Word: planck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reasons we flirt in this way is that we can't help it. We're programmed to do it, whether by biology or culture. The biology part has been investigated by any number of researchers. Ethologist Irenaus Eibl Eibesfeldt, then of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, filmed African tribes in the 1960s and found that the women there did the exact same prolonged stare followed by a head tilt away with a little smile that he saw in America. (The technical name for the head movement is a "cant." Except in this case it's more like...
...though influenced by dopamine - is a complex process that involves much more than one kind of brain receptor. "It's just one factor that may contribute to some problems that might arise in some people," says Markus Ullsperger, a co-author of the Science paper, based at the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research in Cologne. "I think you can compensate for many things without even noticing." In fact, a huge number of people have the genotype that Ullsperger studied, and never have trouble learning from their mistakes: About 30% of Europeans have the allele, according to the German researchers...
...study, published Thursday in Science, makes a strong case that the second theory is the right one. A team of anthropologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, developed a battery of learning tests they call the Primate Cognition Test Battery, and gave it to 106 chimps, 105 children and 32 orangutans, to compare the groups directly. Says Esther Hermann, a co-author of the paper: "It's the first time anything like this has been done...
...Lucy ought not leave her homeland; her grand North American tour will only serve to put the brakes on research. "Scientists who use Lucy for comparative studies will definitely be affected negatively by [her] absence, and I am one of them," says Ethiopian paleontologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "Six years is really too long!" Without "a compelling national interest" and "unique and exceptional benefits," Lucy - and, indeed, all similarly rare and valuable objects - should stay home, Alemseged says. If she absolutely has to travel, he adds, the tour should be limited...
...Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at Berlin's Max Planck Institute for Human Development, dubbed this effect the recognition heuristic and started detailing how it is used to manipulate consumer decision making. Gigerenzer's new book, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, describes a study in which people tasted peanut butter from three jars. Each jar contained the same peanut butter, but 75% of participants thought the contents tasted better in the jar that had a name-brand label on it. In another study, published this month by researchers at Stanford University, children given the same French fries and chicken...