These Suits Were Made for Walking
Last week, a female American astronaut put on some unusual protective gear and journeyed for many hours, venturing into territory few of us would seriously consider exploring. I refer of course to Sunita Williams, who, with a six-hour 40-minute space walk, became the first woman to spend more than one full Earth-day walking in space. Williams, who has now space walked for 29 hours and 17 minutes, was already the top female space walker, having clocked in 22 hours and 37 minutes with her first three walks. Her companion on the atmosphere-less constitutional, Michael Lopez-Alegria, broke the overall American record for most time space walking. He has now walked 61 hours and 22 minutes in space; he still has a ways to go before he catches up with Russian Anatoly Solovyov's world record of over 82 hours. The two astronauts completed their mission of rolling up thermal sheets and tossing them away from the ISS. Last December, space walkers on the space shuttle Discovery had trouble folding up a solar array. After the thermal sheets had been successfully discared, Lopez-Alegria said, "Solar arrays wish they could retract this well!" Yeah! Take that, solar arrays.
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Only You
While the Free-Hugs campaign is cute and all, the indiscriminate huggers probably aren't inspiring much love for themselves. A study slated to be published in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science shows that people tend to be attracted to those who are attracted to them if and only if the other person isn't drooling over everyone they meet. When the suitor digs you over others, you might feel the two of you are establishing a real connection, but if that person throws out love willy nilly, he or she may come across as desperate. The researchers set up four-minute speed-dates for each of 156 undergrads. The participants answered a questionnaire after each date, revealing how strongly they romantically desired their date and how much chemistry they felt. In platonic situations, people tend to exhibit generalized reciprocity: People like those who tend to like people. Apparently, when it comes to romance, people just want to feel special.
Rising See Level
No wonder old people wear glasses—they're not getting nearly enough first-person shooter game play. According to a recent study out of the University of Rochester, people who play action-packed video games can boost their visual acuity by about 20 percent in a month. The paper is published in the January issue of Psychological Science. The researchers took on the nigh-impossible task of digging up a subject pool of Rochester students who never played video games. They gave the students a visual test where they identified the orientation of letters in a clutter. Students then spent a month playing either the action game Unreal Tournament or the less visually exhilarating (but still wonderful) Tetris for one hour a day. After a month, the Tetris players were still their average old selves, but the Unreal Tournament players gained unreal vision. The researchers conclude that gamers can actually change their neural pathways to maximize their vision. "These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it," said researcher Daphne Bavelier. "That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."