Teamwork and collaboration are critical to mission achievement in any organization that has to respond quickly to changing circumstances. My research in the U.S. intelligence community has not only affirmed that idea but also surfaced a number of mistaken beliefs about teamwork that can sidetrack productive collaboration. Here are six of them.

Last week, we reported on the astounding confirmation that all solar systems in the Galaxy probably have planets, and that Earthlike planets are more common than previously thought. While this seems like good news for SETI-enthusiasts, the revelation is actually quite disturbing.

Given that we have yet to meet any extraterrestrials, the finding could mean that basic life may be very common — but that it gets snuffed out before having a chance to leave the cradle. That could be very bad news for humans.

Önskar du dina barn och barnbarn ett långt och friskt liv? Om du är man bör du i så fall skaffa barn sent i livet. Ännu bättre är om din egen far också var till åren kommen när han fick dig, enligt en ny studie.

Last year's accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant exposed local residents to whole-body radiation doses of up to 50 millisieverts, well below the safety threshold, the World Health Organization has estimated.

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Nowhere did the whole-body dose estimate exceed the 100-millisievert limit, which poses enhanced risks of dying from cancer.

The thyroid gland dose estimate was the largest, at 100-200 millisieverts, for infants in Namie, Fukushima Prefecture. That level was lower than the average of 490 millisieverts for evacuees from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident of 1986, which caused thyroid cancer in many evacuees.

Japan insists its nuclear crisis was caused by an unforeseeable combination of tsunami and earthquake. But new evidence suggests its reactors were doomed to fail.

I don't know, I get a distinct whiff of sensationalism from both headline and lede, but I'm tagging this "toread" so I can check it out later.

Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."

A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.

Not really related since I am neither female nor a native English speaker, but still: When I studied phonetics a few years ago and analyzed spectrograms of my own speech, I found it very hard not to "creak" at the end of utterances. Had no idea some would consider it a "disorder." I don't really feel disorderly.

Evidence has long shown that getting a group of people to think individually about solutions, and then combining their ideas, can be more productive than getting them to think as a group. Some people are afraid of introducing radical ideas in front of a group and don’t speak up; in other cases, the group is either too small or too big to be effective.

But according to a recently published study, the real problem may be that participants’ [sic] get stuck on each others’ ideas. On Monday, the British Psychological Society highlighted a recent study by Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith, two researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas A&M; University. [...] As expected, the “nominal” groups, or those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

Une première mondiale. Astrium, géant de l'industrie spatiale, annonce avoir signé un contrat de 275 millions d'euros pour permettre l'observation de la Terre par satellite en temps réel. Le système, sans équivalent à ce jour dans le monde, qu'Astrium Services doit mettre en place pour l'Agence spatiale européenne (ESA) permettra notamment d'observer les conséquences des catastrophes naturelles.

Authorities trying to decontaminate radioactive soil in the aftermath of the accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant have found that sunflowers, despite their reputation for absorbing radioactive cesium, have little effect, an experiment has shown.

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The experiment on removing radioactive cesium started in May in farmland totaling 7,000 square meters in Iitatemura and other locations in Fukushima Prefecture.

In the experiment, the effects of the following four methods were examined: scraping away surface soil; washing contaminated soil with water and removing the water; burying topsoil and replacing it with subsoil; and using sunflowers and other plants to absorb radioactive cesium in soil.

The results showed the least effective of the four methods was the use of plants.