Health & Science

Why the sky dances with light

For decades, scientists have debated the cause of the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis—the dance of colored light in the evening sky sometimes seen in the northern latitudes. Now, using data from five NASA satellites and 20 ground observatories, says The Washington Post, a group of scientists has tracked the lights to their source—an explosion of magnetic energy 80,000 miles from Earth. Scientists had long known that the Northern Lights are related to an interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind, a stream of electrically charged particles streaming out from the sun. But they didn’t really understand how that process worked. New observations have revealed that as Earth’s magnetic field extends into space, it meets the solar wind about one-third of the distance to the moon, and is stretched into thin lines like a rubber band. Periodically, the solar energy surges and hurls the magnetic lines back toward Earth, as if it were snapping the rubber band, and the lines reconnect—exploding into a spectacular release of energy and heat. When that energy hits the atmosphere, it become visible as undulating waves of colored light. “Finally, we have the right instruments in the right place at the right time,” says Nicola Fox, a Johns Hopkins University scientist. “It’s allowed scientists to be able to make the necessary observations to settle this heated debate once and for all.”

Catching up to the boys

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Boys are better at math than girls. Right? Not anymore, says a new study. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison looked at results of math tests from 7 million students in 10 states, and found no difference between boys and girls—not even in high school, where the gap used to widen. With schools facing increased pressure because of the No Child Left Behind law, researcher Janet Hyde tells The New York Times, girls are now taking more advanced math classes, and the old stereotypes are falling away. “There aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance,” Hyde said. She also looked for gender discrepancies among students at the highest levels of mathematical ability, and did find that boys outnumbered girls in the 99th percentile by 2-to-1. Hyde suspects that gap may be a result of cultural influences, because among Asian-Americans, there were more girls in the 99th percentile than boys.

Drinking to the beat

When bars crank up the music, they sell more drinks. Patrons who are subjected to loud, pounding music in bars and clubs, a new study has found, down their drinks faster and end up drunker by the end of the night. “It seems that loud music throws people off their game and renders them less in control of their capacity to moderate their drinking,” alcoholism expert Dr. Mark Galanter tells U.S. News & World Report. In the study, French researchers persuaded two bars to play music at various levels on different nights, and observed how much the patrons drank. Louder and more frenetic music, they found, led to more drinking, for several reasons. Higher arousal and anxiety levels produced by the music stimulated people to want more alcohol; at the same time, the music made conversation more difficult, leaving drinking as the best social alternative to talking. “Everybody is subject to using alcohol to cope with anxiety, whether or not they have a problem with alcohol,” Galanter says. “Loud music puts them in a frame of mind where they’re less coherent, and maybe somewhat distracted, and in a somewhat altered state of consciousness.”

Why day care makes kids fat

Parents who make sure their babies eat healthful food often are undermined by baby sitters and day-care providers, says Scientific American. A study of more than 8,000 infants found that those who were cared for by somebody other than their parents for at least part of the day gained more weight in infancy than those who were fed by Mom and Dad. That weight gain during a baby’s first year can be carried forward through life. Fat babies are more likely to become fat kids, and fat kids more likely to become fat adults. While moms and dads take pains to provide babies and young children with nutritious, low-fat meals, says researcher Juhee Kim, day-care workers, baby sitters, or grandparents may lay on the junk food and sweets out of convenience or cost, or simply because feeding kids is an easy way to keep them quiet. She recommends that parents be quite clear “about when, what, and how to feed their babies during their stay in day care.”