News Archive - Inga Kiderra

Losing Sleep Over Climate Change

Unusually warm nights can harm human sleep, researchers show, and the poor and the elderly are most affected. Rising temperatures could make sleep loss more severe.

Don’t Count on Your Chickens Counting

Arguing against the current conventional wisdom – that there is an evolved capacity for number and arithmetic that we share with other species – Rafael Nunez says numerical cognition is not biologically endowed.

After the Death of a Friend, Healing in a Social Network

Wounds heal – the cells in a body knit over a cut. When a neuron dies, the brain can rewire itself to make up for the loss. And now, new research suggests, something similar seems to happen within a human social network after the death of a friend. Published in Nature Human Behavior, the study of 15,000 anonymized networks on Facebook was led by social scientist, alumnus William Hobbs.

Economists Price BP Oil Spill Damage to Natural Resources at $17.2 Billion

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the largest maritime oil spill in U.S. history. Almost seven years to the day after the start of the environmental disaster, researchers have published a price tag of the damage done to natural resources: $17.2 billion.

Geeking Out in the Golden Years

Philip Guo caught the coding bug in high school, at a fairly typical age for a Millennial. Less typical is that the UC San Diego cognitive scientist is now eager to share his passion for programming with adults age 60 and up. His paper, the first known study of older adults learning to program, has been selected for honorable mention by a leading human-computer interaction conference called CHI.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Elects UC San Diego Chancellor and Three Professors

Three faculty members of the University of California San Diego and its chancellor have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the country’s most esteemed honorary societies and independent policy research centers.

Toeing the Line: Study Finds Brain Cells that Signal Path of Travel

In a paper published by Nature Neuroscience, UC San Diego cognitive scientists say they have found neurons that help an animal align itself within a cognitive map of its environment. The neurons signal “I’m on this line, in this orientation.”

Live Long and… Facebook?

Is social media good for you, or bad? Well, it’s complicated. A study of 12 million Facebook users suggests that using Facebook is associated with living longer – when it serves to maintain and enhance your real-world social ties. Oh and you can relax and stop watching how many “likes” you get: That doesn’t seem to correlate at all.

How the Brain Makes–and Breaks–a Habit

Not all habits are bad. Some are even necessary. But inability to switch from acting habitually to acting in a deliberate way can underlie addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders. Working with a mouse model, an international team of researchers demonstrates what happens in the brain for habits to control behavior

Obituary: UC San Diego Psychology Department Founder George Mandler, 91

George Mandler – founding chair of the University of California San Diego’s Department of Psychology and one of the central figures in psychology’s cognitive revolution – died in his Hampstead, London home on May 6, 2016. He was 91.