If someone accidentally pokes you in the eye, it hurts. But is it more painful if you believe he did it on purpose? Probably yes, according to the findings of a study in Psychological Science.

Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner didn’t poke anyone in the eye, but they did set up a study calling for participants to receive electric shocks and then lured 43 students to participate with offers of course credit or cash.

At the beginning of the study, participants met their “partner,” who was casually introduced as another student but who was in fact in cahoots with the scientists.

Participants were then assigned several tasks including judging musical tones, matching colors, solving number problems and assessing discomfort levels in response to an electric shock. 

The scientists cared only about the latter.

In this task, the student receiving the shock was asked to rate the pain on a 7-point scale, in which 1 meant no discomfort and 7 meant child birth. According to the study design, this rating took place just after scientists gave participants a rather key piece of information.

Half the time, the scientists informed participants that their study partner signed them up for the shock test. The rest of the time, scientists told the participants their partner chose a non-shocking task for them but the trial design called for the decision to be reversed and the shock to be administered.

Students rated the pain they thought was administered intentionally as a 3.62. They rated the unintentionally administered pain at 3.00.

As well, pain associated with shocks perceived to be unintentional decayed with time, but there was no attenuation when the pain was perceived to be deliberate.

Perfume makers want guys to believe they’ll have more success attracting women if they apply a scent. It turns out that’s probably true, but not for the reason members of either sex would expect.

Craig Roberts and his team from the University of Liverpool showed that that when a man alters his normal body odor by adding fragrance, it positively impacts self-confidence and that creates visual cues women find attractive.

The scientists, working with a research team from Unilever, gave half the male volunteers in their study an unlabelled spray containing a commercial fragrance. The other half received an identically-appearing aerosol that contained no scent at all.

The men knew whether their spray contained a scent because they could smell it, but they didn’t know their behavior was being compared to men in the other cohort.

Psychological testing revealed that self-confidence increased in the group of men that had applied a scent, but not in the fragrantless control group.

Next, the scientists showed women brief, silent videos of men in both groups. The medium removed scent from the equation, yet women found men in the fragrantly-scented group to be more attractive.

Follow-up testing revealed the women were attracted equally to both groups when they were shown still photographs of the men, so something about the men’s posture and movement, and not their physical appearance, was decisive.

Thus when Unilever claims its deodorant Lynx renders men irresistibly attractive it’s hard to argue but the attraction has nothing to do with the smell of the fragrance and everything to do with the confidence-building effect it has on the men wearing it.

The study will be published in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science.

If small gangs of cybercriminals can outwit computer makers and antivirus vendors while raking in $100 billion per year in credit card theft and bank fraud, what’s to stop well-funded governments from conducting more sophisticated attacks like shutting down power plants or disrupting Internet traffic?

Not much, it turns out.

Russia proved that last summer. While its army was slicing and dicing Georgia, the Bear launched a distributed-denial-of-service attack on Georgian government Web sites that knocked out email service and public information access for days.

A year earlier, Russia launched a similar attack on Estonia disrupting among other things phone access to emergency services.

OK maybe these countries don’t have the latest, greatest security programs, but now the US Army has been hit. A piece of malware called Agent.btz has infected tens of thousands of thumb drives and memory cards throughout the Army.

Agent.btz is a worm that infects computers after the portable memory devices are inserted into them. Infected computers subsequently hooked up to the Internet automatically download programs enabling distant operators to access the hard drive.

It’s not clear who perpetrated the worm or why they did it but Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff thought it was important enough to brief President Bush on the matter last week.

And Agent.btz is not overly sophisticated. In fact it’s a variant of malware that’s been around for 3 years.

By contrast, Congress was warned last month by a special commission that “since China’s current cyber operations capability is so advanced, it can engage in forms of cyber warfare so sophisticated that the US may be unable to counteract or even detect the efforts.”

Meanwhile simple though Agent.btz may be, it costs a fortune to deal with. One commercial bank that got hit by the worm decided the best approach was to block its computers’ USB ports with glue.

The Army plans a different approach. It’s going to scrub every memory card in its 6-continent system. Tennnn-HUT!

Geologists know that when carbon dioxide contacts the igneous rock peridotite, a spontaneous chemical reaction results. The reaction produces limestone and eliminates carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so people thought why not grind up some peridotite, transport it to power plants and line smokestacks with the stuff to trap CO2 before it’s released into the atmosphere?

A good thought, but one that proved too costly and energy intensive.

Now, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that the miracle stone’s gas trapping abilities can be enhanced a million-fold by simple methods, and the whole CO2 sink idea suddenly has legs.

Peridotite normally resides in the Earth’s mantle 15 miles below the surface. Sometimes though, plate tectonic collisions push peridotite to the surface. That’s what happened eons ago in Oman which is now home to an exposed patch of peridotite the size of Massachusetts.

After 5 years of field work in the Omani desert, Peter Kelemen and Juerg Matter concluded that its peridotite patch is naturally absorbing 10,000 to 100,000 tons of carbon a year–far more than previously thought.

This means it may be feasible to pump CO2 from regional power plants to specially prepared peridotite fields resulting in “a low-cost, safe and permanent method to capture and store atmospheric CO2,” according to Kelemen.

The process would involve boring holes into the rock and injecting warm water containing pressurized CO2. Once started, the reaction would generate heat that would further accelerate the reaction. Fractures would form exposing new peridotite to the soda. The man-made gas trap would keep going as long as fresh CO2 was supplied.

The scientists assert that Omani peridotite alone can absorb some 4 billion tons of carbon a year—that’s 13% of the total spewed into the atmosphere each year.

Peridotite fields also exist in Papua New Guinea, Greece and Croatia. There are small deposits in the western United States as well.

And it turns out that ubiquitous basalt may have similar greenhouse gas gobbling characteristics. Scientists in Iceland are pursuing that lovely possibility right now.

In the Jurassic period of the information age, otherwise known as the late 1970s, there were no cable-ready TVs, electronic games or cell phones and of course there was no Internet. Times were good for TV marketers. They could reach 90% of US households with prime-time ads on just 3 networks.

In 2008, they would be happy to reach 30% with such a strategy, and DVRs mean viewers can skip the ads anyway.

But now things might be looking up for TV ad sellers. Researchers from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College have found that TV advertisements can influence brand preferences even when viewed in fast forward mode.

James Gips and Adam Brasel tracked the eye-movements and subsequent brand selections of participants watching a nature documentary on TV. The scientists showed that viewers focus intensely on the screen while fast forwarding commercial sequences so they don’t miss the start of normal programming.

In fact they’re paying closer attention than when ads are displayed at normal speed.

This explains why fast-forwarded brand images displayed for just a third of a second influenced future preferences, but only if they were centered on the screen and surrounded by little clutter. 

The scientists had inserted ads for Flake and Aero, two UK chocolate bars unfamiliar to most US viewers. Study participants fast-forwarding though ads in which the brand logo was displayed simply and on center screen were twice as likely to choose that brand during follow-up. Such preferences were not observed when ad lay-out deviated from the centered, uncluttered presentation.

So get ready to see brand images parked squarely and simply in mid-screen next time you’re leaning on fast forward.

Big Pharma always had a special place in its heart for America. Why wouldn’t it? Americans spent a ton on health. Americans valued innovation and minimized regulation. Americans even let Big Pharma price its products.

And America generated half of Big Pharma’s worldwide profit.

But things change. Now, Big Pharma thinks its future lies in the developing world. Pfizer just reorganized itself to reflect that as a matter of fact. That move came after Pfizer began cultivating a presence in 130 Chinese cities. Heck, Pfizer just established a JV with a bank to develop rural markets for basic drugs in Bangladesh of all places.

Jean-Michel Halfon was describing Pfizer’s strategy when he told the Economist, ‘serving customers in developing countries is now “a business not a charity,’” but he might have spoken for all Big Pharma.

Why the change? Follow the money. Annual drug sales are expected to grow by 34% per year in emerging markets compared with 9% in the US and Japan, and 14% in Europe.  In less than a decade, drug sales in emerging markets should top $300 million, which is equal to total current sales in America and the 5 top European countries combined.

And frankly, Big Pharma doesn’t know what it’s got in the Big O. What if he were to permit the import of cheap Canadian drugs? What about his threats to have Medicare negotiate tougher price discounts? That could cut American sales by 3-10% right there, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

Meanwhile just because it’s a good idea for Big Pharma to focus on developing countries doesn’t mean it can execute. New marketing and sales strategies will be needed, not just recycled riffs designed for the American, Japanese and European markets. It can expect some tough sledding with distribution partners and regulatory complexity as well.

And what will it do about pricing?

In 1983, Ronald Reagan threatened to build a space-based laser defense system that could obliterate Soviet nuclear missiles before they left their own airspace.  Reagan called it the Strategic Defense Initiative, but Ed Kennedy derided it as a “reckless Star Wars scheme,” knowing full well the technology wasn’t there.

Kennedy was right and Star Wars never got built, but Reagan’s bluster may have nevertheless accelerated the implosion of the Soviet regime by forcing it to account for the billions of rubles it would take to maintain technology parity with the US at a time when its economy was going down the toilet.

Now, 25 years after Reagan’s Star Wars political checkmate, the US military appears to be back in the ray gun business. And this time, the early prototypes actually work.

At an undisclosed location probably in Iraq, an undisclosed branch of the military, probably the US Army has deployed Zeus, a “directed energy weapon” to destroy unexploded ordinance like roadside bombs from a safe distance.

Until now, the military completed this unsavory task with rocket propelled grenades, but RPGs are expensive and they have an annoying tendency to not go where they’re supposed to. Reportedly the laser goes where it’s aimed, and it works from 400 yards out so soldiers don’t have to expose themselves to sniper fire during the disarmament process.

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We’ve deployed nanoparticles (that is, particles measured in billionths of a meter) in the war on cancer for awhile now. For example, Abraxane packages the breast-cancer drug Taxol with albumin, a tiny blood protein that improves drug delivery and reduces side-effects.

Now, scientists have begun testing a new generation of nanoparticles that attack malignancies in a different way. By focusing energy from external sources, the new nanoparticles destroy cancers physically rather than chemically.

Jennifer West at Rice University for example, has developed gold- and silicon-based nanoparticles that absorb infra-red light and then heat up. If we can deliver these nuggets exclusively to the site of a cancer and turn on the juice, the tumor cooks while normal tissue remains unharmed.

It turns out this is quite possible because the pores of tumor capillaries are many nanometers larger than normal. It’s just a matter of creating nanoparticles exactly the right size to exploit the difference.

West’s nanoparticles have proven effective and safe in mice and dogs. Her team has begun testing them in humans with head and neck cancer.

Other teams are deploying nanoparticles of their own. The privately held German company MagForce Nanotechnologies for example, injects iron-containing particles directly into tumors and heats them with magnetic fields.

And the Taxol/albumin vehicle is only the first of what will likely be many cancer-fighting, drug-based nanoparticles. CytImmune Sciences of Rockville, Maryland has initiated a study of another gold nanoparticle that delivers tumor necrosis factor, while Calando Pharmaceuticals of Pasadena, California has enclosed camptothecin in a protective nanoparticle made of sugar.

The particular nanoparticles mentioned here may or may not prove effective, but those leaky tumor capillaries provide an opening big enough to drive a truck through.

Just months ago, gas cost more than Chanel No. 5 and the presidential candidates loved every green technology they could name. But the Great Economic Crisis of 2008 took the steam out of clean.

T. Boone Pickens, who bet $58 million on wind power said last week that plummeting oil prices and challenging credit markets will “put off” the boom. The NEX, an index of clean-tech stocks, is down twice as much as the Dow since January, and several American utilities have slashed near-term investments in clean energy.

Florida Power and Light for example, reduced by 400 megawatts its investment in wind power for next year, while North Carolina’s Duke Energy slashed $50 million from next year’s solar power budget.

But long term prospects remain excellent for green tech. The world still needs energy, argues Steve Sawyer, head of the Global Wind Energy Council in last week’s Economist. And investing in fossil fuel-derived sources carries risks of its own, as recent oil price gyrations have demonstrated.

Meanwhile, the Big O argues persuasively that green tech addresses global warming while creating jobs that can’t be shipped overseas (someone has to unwind the rubber bands attached to the wind farm propellers, right?). Even Congress gave green tech the green light by adding renewable energy subsidies to last month’s bailout.

Green companies with solid business plans, especially those likely to generate revenue in the short term, are raising capital even now. EDF Nouvelles, a European renewable-energy firm, just raised $734 million in a secondary share issue. GridPoint, a US start-up focusing on improving electrical grid efficiency, just raised $120 million. And wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers still have long waiting-lists

Which is good because long term, global warming is a bigger problem than global economic cooling.

People who are old enough will remember the 1966 flick Fantastic Voyage, in which scientists are miniaturized and sent into the body of a man dying of a brain clot. The scientists run a gauntlet of biological obstacles before saving the man’s life.

It may not be long before we’re doing that for real and in one sense, we already are. Given Imaging for example markets Pillcam, a 1.1 cm by 2.6 cm capsule that contains a camera. Once Pillcam has been swallowed, the camera transmits images that can identify causes of GI bleeding, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

Pillcam relies on peristaltic contractions to whisk it along, but what if we could design one that moves on its own or rejigger it to perform biopsies?

Paolo Dario and his group in Pisa have already designed prototype robots that have retractable legs which allow the capsule to go where no capsule has gone before (sorry). His and other European teams are also designing modular robots in which individual pieces assemble themselves inside the stomach and the resulting devices can perform surgery “inside-out.”

The big hurdle is powering the devices. While they wait for battery technology to improve, scientists believe the most effective work-around is to build the robots using magnetic material which can be manipulated with magnetic fields produced by MRI machines.