http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/money-may-corrupt-but-thinking-about-time-can-strengthen-morality.html

PRESS RELEASE
December 10, 2013
For Immediate Release
Contact: Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science
202.293.9300
amikulak@psychologicalscience.org

Money May Corrupt, but Thinking About Time Can Strengthen Morality

Priming people to think about money makes them more likely to cheat, but priming them to think about time seems to strengthen their moral compass, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The research, conducted by psychological scientists Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and Cassie Mogilner of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, shows that implicitly activating the concept of time reduces cheating behavior by encouraging people to engage in self-reflection.

High-profile cases of fraud, scams, and other unethical behavior provide regular fodder for the 24-hour news cycle. But most unethical behavior is much more mundane:

“Less attention is given to the more prevalent ‘ordinary’ unethical behavior carried out by people who value and care about morality but behave unethically when faced with an opportunity to cheat,” says Gino.

Gino and Mogilner wondered whether boosting self-reflection might be one way to encourage people to follow their moral compass.

Across four experiments, the researchers had participants complete various tasks — including word scrambles, searches for song lyrics, and counting tasks — designed to implicitly activate the concept of money, time, or something neutral.

Participants then worked on supposedly unrelated puzzles, reporting how many puzzles they had solved at the end. The researchers incentivized performance, providing additional money for each puzzle the participants solved. Participants could easily cheat by overstating their performance because the puzzle worksheets seemed to be anonymous, and they were recycled at the end of the task.

What the participants didn’t know was that each worksheet had a unique number on it, allowing the researchers to compare how many puzzles the participants actually solved to how many they said they solved.

The results were clear: Disposing people to think about money seemed to make them cheat.

In the first experiment, 87.5% of the participants primed to think of money cheated on the puzzles, compared to only 66.7% of those participants primed with neutral words. They also cheated to a greater extent, artificially boosting their scores by a greater margin than the other participants.

Thinking about time, on the other hand, seemed to prevent people from cheating: Only 42.4% of the participants primed with the concept of time overstated their performance on the task.

Data from subsequent experiments showed that the link between money and cheating, and between time and cheating, could be explained by self-reflection (or lack thereof).

Priming the concept of time seems to lead people “to notice that how they spend their time sums up to their life as a whole, encouraging them to act in ways they can be proud of when holding up this mirror to who they are,” the researchers write.

While time may be an important tool in keeping us on the straight and narrow, preliminary data collected by Gino and Mogilner suggest that people tend to pay more attention to money.

“These new findings show the benefits of doing just the opposite: thinking about time rather than money,” says Gino. “Our results suggest that finding ways to nudge people to reflect on the self at the time of temptation, rather than on the potential rewards they can accrue by cheating, may be an effective way to curb dishonesty.”

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For more information about this study, please contact: Francesca Gino at fgino@hbs.edu.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Time, Money, and Morality" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2014/acs-presspac-february-12-2014/green-space-can-make-people-happier-for-years.html

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | A PressPac Instant Replay*

ACS News Service Weekly PressPac: Wed Feb 12 14:02:00 EST 2014

Green space can make people happier for years

"Longitudinal Effects on Mental Health of Moving to Greener and Less Green Urban Areas"

Environmental Science & Technology

More green space could have a long-lasting positive effect on public health.
Credit: Sergey Borisov/iStock/Thinkstock
University of Exeter video featuring co-author Ian Alcock.

Nearly 10 years after the term “nature deficit disorder” entered the nation’s vocabulary, research is showing for the first time that green space does appear to improve mental health in a sustained way. The report, which appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, gives urban park advocates another argument in support of their cause.

Mathew P. White and colleagues note that mental well-being is a major public health issue, with unipolar depressive disorder the leading cause of disability in middle- to high-income countries. Some research suggests that part of the blame for this unhappiness lies in increased urbanization — nearly 80 percent of the world’s population in more developed regions live in city environments, which tend to have little room for nature. Other studies suggest a link between happiness and green space, but no research had convincingly established cause and effect of nature on well-being over time. To help fill that gap, White’s team decided to examine the issue.

To figure out if nature makes people feel better in the long run, they compared the mental health of hundreds of people in the U.K. who went from a grey urban setting to a greener one with those who moved in the opposite direction. Mental health data showed that the people who moved to greener areas were happier during all three years that their health was tracked after relocating. “Moving to greener urban areas was associated with sustained mental health improvements, suggesting that environmental policies to increase urban green space may have sustainable public health benefits,” the researchers conclude.

The authors acknowledge funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.

http://www.americaspace.com/?p=52523

Mars Odyssey Orbiter Repositioned to Observe Possible Water Processes on Martian Surface
By Mike Killian

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA - in cooperation with Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver, CO – recently fired up the thrusters on the space agency’s longest-serving Mars explorer in an attempt to study the planet’s surface during Martian dawn. Mars Odyssey, which has been exploring the Red Planet since 2002, is now set up for an orbit which will – for the first time in its 12 years of service – give researchers back on Earth a chance to observe possible water processes happening on the ground in morning daylight; something no NASA Mars orbiter has had a chance to do since the twin Viking orbiters in the 1970?s.

“We’re teaching an old spacecraft new tricks,” said Odyssey Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of JPL. “Odyssey will be in position to see Mars in a more different light from ever before.”

The gentle maneuver, which took place on Feb. 11 courtesy of a 29-second burn from four thrusters on the spacecraft, will accelerate Odyssey’s drift toward a morning-daylight orbit to give scientists the first detailed observations of the Martian surface in the hours around sunrise. Other orbiters, from both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), have observed morning mists, fogs, clouds and surface frost develop seasonally on the Red Planet, but so far have concentrated on afternoon observation times when views of the surface are less hazy.

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Putting Odyssey into an orbit for morning observations will (hopefully) yield insight about the composition of the ground and about temperature-driven processes – such as water flows and geysers fed by spring thawing of carbon-dioxide ice near Mars’ poles.

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http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/02/14/japanese-satellite-startup-releases-images-polar-satellite/

Japanese Satellite Startup Releases First Images From Polar Satellite
Posted by Doug Messier on February 14, 2014

A Japanese start-up company named Axelspace Corporation has released the first images from a commercial micro-satellite launched aboard a Dnepr rocket in November.

The WNISAT-1 weather satellite — built in partnership with Weathernews, Inc. – produces images of Arctic ice for the shipping industry. Warming temperatures in the area have opened up a northern sea routes during the summer months that cut significant time off of voyages.

Axelspace is a rare start-up entry in the Japanese aerospace market, which is dominated by large corporation. The five-year old company lists 13 employees on its website.

Later this year, the company plans to launch its Hodoyoshi-1 Earth observation satellite, which will produce multi-spectral images with the ground resolution of 6.7m (22ft). The 60 kg (132 lb) micro-satellite measures 60 cm (23.6 in).

The press release announcing the release of the first images from WNISAT-1 is below.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-13/edf-overwhelmed-by-nuclear-reactor-upkeep-operations-asn-says.html

EDF ‘Overwhelmed’ by Nuclear Reactor Upkeep Operations, ASN Says
By Tara Patel Feb 13, 2014

Electricite de France SA, the biggest nuclear operator, is facing delays in carrying out work on its atomic reactors that could pose safety and quality issues, the regulator said.

“They are overwhelmed by the work that they themselves decided to carry out,” Pierre-Franck Chevet, head of the Autorite de Surete Nucleaire, told lawmakers today in Paris. The problems are “worrying” and need to be addressed.

EDF, which operates 58 nuclear reactors that provide about three-quarters of French power, has embarked on a period of maintenance and safety improvement prompted by aging equipment and tougher standards after the Fukushima meltdown. The utility missed a target last year for atomic output, blaming unexpectedly long halts for works.

EDF is spending 50 percent more time carrying out work at nuclear plants than it anticipated, Chevet told a parliamentary hearing that is investigating nuclear energy costs. The amount of work being carried out by EDF during halts has doubled in the past five years, he said.

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http://www.janes.com/article/33051/experts-warn-of-chernobyl-risk-at-yongbyon-nuclear-plant

Experts warn of 'Chernobyl' risk at Yongbyon nuclear plant
Sebastien Falletti, Seoul - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
26 January 2014

North Korea's decision to restart its 5 megawatt electric (MWe) reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear scientific research complex threatens Northeast Asia with a disaster potentially worse than Chernobyl, according to nuclear experts.

"This reactor comes from another world. The Yongbyon site has a concentration of so many nuclear facilities that if there was a fire in one building it could lead to a disaster worse than the Ukrainian one," said Seo Kyun Reul, a professor at the nucleonic department of Seoul National University.

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"Graphite loves to burn. All the countries that used it faced a fire issue at some point," said Peter Hayes of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. "The safety issue in Yongbyon is straightforward - the graphite moderator catches fire, and you have a perfect storm: a fire with powerful thermal plume carrying contents high into the sky."

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Depending on the wind direction, the radioactive plume could threaten the population of Pyongyang, which is only 85 km away, or Siberia and northern Japan. Seoul, which is only 300 km south, could also be impacted.

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http://orepa.org/sentencing-schedule-for-transform-now-plowshares/

Sentencing schedule for Transform Now Plowshares
Feb 14, 2014

Judge Amul Thapar has shifted the sentencing schedule for the Transform Now Plowshares resisters to the afternoon of Tuesday, February 18. The hearings will take place in the Howard Baker Federal Courthouse in Knoxville, TN.

Michael Walli’s sentencing hearing will begin at 12:00noon.
Greg Boertje-Obed’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for 2:00pm.
Megan Rice’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for 4:00pm.