When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.
de morte ætérna, in die illa treménda:
Quando cœli movéndi sunt et terra.
Dum véneris iudicáre sǽculum per ignem.
Tremens factus sum ego, et tímeo, dum discússio vénerit, atque ventúra ira.
Quando cœli movendi sunt et terra.
Dies illa, dies iræ, calamitátis et misériæ, dies magna et amára valde.
Dum véneris iudicáre sǽculum per ignem.
Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine: et lux perpétua lúceat eis.
There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.
Controversy ahead
The findings combine three hot-button topics.
“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”
Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.
“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”
Brains and bias
Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured.
In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.
Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)
As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.
People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.
“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.
(via scinerds)
4 midterms between now and the weekend
Somehow gotta find it in me to push through
I know I can
HIV cure months away, Danish scientists say, citing novel new DNA treatment
Danish scientists believe they may have a cure for HIV “within months.”
Image 1: This photo shows HIV infecting a T-cell, which usually fights off infections in the human body. Credit: NIH/NIAID
Image 2: Researchers at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark are testing a new technique that involves flushing HIV from so-called reservoirs in human DNA. (LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images)
Researchers at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark are testing a new technique that involves flushing the virus from so-called reservoirs in human DNA.
The virus is then destroyed naturally by the body’s immune system, The London Telegraph reported.
They are expecting results to show that “finding a mass-distributable and affordable cure to HIV is possible”.
Fifteen patients are taking part in the trials, funded with $2.1 million from the Danish Research Council.
If they are found to have successfully been cured of HIV, the new technique will be tested on a wider scale.
Any cure would be affordable for many of the 33 million people worldwide afflicted by the virus.
However, despite the trials Dr. Ole Sogaard, a senior researcher in the department of infectious disease warned that the efficacy in the human body remained unproven.
Medical Daily quoted him as telling the media:
“The challenge will be getting the patients’ immune system to recognize the virus and destroy it. This depends on the strength and sensitivity of individual immune systems.”
British researchers are reportedly conducting similar research through a consortium of five universities.
Both studies are aiming to find a cure for those already infected with the virus and would not result in a preventative measure for HIV or AIDS.
As with many articles purporting possible cures it’s always good to take these with a grain of salt and practice our skepticism until the results and stats are weighed in. But if it’s anything close to being true then I am glad to see this progressing into a challenge of engineering the proper tools to fight it rather than how to fight it. Let’s hope this is followed up with success.
(via scinerds)
Why is she so freakin amazing
“You better go study, or else our garden could use alot of work.”
My dad, who is supposed to be on “adminestrative duty” back at the hospital, but just got done playing tennis and swimming
=_______=
And who says doctors have busy schedules
