“For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts — acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation — spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.

In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network.”

Read more at Science Daily

“Materials such as paper, paint, and biological tissue are opaque because the light that passes through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways. A new experiment conducted by researchers at the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) has shown that it’s possible to focus light through opaque materials and detect objects hidden behind them, provided you know enough about the material.

The experiment is reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, and is the subject of Viewpoint in APS Physics by Elbert van Putten and Allard Mosk of the University of Twente.”

Read more at Science Daily

“A German woman has failed in a bid to force her country’s government to halt experiments at the world’s largest atom smasher which she feared would lead to the Earth’s destruction.

The country’s highest court said that the woman — whom it didn’t identify — had failed to demonstrate any connection between experiments at the CERN collider outside Geneva and the apocalypse.

The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”

“The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court ruled.

CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.

Housed inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the collider was started with great fanfare in September 2008, only to break down after nine days for the next 14 months.

It was shut down again in December, this time to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels which began last month.”

Read more at The Telegraph

The ingredients for life as we know it have been found in the Orion Nebula.

By finely separating the spectrum of incoming light, astronomers are able to detect the chemical fingerprints of molecules like water and methanol. The spectrograph that their work produces can be seen in the image above. The peaks represent the presence of the molecule indicated.

The new data was collected by the Herschel Telescope, launched into space last year by the European Space Agency. Herschel’s HiFi instrument uses a new technique to do more-sensitive spectroscopy. It will enable scientists to better understand the chemistry of space.

The Orion Nebula is located about 1,300 light-years away. No very active star-forming region is closer to Earth. M42, as the nebula is also known, is 24 light-years across.

Wired (Thanks DG)

A 101-year-old woman in China has baffled doctors after growing a huge goat-like horn on her forehead.

Zhang Ruifang claims the growth first appeared only last year and has since expanded to be more than 6cm long. Now her family in Linlou, Henan province, are concerned about a second mark on the other side of her forehead.

“[At first] we didn’t pay too much attention to it,” said Mrs Zhang’s youngest son Zhang Guozheng. ”Now something is also growing on the right side of her forehead — it’s quite possible that it’s another horn.”

9 News

Street signs warning Romanian drivers to be careful of drunken pedestrians lying on roads were erected by road safety chiefs worried about the “despairing” levels of accidents.

Officials in Pecica, a village town about 13 miles from the Hungarian border in the country’s west, ordered the bright red signs, complete with the phrase “Attention – Drunks”. The 10 road signs, which also show a person crawling on their knees while clutching a glass in one hand, were erected in popular nightspot areas close to the city’s bars and restaurants.

Telegraph

“It may seem odd, but the locals swear it’s true. People in a Japanese mountain region have reported a number of kangaroo sightings, and journalists are now trying to stalk the marsupials.

The descriptions given by the apparent eyewitnesses seem close enough. For years they have spoken of a beige animal with large ears, one to 1.5 metres (three to five feet) tall, that stands by the roadside and then hops away.

The sightings were all reported in the Mayama mountain district of Osaki city in Miyagi prefecture, a community of 441 households, located about 350 kilometers (220 miles) north of Tokyo.

The city has received about 30 reports of ‘kangaroo-like animals,’ including three cases since December, when the mountain area was often covered in snow, said local official Tetsuya Sasaki.”

Read more at Yahoo

“Simple motor actions, like moving marbles upward or downward between two cardboard boxes, may not seem meaningful. But a study published April 2010 in Cognition shows that motor actions can partly determine people’s emotional memories.

Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences, according to Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). ‘Meaningless’ motor actions can make people remember the good times or the bad.

When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them.”

Read more at Science Daily

“The Church of Scientology is expected to come under closer scrutiny over the coming days.

The Senate is preparing to vote on a possible inquiry into alleged abuses against Australians which have occurred within the organisation.

Tonight’s Four Corners program details claims of mistreatment and allegations that some women were pressured to have abortions.

Former members in Australia and in the United States have spoken openly for the first time about their lives in the Church.

Scientology has denied their claims but their stories raise more questions about whether the Church of Scientology should keep its status as a tax free charity.

Emily Bourke compiled this report.

EMILY BOURKE: The former members of the Church of Scientology who’ve spoken out were members of an elite religious unit known as the Sea Organisation.

One former Sea Org member whose identity will be revealed in tonight’s Four Corners program has detailed allegations of a strict regime of discipline and punishment in place during the 1960s.

SEA ORG MEMBER: I mean looking back I, you know, I deeply regret my, even my fringe participation in some of the things that went on. And I’m ashamed of some of them.

People were thrown overboard. Hands bound and feet bound and blindfolded. You know women of 55-years-old, you know, for, for, for running a process incorrectly. A counselling technique incorrectly in a, in a auditing session, you know.”

Read more at ABC News (thanks, Fosca)

We are now in Eastbourne. It’s a very different crowd, but the shows have been good so far. A good friend has come over from the States to see the show (and Andy’s Ghost Stories) and today we had a bloating pub lunch in the nearby village of Alfriston, which I may have spelt correctly. Our hotel is a stranger to wi-fi, so I have been slow on blog entries. I type this, as I tend to tweet, face down in a steamer sat in my dressing room.

Excitingly, I am trying out something new in the show. It’s a new ending to one of the pieces that felt like it needed it. It’s really enjoyable to let it settle in and make these sorts of changes. Keeps one on ones tootsies.

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