About Moronia

Sandia chemists find new material to remove radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel

(Sandia Labs News Release) Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste. Sandia chemist Tina Nenoff heads a team of researchers focused on removal of radioactive iodine from spent nuclear fuel.  (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution [...]

Empathetic rats free distressed cage-mates from containers

By Joseph Castro (LiveScience) The act of helping others out of empathy has long been associated strictly with humans and other primates, but new research shows that rats exhibit this prosocial behavior as well. In the new study, laboratory rats repeatedly freed their cage-mates from containers, even though there was no clear reward for doing [...]

Report shows fewer traffic fatalities after states pass medical-pot laws

By John Ingold (Denver Post) The passage of state medical-marijuana laws is associated with a subsequent drop in the rate of traffic fatalities, according to a newly released study by two university professors. The study — by University of Colorado Denver professor Daniel Rees and Montana State University professor D. Mark Anderson — found that [...]

Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans

By Jenny Deam (Los Angeles Times) According to the Air Force Academy’s enrollment records, only three of United States Air Force 4,300 cadets identified themselves as pagans, followers of an ancient religion that generally does not worship a single god and considers all things in nature interconnected. Still, the academy this year dedicated an $80,000 [...]

Psychiatrist Loren Mosher, advocate of drug-free schizophrenia treatment, dies at 70

By Adam Bernstein (Washington Post) Loren R. Mosher, 70, who died of liver cancer July 10 at a clinic in Berlin, was a contrarian psychiatrist and schizophrenia expert who was dismissed from the National Institute of Mental Health for his controversial theories on treatment. While chief of NIMH’s Center for the Study of Schizophrenia from [...]

Ionized plasmas used in neon lights can cheaply sterilize water in developing world

By Robert Sanders (UC California, Berkeley) University of California, Berkeleyscientists have shown that ionized plasmas like those in neon lights and plasma TVs not only can sterilize water, but make it antimicrobial – able to kill bacteria – for as long as a week after treatment. A brief spark in air produces a low-temperature plasma of [...]

5 amazingly busted myths that you’ve believed until now

Created by: Online PhD via Mythbusters | Online PhD.

Wealth managers results are no better than a chimpanzee’s

By George Monbiot (The Guardian UK) The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found [...]

Opinion: Ghost Writing is Fraudulent | The Scientist

By Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens (The Scientist) In August, we proposed, in an article in PLoS Medicine, that medical “guest writers” might be sued for fraud. For some time, commentators have called for sanctions against academic doctors who agree to sign their names to articles that are planned and developed by medical writing companies and [...]

A die-hard capitalist challenges anyone to show her a regulation that caused a layoff

By Bevi Chagnon I’m a federal contractor who helps US government agencies produce, update, maintain, and publish those regulations you’re talking about. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of regulations from just about every federal agency here in Washington DC, and I have never found even one regulatory point that I thought was unrealistic [...]