New Horizons in Science

Jon Krosnick is one of the principal investigators on a $10 million National Science Foundation study of American elections, and an expert on scientific polling. He will talk about how polls can correctly and incorrectly assess the public's views on global warming, elections, and presidential candidates. He'll discuss findings on how the gender of an interviewer more…

The nature of the metaverse' of virtual worlds, what we can learn from them, and how they will change the nature of work, e-commerce, social life and politics -- those are the things Robert Bloomfield thinks about when doing economics research in virtual worlds or interviewing guests on his virtual weekly television show, Metanomics. The study more…

Effective explosives detection involves a combination of materials science, physics and chemistry. But it's more than a scientific problem. Once a technology has been developed, researchers need to know how to implement it at airports, or in the hand of a soldier searching for explosive devices in Iraq. They also need to anticipate emerging threats. David more…

Prosecutors, judges, and police would like to know which psychopathic criminals are likely to repeat their crimes if released and which are not. Kent Kiehl has wheeled his tractor-trailer sized mobile MRI scanner to prisons, where he has done more than 1,000 scans of inmates in the past year that's 10 times the number of such more…

Which statin is best at lowering cholesterol? Drug companies do trials, and, happily for them, each company's trials usually show that its drug is best. In one study, Lisa Bero found that almost half of a group of statin trials were improperly blinded. She has data that show profound problems with the way new drugs are more…

Robert B. Dunbar roams the world in search of sediments and coral skeletons that can help him track climate change over the past 50 to 12,000 years. These samples are crucial to understanding climate change, he says, because most of the planet's heat is stored in the oceans. Data collected from such projects as submersible dives more…

The human brain was wired for speech, and now machines are being built to take advantage of that. Nass has discovered that even crude computer speech can trigger a profound human response we so want to believe those voices are real. Can we use that response to improve machine-human communication? Would a female-sounding computerized physics tutor more…

Karl Deisseroth can introduce into brain cells a gene sensitive to light, so it is activated only when a lab animal is exposed to a certain color light. By varying where he introduces this gene, he can turn different circuits on and off. He calls it "speaking the language of the brain." He is now using more…

How do thoughts and emotions shape social judgments? Mahzarin Banaji has worked to reveal people's unconscious judgments and preferences, demonstrating that they can contradict values people think they hold dear. She will demonstrate the phenomenon using the audience and herself as subjects. She will also present her latest findings using this test with different social more…

Researchers trying to attack pain are stymied by a fundamental lack of understanding of pain mechanisms. Pain management is trial-and-error. Sean Mackey, who runs what he calls the "house of pain" at Stanford, is trying to understand pain by seeing how it can be derailed. In one recent study, he found that Stanford students who were more…

Lawrence M. Wein uses advanced mathematics and operations research to address bioterrorism risks. He was praised and vilified in 2005 for a /New York Time/s Op-Ed in which he explained how terrorists could poison the nation's milk supply. He calls himself "a probabalist." He has looked at the consequences of attacks using anthrax, smallpox, and botulinum. more…

The Hayward fault runs through Berkeley, Oakland, the Oakland zoo, Hayward and Fremont. For nearly a millennium, researchers have now determined, it has been the site of severe earthquakes every 140 years. The last one was in 1868. (Do the math.) Thomas Brocher will walk us along the fault with new data from an airborne laser, more…

Sapolsky is a neuroscientist and field biologist who studies, among other things, the effects of stress on the brain, and its relation to depression, brain aging, and PTSD. He is also interested in how parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts. He's looking in particular at toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a parasite that causes rats more…

Baba Shiv put volunteers into an MRI and told some they were drinking $45-a-bottle wine. The others got $5 wine. Those who got the high price tag liked the wine much more. In both cases, it was, of course, the same wine. What Shiv found was not just that the subjects thought they liked the expensive more…

In honor of the 2009 bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, David M. Kingsley will share with us the latest findings from the nearly completed genome of the threespine stickleback, a fish that thrives in oceans and fresh water. Kingsley has found that alterations in more…

A 28-year-old otherwise healthy woman was near death from an unidentifiable infection. The costs of her care reached hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days. A quarter of that went to failed diagnostic tests, including a lung biopsy that itself had a mortality rate of 10-15 percent. In 24 hours, a new viral more…