Health & Science

The befuddling effect of poverty

The strain of worrying constantly about making ends meet depletes poor people’s brainpower, making them more likely to make bad decisions that can perpetuate the cycle of poverty. In fact, Princeton University researchers conclude in a new study, just feeling poor can quickly knock 13 points off a person’s IQ. To determine how financial worries affect thinking, the researchers posed various problems to middle- and low-income shoppers at a New Jersey mall. The study subjects were asked to make decisions about how they’d spend their money when facing emergency expenses. When the expenses were large, the cognitive performance of the poorer shoppers fell dramatically—by an equivalent of 13 IQ points or a lost night’s sleep—while the better-off shoppers’ scores remained the same. “Picture yourself after an all-nighter,” study co-author Sendhil Mullainathan tells The Washington Post. “Being poor is like that every day.” Researchers also ran cognitive tests on farmers in India before their harvest, when they were financially strapped, and afterward, when they were flush with cash; they, too, scored worse when they had less money. “There’s been this perception that the poor function less well,” said Eldar Shafir, the other co-author of the study. “[But] when you don’t have enough [money], it occupies your mind and takes away bandwidth that you could use for other things.”

The final moon mission?

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NASA last week launched an unmanned spacecraft on a mission to the moon—the last lunar flight on the space agency’s schedule. The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) will study the water molecules and dust particles in the lunar atmosphere for three months in orbit before crash-landing on the moon’s surface, The New York Times reports. Researchers hope data from LADEE can help them understand the moon’s water cycle, particularly how its poles became covered in ice. They also envision using the information to protect future moonwalking astronauts and machinery from lunar dust, which is extremely sharp because no water or wind wears off its edges. “It’s like shards of glass, and it sticks to everything,” says NASA scientist Sarah Noble. “If it gets into your eyes or your skin, it’s abrasive and it hurts.” Many moon researchers fear that NASA’s focus on putting an astronaut on Mars or on an asteroid will prevent it from planning any further manned lunar missions, the last of which was in 1972. China, India, Japan, Russia, and the European Space Agency, meanwhile, have unmanned lunar spacecraft in development.

Growing a human brain

Austrian researchers have used stem cells to create human brain tissue in a petri dish, a breakthrough that could help scientists study how complex disorders like autism and schizophrenia develop. Stem-cell researchers have previously grown tissue from other organs, including the heart and liver, but the brain—one of the most complex structures in the universe—has remained out of reach until now. The Austrian team used embryonic stem cells and adult skin cells that they reverted to stem cells to form pea-sized structures with different brain regions, mimicking the brain architecture of a 9-week-old human embryo. “It’s a long way from consciousness or awareness or responding to the outside world,” neurologist Zameel Cader of the John Radcliffe Hospital in the U.K. tells BBCNews.com. Still, the ability to grow human brain tissue could allow researchers to watch for the first time how neurological diseases develop, offering clues to diagnosing and treating them before symptoms appear. “What our organoids are good for,” said researcher Jürgen Knoblich, “is to model development of the brain and to study anything that causes a defect.”

A grand hidden canyon

The world’s longest canyon lies buried below two miles of ice in Greenland. Researchers discovered the unknown geographical feature by examining data collected from airplanes equipped with ice-penetrating radar. The radar revealed a massive gash in the island’s bedrock that is twice as long and twice as wide as the Grand Canyon, though only half as deep. “It’s not every decade, it’s not every five decades that you discover something quite as substantial and extensive as a feature like this, so it was a big surprise for us,” geographer Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol in the U.K. tells NPR.org. The canyon appears to funnel melt-water from Greenland’s massive ice sheet into the sea, which may explain why there are no lakes beneath Greenland’s ice, as there are beneath Antarctica’s. The runoff may also influence how quickly sea levels rise as climate change causes ice to melt on the world’s largest island. Researchers believe rivers carved out the canyon some 4 million years ago. “You think that everything that could be known about the land surface is known, but it’s not,” Bamber says. “There’s still so much to learn about the planet.”