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Global Impact, Research

Arria: Energy Drinks May Fuel College Kids' Alcohol Use

HealthDay: "College students who routinely consume highly caffeinated energy drinks are at significantly higher risk for becoming alcohol-dependent, new research suggests. 'What we found is that weekly drinkers of energy drinks are more likely to meet the criteria for alcohol dependence,' said study author Amelia M. Arria, director of the Center on Young Adult Health and Development in the department of family science at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. That means energy-drink aficionados are more likely to suffer from 'an inability to stop drinking alcohol, even though they continuously experience a cluster of negative consequences as a result of drinking too much of it,' she explained."

'Heroes' Judged Harshly for Bad Behavior, Study Finds

HealthDay: "Your past record of good deeds won't help you escape blame when you do something wrong, suggests a new study. But you may get off easier if you're perceived as a victim. U.S. researchers looked at study participants' reactions to a number of fictional scenarios representing real-life transgressions, ranging from stealing money to harming another person. The results showed that, no matter how many previous good deeds a person had done, they received just as much blame -- if not more -- than people with less heroic backgrounds. 'People may come down even harder on someone like the Dalai Lama than they do on "Joe Blow," ' study author Kurt Gray, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, said in a university news release. 'However, in our research those who have suffered in the past received significantly less blame, even if such suffering was both totally unrelated to the misdeed and long since past,' he added."

Mannes: Understanding Terror Attacks in India

PsyOrg.Com: "Recent advances in computer science at the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics cast fresh light on terrorism in India, such as yesterday's coordinated attacks in Mumbai. Some important conclusions from two forthcoming papers, accepted for publication at the 2011 European Conference on Intelligence Security Informatics and the 2011 Open Source Intelligence Conference in September 2011, suggest that reining in terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), who carried out the devastating Mumbai attacks in Nov. 2008, can be done only with concurrent action by the United States and India and a reduction in US aid to Pakistan."

Idsardi: Human Learning

UDaily (University of Delaware): "How do humans learn, and how can an evolving 'new science of learning' shape the way humans and machines are taught in the future? Jeffrey Heinz, a University of Delaware assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, explores these issues as co-author of 'Sentence and Word Complexity,' an article that appears in the July 15 issue of Science magazine, the journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. William Idsardi, associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland College Park and former chair of what was then the UD Department of Linguistics, is also co-author of the article. Heinz noted that this new science of learning reflects a collective effort by psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists, roboticists, and others, to understand how humans learn and how to make machines learn."

The Tallest Tree in the Land

R&D Magazine: "The next time you're outdoors, see if you can spot the tallest tree. If you're in the desert Southwest, this may be an easy task -- trees there are few and far between, and tend to hunch low to the ground to conserve resources. In the temperate Northeast, dense forests make the exercise a bit more difficult. And in the rainy Northwest, the towering stands of sequoias often reach higher than the eye can estimate. Knowing how tall trees can grow in any given region can give ecologists a wealth of information, from the potential density of a forest and size of its tree canopy to the amount of carbon stored in woodlands and the overall health of an ecosystem. Now an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher, along with colleagues at the University of Maryland and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, has come up with a simple model to predict the maximum tree height in different environments across the United States."

Park: Space Shuttle's Science Brought Payoffs to Earth

The Reporter (California): "Science from the space shuttle helped open Earth's eyes to the cosmos and sister planets. It created perhaps the most detailed topographical map of Earth. And it even is helping doctors understand, and sometimes fix, what's happening in our aging and ailing bodies. If you need help getting out of a crashed car, or if you're a soldier maneuvering around an active land mine field, space shuttle-derived technology may have saved your life. And thanks to the space shuttle, we have healthier baby formula and cooling socks to wear in hot weather. Most Americans wrongly credit the Apollo moon program with creating Earthly 'spinoffs' of new technology that it never did: sticky Velcro, non-sticky Teflon and orange-powdered Tang -- all things used by NASA but not invented there. Yet the space shuttle program often doesn't get recognized for its science and technology, NASA says. And shuttle-based science will come to an end when Atlantis -- carrying mouse stem cell and vaccine experiments -- comes home on Thursday."

Too Much Screen Time? Experts Might say You're Facing Technology Addiction

Canada.Com: "Michael Decker is always reachable. The 42-year-old creative director from Dallas sleeps with his phone nearby on his nightstand. From when he wakes up and checks it until he sets it down before bed, his phone is constantly with him. 'It's an intrusion into your own private life,' he says. 'It leads to burnout if you can never turn it off.' Decker, who owns an iPhone , a laptop and an iPad, uses his gadgets for work and for play. Though he makes a point not to look at his phone at dinner, he says his friends still chide him. Put that thing down, they say. 'They always have a point,' he says. 'It becomes more important than truly interacting with friends and family.' For most of the population, technology is a tool to enhance our lives. Our phone beeps, and we feel compelled to check whatever new text, email or tweet has come our way. Decker's behaviour is not uncommon, nor is it particularly unsettling."

Facebook Paints Clear Portrait of Your Personality

Arizona Republic: "It turns out you can size up a personality just by looking at a person's Facebook profile. Although that may not seem like a big deal, it is providing fodder for academics who are trying to predict temperament based on the things we post online. If such predictions prove accurate, employers might have good reason to poke around our Facebook pages to figure out how we would get along with others at the office. And Pentagon officials want to use personality assessments to make better decisions on and off the battlefield. A recent study by researchers at the University of Maryland predicted a person's score on a personality test to within 10 percentage points by using words posted on Facebook."

UMd.'s Wind Tunnel to Test Unmanned Aircraft that Takes Off Vertically

Washington Post: "The University of Maryland's wind tunnel will be used to test the propulsion system for an unmanned aircraft that takes off vertically and then shifts to horizontal flight. Jessup-based American Dynamics Flight Systems' AD-150 is one of the few unmanned vehicles that can take off vertically and travel like an airplane at speeds of about 240 miles per hour. The aircraft being developed for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps can carry weaponry, an array of sensors or wounded soldiers with its 500-pound payload."

Astronomers Find Largest, Oldest Mass of Water in Universe

LiveScience: "Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe -- a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called a quasar located 12 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence, researchers said. 'Because the light we are seeing left this quasar more than 12 billion years ago, we are seeing water that was present only some 1.6 billion years after the beginning of the universe,' said study co-author Alberto Bolatto, of the University of Maryland, in a statement. 'This discovery pushes the detection of water one billion years closer to the Big Bang than any previous find.' "

Researchers Aim for Direct Brain Control of Prosthetic Arms

R&D Magazine: "Engineering researchers at four U.S. universities are embarking on a four-year project to design a prosthetic arm that amputees can control directly with their brains and that will allow them to feel what they touch. While it may sound like science fiction, the researchers say much of the technology has already been proven in small-scale demonstrations. The research at Rice University, the University of Michigan, Drexel University, and the University of Maryland is made possible by a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Human-Centered Computing program. 'There's nothing fictional about this,' says Rice University coprincipal investigator Marcia O'Malley. 'The investigators on this grant have already demonstrated that much of this is possible. What remains is to bring all of it -- non-invasive neural decoding, direct brain control, and tactile sensory feedback -- together into one device.' "

Smolyaninov: Physicists Make Time End

Wired Science: "This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a higher harmonic generation. The same researchers who used exotic substances called metamaterials to make a benchtop Big Bang have mimicked the end of time, also known as the Big Crunch. Light traveling through metamaterials is described mathematically by equations used to describe space and time, allowing physicists to probe cosmic questions in a controlled manner. In this experiment, the photons underwent a 'higher harmonic generation,' or a sudden rise in frequency and energy. Put another way, 'the end of time looks very hot,' said electrical engineer Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland."