for the Environment


The Study
"Mountaintop Mining Consequences,” Science, January 2010

The Findings
One of the most popular mining techniques in Appalachia has been cutting down the trees on top of mountains and blasting the peaks off to get to the buried coal. It doesn’t take a doctorate to see that mountaintop mining (MTM) is bad for the environment, but until Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland and her colleagues collected the data, no one knew just how bad it was. Their analysis shows that the technique has led to downstream flooding and toxic levels of selenium in West Virginia streams, that the blast dust can cause respiratory problems, and that reclaiming the mined areas by planting grass doesn’t appear to work.

Why Bother?
Last summer, the Obama administration inked a plan that adds more regulation but allows the practice to keep expanding. Palmer hopes her paper gives policymakers a clear rundown of the potential consequences. “MTM permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems,” she writes. “Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science.”

2. Old People Prefer Happy Memories


The Study
“There Are Age-Related Changes in Neural Connectivity during the Encoding of Positive, but Not Negative, Information,” Cortex, May 2009

The Findings
An international team of psychologists put a group of people aged 19 through 31 and a group aged 61 through 80 into a functional MRI and showed participants positive, neutral and negative photographs. It turned out that the brains of younger and older people responded similarly when they saw gunshot wounds, but for the older people, their ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which are involved in emotion, and the hippocampus, which governs memory, all responded when they saw positive images like kittens, indicating the formation of a stronger memory. (The younger brains showed no such effect.) The researchers think this may explain the “positivity effect,” the idea that as people age, positive memories tend to get stronger while bad memories fade more quickly.

more
http://www.popsci.com/science/gallery/2010-07/gallery-science-confirms-obvious-2010