MIT’s Green Energy Club | Newsweek Scope

A Green University
Stryker McGuire 8/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
The rulers of Abu Dhabi have seen the future, and it's not oil. The evidence of that is everywhere in this petro--emirate—from gleaming solar panels to the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in diversified foreign assets. But perhaps the greatest single testament to Abu Dhabi's bet on life after oil is the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, which opens this autumn. Masdar Institute will be the world's first postgraduate research university in science and engineering focusing on alternative energy and -sustainability—and in a self-contained green city to boot. With the global economy on edge and oil prices half what they were a year ago, the timing couldn't be better.
Popular Science: Beware False Claims
Sharon Begley 7/28/2009 12:00:00 AM
It is a sorry fact of science that many, many of the results reported even in peer-reviewed, published studies are wrong—by some accounts, most are wrong. By dumb luck (also known as statistical errors), something that seems to be associated with something else isn't; something that seems to cause something else doesn't; or something that seems to be the result of something else isn't. Alternatively, a study can fail to find evidence for something that, it later turns out, is indeed true. Both kinds of mistakes—false positives and false negatives—are well known to scientists, who take lots of precautions (not always successfully) to prevent them.
The Carbon Counter
6/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
Climate change is likely to have all sorts of nasty consequences over the next century—among them, according to a brand-new report from the U.S. Global Change Research program, an increase in torrential downpours in the American northeast.
Of Voodoo and the Brain
Sharon Begley 1/31/2009 12:00:00 AM
It is a brave, or perhaps foolhardy, scientist who uses the term "voodoo" to describe results in a high-profile field of science, and in retrospect psychologist Hal Pashler of the University of California, San Diego, concedes that the word might have been just a teensy bit incendiary. But when he, Ed Vul of MIT and colleagues scrutinized the use of brain imaging in social neuroscience— a burgeoning new field that seeks the brain basis for feelings and thoughts resulting from social interactions—there was a good reason why dolls with little needles stuck in them came to mind. Voodoo doctors think the needles bring harm to the unfortunate person represented by the doll. Social neuroscientists think the brain activity they discover can predict and explain differences among people in feelings of prejudice, moral judgments, fear of pain, how much social rejection hurts and other fascinating questions. But in about half the studies the voodoo critics looked at, they charge in a paper to be published this year in Perspectives on Psychological Science, the methods and analysis are so poor that neuroscientists should go back, do it right "and correct the scientific record."
FACTCHECK.ORG
A Clean Coal Confrontation
Viveca Novak 1/23/2009 12:00:00 AM
The coal lobby's most recent issue ad reminds viewers that the new president has voiced strong support for its side. It features a clip of then-candidate Barack Obama speaking last year, saying "clean coal" is an attainable goal that can create jobs and help the environment:
ON SCIENCE
Inside the Shopping Brain
Sharon Begley 12/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
If the holiday shopping season turns out to be as grim as many forecasters are warning, among the reasons will be a little brain region called the insula. Maxed-out consumers have been heeding the advice to take scissors to their credit cards, since paying with cash controls the eventual cost of a purchase (carrying a credit-card balance can double an item's original price) and limits impulse buys (most of us have less cash on hand than we do a credit limit, so if we have to count out greenbacks for Juicy Couture, we'll pass it up). But there's another, more fundamental reason why we buy less when we pay with cash. When you hand over a stack of 20s, you have less of something tangible: your billfold is lighter. That causes a brain region that registers negative feelings (bad smells, unfairness, social ostracism) to become more active than when you charge a purchase. Humans have evolved to pay attention to the messages the insula sends, with the result that it hurts to pay cash. There is no such feeling of loss when you pay with plastic, so the insula doesn't react. Credit cards anesthetize the otherwise painful act of paying.