Science News - October 9, 2010

“It used to be that scientists in academic research (and in some industries) would have the option of taking a sabbatical. It was an opportunity to leave one’s institution, explore different science and technology fields and create new areas of investigation. But today, many harried researchers tell me that even if they were able to take a sabbatical, they would use it to divest themselves temporarily of their teaching duties and get caught up on their research activities. If the chance to examine other scientific realms is absent, scientists can go for years being completely locked into their careers. This can seem highly productive, at least for a while. But without the opportunity to explore, reflect or simply relax, anyone engaged in a creative endeavor such as scientific research runs the risk of intellectual and creative stagnation or worse: burn-out.” — PE TER FISKE, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF PAX WATER TECHNOLOGIES, IN THE AUG. 12 NATURE

SN Online www.sciencenews.org

BODY & BRAIN Swimming laps may modify more than muscles. See “DNA-damaging disinfection by-products found in pool water.”

GENES & CELLS Two teams have drafts of the cocoa tree’s genetic blueprint. Read “A taste of the chocolate genome.”

Science Past | FROM THE ISSUE OF OCTOBER 8, 1960

DO SEA SERPENTS EXIST? — The flurry of interest in sea
monsters gained new impetus in September 1959, when
Dr. Anton Brunn of Denmark described captured larval
eels six feet long.… [T]he unusually large
size of the larvae suggested that the par-
ents must be of huge size. The adult eels,
perhaps 30 to 50 feet in length, hooping
their way across the ocean waves, might
account for some of the sea serpent leg-
ends. “I know that some of the stories told
about sea monsters and sea serpents sound weird,” Dr.
[Robert] Menzies said. “But it would be even more ridicu-
lous to pooh-pooh them completely and not even look
for the monsters.... I am not prepared to say that there are
such things; neither would I deny they exist.”

Science Future

October 10 – 24 First USA Science & Engineering Festival, held in D.C. Go to www.usasciencefestival.org

October 15 – 22 Third annual Imagine Science Film Festival celebrated in New York City theaters. See http:// imaginescience; lms.com

ON THE SCENE BLOG Hubble Space Telescope’s successor is over budget, but cuts can’t be made when no one’s saying how much red is in the books. See “An uncomfortable silence.”

October 16 New Smithsonian exhibit opens featuring a coral reef made of yarn crocheted into geometric patterns. Go to www.mnh. si.edu/exhibits/hreef

For Daily Use

Keep angry people’s attention with rewards, not threats. A recent study led by Brett Ford of Boston College measured the effect of volunteers’ emotional states on their visual attention by tracking participants’ eyes as they looked at pairs of threatening, rewarding and neutral images. The researchers, whose work appeared in Psychological Science, compared eye-gaze times and found that angry individuals fixated nearly 85 milliseconds longer on rewarding images than on threatening images, and 65 milliseconds longer than on neutral images. If anger is a reaction to an event that violates “what ‘ought’ to be,” the authors suggest, the emotion may help a person resolve a situation by focusing attention on the desired (rewarding) solution.