B Boron

Once upon a time the factory, with its dirty, noisy machinery, was the standard workplace of industrialized nations; today it’s the office. Hundreds of millions of people--at least 15 percent of the population in developed countries--work at a desk, with or without a partition that separates them from the desks of their co-workers. That’s an awful lot of swivel chairs.

But a cubicle is more than a mere physical workspace. In recent years social and organizational psychologists have begun to amass evidence that the character of people’s personal work environments affects their performance in profound and surprising ways. The size of our desks, our proximity to natural light, the quality of the air we breathe and our privacy (or lack thereof)--all are major predictors of our comfort, our contentment and our productivity.

Imagine being twelve years old. Imagine coming home after school and finding your big sister’s lifeless body hanging from a rafter in your home’s stairwell. Phoebe Prince’s little sister did not have to imagine this scenario, because she lived it. She arrived home after school in South Hadley, Massachusetts, last January 14 and discovered that her sister had committed suicide by hanging herself, a result of enduring extreme and relentless bullying at the hands of her peers. [More]



Bullying - Suicide - South Hadley Massachusetts - South Hadley High School - South Hadley

Imagine being twelve years old. Imagine coming home after school and finding your big sister’s lifeless body hanging from a rafter in your home’s stairwell. Phoebe Prince’s little sister did not have to imagine this scenario, because she lived it. She arrived home after school in South Hadley, Mass., last January 14 and discovered that her sister had committed suicide by hanging herself, a result of enduring extreme and relentless bullying at the hands of her peers. [More]



Bullying - Suicide - South Hadley Massachusetts - South Hadley High School - South Hadley

Coral, the reef-building organisms responsible for some of the oceans' most vital ecosystems, are in trouble around the world because of climate change, ocean acidification and human interference. But lots of people are also trying to save coral reefs before it's too late. Here's a roundup of some of the latest research into this important class of organism.

Some of the worst news comes out of Indonesia, where the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found that rising surface water temperatures have created a large-scale bleaching event in the local coral. Bleaching occurs when environmental factors stress the living organisms residing within coral reefs, causing them to either leave their reef structures or die. As a result, reefs turn white. WCS marine biologists found that at least 60 percent of the area's coral reefs, and 80 percent of some coral species in the region, have bleached and died following a 4-degree Celsius rise in water temperatures. Bleached coral reefs cannot support the variety of marine life that depend on coral for their survival. That, in turn, affects the ability of people to fish for their livelihoods around those reefs.

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In a New Era of Discovery by Ann Finkbeiner (on sale August 17 from Free Press). The book chronicles the development of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an influential astronomical survey that has charted the position of hundreds of thousands of galaxies and turned up large numbers of distant quasars. The excerpt below details some of the problems encountered by Princeton University astronomer Jim Gunn, the project's leader, and "French" Leger, an engineer at the University of Washington in Seattle (UW), in preparing the telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico for the survey . [More]



Sloan Digital Sky Survey - Astronomy - New Mexico - Princeton University - Apache Point Observatory

Ketamine --a powerful anesthetic for humans and animals that lists hallucinations among its side effects and therefore is often abused under the name Special K--delivers rapid relief to chronically depressed patients, and researchers may now have discovered why. In fact, the latest evidence reinforces the idea that the psychedelic drug could be the first new drug in decades to lift the fog of depression. [More]



Mental health - Major depressive disorder - Psychedelic drug - Health - Disorders

Ketamine --a powerful anesthetic for humans and animals that lists hallucinations among its side effects and therefore is often abused under the name Special K--delivers rapid relief to chronically depressed patients, and researchers may now have discovered why. In fact, the latest evidence reinforces the idea that the psychedelic drug could be the first new drug in decades to lift the fog of depression. [More]



Mental health - Major depressive disorder - Psychedelic drug - Health - Disorders

Editor's note: This is the introductory article for the September 2010 special issue "The End" .

Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and blockbuster movie directors. Not long before, three separate lawsuits charged that the Large Hadron Collider would seed a metastasizing black hole under Lake Geneva. Before that, captains of industry shelled out billions preparing for the appearance of two zeros in the date field of computer programs too numerous to count; left alone, this tick of the clock would surely have shaken modern civilization to its foundations.

Scientists are still assessing the ecological damage wrought by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. Other researchers, however, are looking at subtler signs of the disaster's potential impacts on human health. [More]



Oil spill - Gulf of Mexico - Deepwater Horizon - Environment - Health

Mrs. K. questions who she really is. Her family, her career, her entire life seem pointless. She feels anxious and broods. She sometimes screams at her children for no reason and then feels guilty. She has toyed with the idea of suicide. In contrast, Mr. M. believes that he possesses extraordinary gifts. He spends long nights writing down grandiose plans to save the world and sends his manuscripts to numerous publishers. Despite heaps of debt, he buys an expensive sports car, anticipating success. He has never felt more confident. These patients suffer from different mental illnesses--Mrs. K. is depressed, and Mr. M. is manic--but they both hold highly distorted views of themselves.

It is more than just sage advice to “know thyself,” as Heraclitus advocated in the fifth century B.C. A realistic self-image is a hallmark of a healthy mind. Ancient Greek philosophers speculated that the psyche determines behavior. Since then, numerous studies have shown that people with a faulty self-image tend to have high levels of anxiety, defensiveness, self-doubt and narcissism. Relationships, careers and happiness suffer when reality doesn’t match who we think we are.