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November
18, 2005
This internal publication contains information about recent coverage
of Carnegie Mellon that appeared primarily in national newspapers, magazines
and online publications. Please note that some sources may require registration
or a subscription in order to access their information online.
Please send comments and suggestions to thomas@cmu.edu
The media coverage archive is available at www.cmu.edu/clips
From November 11 - 17,
Carnegie Mellon Media Relations counted 167
references to the university in worldwide publications. Here is a sample.
National News Stories
The Chronicle of Higher Education | November
18
The Chronicle of Higher Education | November
18
The Wall Street Journal | November 16
ABC News (Christian Science Monitor) | November
16
Bloomberg News | November 15
Philadelphia Daily News | November 15
ABC News | November 11
MSNBC | November 10
USNews.com | November 2005
Student Experience
Chemical and Engineering News | November 21
Arts and Humanities
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 17
Orlando Sentinel | November 16
Genetic Engineering News | November 16
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 13
The New York Times (AP) | November 10
Information Technology
ADT Magazine | November 16
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 14
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 14
Environment
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 15
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 15
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 13
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 13
Pittsburgh Business Times | November 11
International News Stories
Gulf Times | November 16
Daily Mail | November 15
-
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National News Stories
The Chronicle of Higher Education | November
18
With his dusty boots planted firmly in pinkish rubble, David
Wettergreen gazes out across the vast, brutal wasteland and
tries to imagine that he is an astronaut landing on Mars. It is not
so far-fetched. This desiccated plateau stretching across 40,000 square
miles in northern Chile is the closest thing on earth to the surface
of the Red Planet. Reddish sand littered with volcanic rock stretches
endlessly into the distance. Barren mountains shrouded in ice caps poke
up against a frigid cobalt sky. The air is so dry it hurts to breathe.
Mr. Wettergreen's partner doesn't mind, though. Zoë is short, wide,
and a bit dirty, but can tackle conditions that cause even the most
intrepid explorers to cower. That is, as long as Zoë's batteries
don't run too low. Zoë is a 400-pound robot with four wheels and
a set of cameras that serve as eyes. Mr. Wettergreen, a robotics engineer
at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, has carted
the rover to this place to take advantage of the site's otherworldly
attributes.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/
v52/i13/13a01401.htm | back to top
The Chronicle of Higher Education | November
18
Chief among the heavy hitters was Carnegie Mellon University's
Red Team, the only squad to enter two robots in this year's [DARPA Grand
Challenge]. Sandstorm, a 1986 Humvee that topped last year's undistinguished
field by making it through just over 7 miles of a 150-mile course, had
been rejiggered after its 2004 showing. And Highlander, a souped-up
1999 Hummer, had run even faster than Sandstorm during this year's time
trials. The team took its name from its chief, William L. (Red)
Whittaker, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon who
was well known for helping to build the institution's robotics program
into a powerhouse. He had made his squad the team to beat by wooing
more than two dozen sponsors, including Boeing, Intel, and Google. ...
The race began at 6:40 a.m., when Carnegie Mellon's Highlander deftly
shot out of the opening gate, managed a right-hand turn, and sped up
to just over 30 miles per hour, kicking up dust that made life tougher
for the human operators of the pickup truck following it. ... Within
half an hour, the first three vehicles to start had all gone farther
than had any of the robots in last year's event.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/
v52/i13/13a03401.htm | back to top
The Wall Street Journal | November 16
Amid rapidly changing technology, the engineers employers want aren't
necessarily the engineers who are available. And companies often create
the very shortages they decry by insisting on applicants who meet every
item on a detailed list of qualifications. With the Internet adding
to the pile of résumés, company officials say a certain
degree of mechanical weeding-out is unavoidable. ... Hiring managers
often prefer to wait for the candidate who has the exact combination
of attributes they seek, rather than immediately hiring someone who
comes close and then giving that person time to get familiar with a
new machine or software program. ... Pradeep Khosla,
dean of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, says that for older engineers, "there is a problem
of technology moving at a very fast rate. When engineers are without
jobs, it is usually because they have not kept up." ... "During
the dot-com boom demand for electrical and computer engineers was so
great it was enough if you could just write code," says Prof. Khosla.
"Things have changed a lot."
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB113210508287498432-search.html | back to top
ABC News (Christian Science Monitor) | November
16
Could a computer run the Fed? That's the essence of a question Federal
Reserve Chairman nominee Ben Bernanke once posed in an academic paper.
With so many factors affecting the economy, might automated models outperform
human judgment in setting monetary policy? By raising the "man
versus machine" query, Dr. Bernanke showed his interest in developing
and following clear guidelines - a penchant that could lead the Fed
into new terrain if he is confirmed to succeed Alan Greenspan next year.
... In addition to an economy burdened by rising entitlement costs as
baby boomers retire, Bernanke will face other possible challenges...
Fed chiefs in the past have often faced significant tests early in their
tenure. Consider Greenspan: "Within two months he had a stock market
break, which in one day wiped out about one quarter of the value of
the stock market," says Allan Meltzer, an economist
and historian of the Fed at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/
CSM/story?id=1316009 | back to top
Bloomberg News | November 15
If Ben Bernanke wants a long tenure as Federal Reserve chairman, he
should hope for a short confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking
Committee today. Of the eight U.S. central bank chiefs who had confirmation
hearings, the five whose appearances lasted less than four hours went
on to serve at least eight years. The rest didn't last three years.
Little controversy surrounds Bernanke, 51, and praise from Republicans
and Democrats suggests quick approval by the committee and the full
Senate before Alan Greenspan's 18-year tenure ends Jan. 31. Greenspan
spent 3 1/2 hours before the committee in July 1987; his tenure will
have been the second- longest after that of William McChesney Martin
Jr., whose 1951 hearing lasted two hours. ... Allan Meltzer,
a Fed historian and professor of political economy at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said he was unaware of a connection
between the length of confirmation hearings and Fed tenure and cautioned
against making too much of it. A sample of eight chairman "is not
very many,'' he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=
10000103&sid=aenx8qUFUq_8&refer=us | back
to top
Philadelphia Daily News | November 15
Philadelphia sports fans' reputation as the meanest and most cold-hearted
in the nation is undeserved, and we have the data to back that up. The
evidence comes, oddly, from a study we and several colleagues recently
completed on public attitudes toward juvenile crime. Along with Daniel
Nagin, at Carnegie Mellon, and Elizabeth Scott,
at the University of Virginia law school, we conducted a survey of Pennsylvania
households in which we asked about the about the treatment of serious
juvenile offenders. One of the ways we assessed this drew on a method
developed by economists called "contingent valuation," which
is a way of ascertaining the relative popularity of different social
programs. To do this, you describe a social problem to a sample of people
who have been randomly divided into groups that are each presented with
a different potential solution, and then ask how much they would pay
in order to implement the specific alternative they've been asked about.
... Because we were concerned about the length of the survey, we decided
to break it up by including this question midway: "If the Eagles
and Steelers were playing against each other in the Super Bowl, who
would you root for?" The sample was split evenly between Eagles
and Steelers fans. But the way in which each teams' fans answered our
questions about juvenile crime were very different. Eagles fans were
far more generous than Steelers fans in the amount they would pay for
rehabilitation, while Steelers fans were willing to pay more for longer
jail terms.
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/
news/opinion/13169892.htm | back to top
ABC News | November 11
Stressed out? Put on an angry face — or at least not a fearful
one. A small study has found that those who responded to stressful situations
with angry facial expressions were less likely to suffer stress-related
ill effects such as high blood pressure and high stress hormone secretion,
compared to people who responded to stress with fearful expressions.
"Anger can sometimes be adaptive. We're showing for the first time
that when you are in a situation that is maddening and in which anger
or indignation are justifiable responses, anger is not bad for you,"
study lead author Jennifer Lerner, associate professor
of psychology and decision science at Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh, said in a prepared statement.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/
Healthology/story?id=1305153 | back to top
MSNBC | November 10
If Volker Hartkopf has his way, the office building
of tomorrow would look much like the office building of today, but with
more windows. Most of the innovations that he and fellow researchers
have added to a model office space here at Carnegie Mellon
University are under the hood. They’re things you might not even
notice unless you were working in such an office — or had to pay
the heating bills. For example, there's the heating system, which sends
lukewarm water up through pipes built into the structure's vertical
window frames, or mullions. That heat, along with the daylight coming
through the windows, is enough to keep the office comfortable on a cloudy
autumn day. "If I air-condition on a day like today, I'm a stupid
ass, because I can open windows," says Hartkopf, director of Carnegie Mellon's
Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. "We get very nice
air in here, and we get all the thermal quality we want by heating the
mullions just a little bit." Open the windows? In an office building?
Heretical common-sense ideas like that one are being put to the test
every day in Carnegie Mellon's 7,000-square-foot Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace,
which has been set up on the top floor of a campus building. The experimental
workspace began operation eight years ago, but the bolted-steel structure
is designed to be easily reconfigurable to suit the ideas of the 26
students, faculty and staff members who work here.
http://msnbc.msn.com/
id/9972711/ | back to top
USNews.com | November 2005
The versatility computers bring to the classroom is on full display
in Wooster, Mass., where several classes of eighth graders are currently
testing the Assistment program, a software tool designed by professors
at Carnegie Mellon University. The program saves teachers
time by administering and automatically scoring quizzes that are similar
to Massachusetts's state achievement test. And when kids get tripped
up on a problem, the PC breaks a larger problem down into step-by-step
questions, trying to tease out exactly where the students got off track.
"It's fine-grained analysis," says Ken Koedinger,
the program's designer. "It's terribly useful for teachers marking
up lesson plans."
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/
elearning/articles/1007nochild.htm | back to top
Student Experience
Chemical and Engineering News | November 21
Chemistry and art students are invading each other’s territory
this semester at Carnegie Mellon University. They are
participating in a new course called “The Color of Minerals &
Inorganic Pigments,” which is being team taught by Catalina
Achim, assistant professor of chemistry, and Clayton
Merrell, associate professor of art. The professors came up
with the idea for the class after they discovered during a faculty meeting
that they share an interest in geology. Achim takes the students in
her undergraduate inorganic course to the gem and mineral hall at the
Carnegie Museum of Natural History each year. Merrell often makes paintings
that include geological information. “That started us thinking
about going from chemistry through mineralogy to the pigments and thus
to the chemistry of art,” Achim says. Six chemistry majors and
six art students are taking the class. For many of the art students,
it’s their first chemistry class since high school. Despite the
artists having no college chemistry experience and the chemists having
no art experience, the course is being taught at an advanced level in
both subjects.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/
83/i47/8347art.html | back to top
Arts and Humanities
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 17
Tuesday night's Nuance concert began exactly the way it should, with
a pair of works that demonstrated the elegance and skill of the Pittsburgh
Symphony Chamber Orchestra musicians at the JCC's Katz Performing Arts
Center. ... But if the first half was more black and white, the second
half emerged with what might be termed the technicolor side of music.
Carnegie Mellon University composer Leonardo Balada's
premiere, Caprichos No. 3 for Violin and Chamber Orchestra, provided
the primary interest on this program. PSO concertmaster Andres Cardenes,
who has championed Balada's work before, served as the soloist, with
Larry Loh taking over the conducting reins. Balada's recent and highly
successful sojourns into combining folk and abstract music techniques
were evident here. But Balada chose an unusual inspiration for his piece:
melodies sung by the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil
War.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05321/607470.stm | back to top
Orlando Sentinel | November 16
The time has come to pop a long, sharp stickpin in the rumblings that
men are less than equal at multitasking. "I don't believe the functional
data supports that," reports neuro-psychologist Marcel
Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at
Carnegie Mellon University.
He disputes a 1998 study, done by scientists elsewhere, that he believes
wrongly suggested that women might have the upper hand when it comes
to multitasking. Just, who has spent years peering into the human mind
through functional CT scans that map brain activity during cognitive
tasks, reports that only when asked to listen to two things simultaneously
do women demonstrate higher capacity to do so. In every other pairing
of cognitive tasks, listening to a series of true-false statements while
mentally twisting three-dimensional figures, for instance, men and women
show equal capacities.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/
orl-multitasking05nov16,0,686797.story?coll=orl-caltop | back
to top
Genetic Engineering News | November 16
The World Technology Network (WTN) announced today the top individuals
deemed the most innovative in the world of science and technology. Voted
by their peers in 20 categories such as biotechnology, ethics, entertainment
and space, the top individuals in each category have been named WTN
Fellows. The WTN is a global meeting ground, a virtual think tank, and
an elite club whose members are all focused on the business and science
of bringing important emerging technologies of all types (from biotechnology
to new materials, from IT to new energy sources) into reality. ***Golan
Levin, assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon
was named a WTN Fellow for the arts.
http://www.genengnews.com/news/bnitem.aspx?name=
1107589XSL_NEWSML_TO_NEWSML_WEB.xml | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 13
Zadie Smith's first novel, "White Teeth," was a revelation.
Published when she was 24, it was a blunderbuss of a novel, set in contemporary
multicultural London, and dealt with the messy issues that surround
us -- religion and class, intermarriage and sex, growing up and growing
old, and constructing identity, family and community in a post-everything
world. In her third novel, she continues her search for absolutes in
a relativistic world, and also pays homage to E.M. Forster's "Howards
End" while upping the ante. In that novel, Forster explored the
barriers that class imposed on the ability to achieve intimacy. A hundred
years later, Smith borrows Forster's plotlines while winking at "Howards
End" occasionally, but manages to construct a story that incorporates
the issues of race, adultery and professional jealousy. *** This book
review was written by Sharon Dilworth, a writer and
professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05317/605004.stm | back to top
The New York Times (AP) | November 10
New album, master classes, concert performances in Europe and America
-- Earl Wild is turning 90, but that's not stopping him. Neither are
two eye operations and a quadruple bypass. ''After I had my (heart)
operation,'' the pianist said, ''I decided I wasn't going to stop playing
because why live if you can't play, when you've done it all your life?''
... Being a link between past and future, he still teaches at his home
in Columbus, Ohio, giving each student up to five-hour lessons once
every three weeks. He also has regular master classes at Carnegie
Mellon University in his native city Pittsburgh.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/
arts/AP-Music-Wild-at-90.html | back to top
Information Technology
ADT Magazine | November 16
The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute
and GM announced on Tuesday a collaboration to create a business process
improvement model for companies looking to source information technology
capabilities from third-party suppliers. The SEI and GM will co-develop
the initial model for use by government and industry organizations.
The initial model will be based on the existing CMMI Acquisition Module,
created for the U.S. Department of Defense in 2004. ... CMMI can be
used to guide process improvement across a project, a division or an
entire organization. The model helps integrate traditionally separate
organizational functions, sets process improvement goals and priorities,
provides guidance for quality processes and provides a point of reference
for appraising current processes. GM anticipates an initial draft by
December, and an SEI special report of the initial model for public
release will be published by the end of the first quarter of 2006.
http://www.adtmag.com/
article.asp?id=17507 | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 14
A month after the Grand Challenge robot race, members of [Carnegie
Mellon's] Red Team are still hard pressed to explain why their
lead racer, H1ghlander, took almost an hour longer than planned to complete
the 132-mile course. ... The Red Team had programmed H1ghlander to complete
the course in 6 hours, 19 minutes. Based on speeds achieved during the
qualifying events prior to the race, the Red Team had calculated that
no other team was likely to finish the course in much less than seven
hours. But 17 miles after leaving the starting gate, H1ghlander began
to fall off its pace. At seven spots, it came to unexplained stops,
twice rolling backward on hills. On-board audio recordings indicate
the engine repeatedly stalled and, at the finish line, its idle speed
was oscillating wildly. ...[William "Red"] Whittaker
professes no disappointment with the outcome and points with pride not
only to two successful finishes, but also to the fact H1ghlander was
able to finish at all. "On its worst damn day," he said, "the
thing is really tough."
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05318/606011.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 14
"The thing we've got going for us is the success of the Grand Challenge
shifted a lot of the belief state," [said William "Red"
Whittaker, the Carnegie Mellon University
roboticist whose Red Team had the second- and third-place finishers.]
In just the past month, a number of government "requests for proposals"
have appeared that specify autonomous driving as a requirement. "There
were a lot of great finishes in the Grand Challenge and that shifted
a lot of things from intention to action." Some of that interest
is from the military. After all, DARPA, the Pentagon's research and
development arm, had sponsored the race to foster innovation in autonomous
ground vehicles; the armed forces are facing a mandate to make a third
of their vehicles self-driving within the next 10 years. But Dr. Whittaker,
whose work 20 years ago using robots in the cleanup of the Three Mile
Island nuclear accident was a milestone in establishing the concept
of "field robotics," said the interest in autonomous vehicles
is much broader than that, including environmental remediation, mining
and agricultural machinery.
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05318/606010.stm | back to top
Environment
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 15
A survey to be released today by PA CleanWays, a nonprofit environmental
organization, found Allegheny County has more than twice as many illegal
dumps as any of the five other Western Pennsylvania counties recently
studied. The group is calling for coordinated enforcement of illegal-dumping
laws. ... The group has several theories about why Allegheny County
has so many more illegal dumps than the other counties, said Danielle
Crumrine, executive director of PA CleanWays of Allegheny County. ...
Allegheny County has 1.2 million residents compared to Fayette's 150,000.
Socioeconomic factors might also play a role, Crumrine said. Rikki
Hrenko, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate
student, is mapping the locations of Pittsburgh's dump sites along with
income statistics in search of a correlation. Last spring, Hrenko called
the main agencies responsible for enforcing illegal dumping laws ...
to find out how organized and accessible illegal-dumping records are
in Pittsburgh. "There are laws, but enforcement is not being maintained
at all," Hrenko said. The records are "pretty much a mess.
There's no standardization, no data-sharing between groups and very
little public information."
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
trib/pittsburgh/s_394561.html | back to top
Local News Stories
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 15
Alcoa said Chief Financial Officer Richard B. Kelson,
a 31-year veteran who has served as CFO since 1997, has chosen to retire.
... Kelson, 58, plans to retire in the first half of next year in order
to pursue opportunities in the private equity business. Kelson, who
was born in Pittsburgh, currently serves on the board of directors of
PNC Financial Services Group Inc., the Alcoa Foundation and MeadWestvaco
Corp., based in Stamford, Conn. He is a member of the board of trustees
at Carnegie Mellon University and serves on the board
of visitors of the University of Pittsburgh Law School.
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/
business/s_394528.html | back to top
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | November 13
To survive in a Wal-Mart world, local grocers... are re-evaluating nearly
every aspect of their business and working to stay relevant to consumers
increasingly less beholden to the traditional supermarket. ... Retailers
are discovering that while they can't compete on price on all items
all the time, they need to be price competitive on key items. This was
the conclusion of research by Carnegie Mellon University
marketing professor Vishal Singh, who was part of a
team that tracked customer behavior at an unnamed East Coast supermarket
over 20 months before and after the opening of a Wal-Mart Supercenter
nearby. Sales fell 17 percent after Wal-Mart opened. Using database
information from the store's frequent shopper card, Singh's team found
that 70 percent of lost revenue came from only 20 percent of customers
-- many of whom shared something in common: a dog or an infant in the
family. The study also found that the likely Wal-Mart defectors tended
by buy store brands over name brands. "In many cases, local retailers
already possess the information they need to be potent competitors,"
Singh said. "The challenge is to figure out how to best use this
data to improve performance and compete effectively."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/
tribune-review/business/s_393735.html | back to
top
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | November 13
Last week's election marked the end of a four-decade era of lever machine
voting in Allegheny County. Yet with a Jan. 1 deadline looming, no one
knows what will replace those machines, some of which have been in use
since the 1960s. ... The Pennsylvania Department of State has certified
one company's machine. It uses a touch-screen system which displays
one ballot question at a time on a computer monitor. ... Two other types
also will be on display Thursday. One, a "full-face" machine,
is larger and lets voters see the entire ballot at once, just as the
lever machines do. Another system resembles a standardized test. Voters
fill in ovals on sheets of paper and election workers feed the sheets
into a scanner. Only the scanner leaves a paper trail, which voters
and election officials can use to check results. ... This is a major
consideration for some government officials who are concerned about
the reliability and security of computerized voting. ... But Michael
Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie
Mellon University who tests voting systems for the state, disagrees.
He argues that a thorough testing process should identify problem machines.
In October, the state denied certification for the UniLect Patriot,
which experienced problems in Mercer County during last year's presidential
election. Mr. Shamos also questioned the security of optical ballots.
"[They] get handled by people," he said, "and are susceptible
to manipulation."
http://www.post-gazette.com/
pg/05317/605076.stm | back to top
Pittsburgh Business Times | November 11
As more apartments and condominiums are being built Downtown, real estate
brokers and Downtown advocates are looking for new ways to entice people
to move there and make the area more livable for existing residents.
One way they're looking to improve the amenities available to Downtown
residents is to make it easier to rely less on cars. Now advocates are
trying to bring an idea to Pittsburgh that has taken off in urban areas
around the country: car rentals by the hour. Attracting a car-sharing
business to Pittsburgh is a long-term goal of the Downtown Living Initiative.
... Jerry Paytas, director of the Center for Economic
Development at Carnegie Mellon University, said the
car-sharing idea could be helpful for Pittsburgh. "It would certainly
be a savings for people to not have to own a car but yet still have
access to one when you need it," Paytas said. "There are people
who would like to not have a car, but with the realities of both public
transportation today, but also the kind of topography and nature of
our region, you can't quite give up a car entirely. That would be an
option for them."
http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/
stories/2005/11/14/story3.html | back to top
International News Stories
Gulf Times | November 16
A high-level delegation led by the Prime Minister HH Sheikh Abdullah
bin Khalifa al-Thani will attend the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS) in Tunis starting today. ... The aim of the summit is
to bring governments and interested private sector organisations together
to share their experience and knowledge in order to enable individuals,
communities and nations achieve their full potential and improve the
quality of life through effective application of Information and Communication
Technology (ICT). ... One of the important aspects WSIS is managing
cyber security risks and responding to security vulnerabilities in order
to protect the interests and integrity of all ICT users. To deal with
these risks, ictQatar is partnering with Carnegie Mellon
University’s CERT Co-ordination Center to establish Q-CERT. Q-CERT
will be the national organisation for conducting and co-ordinating the
comprehensive set of cyber security activities that will be needed to
adequately protect Qatar’s critical infrastructures as ICT facilities
increasingly become central to the government, business and education
operations.
http://www.gulf-times.com/site/
topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=60857
&version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16 | back
to top
Daily Mail | November 15
Old wives tales have long been dismissed by modern medicine. But a study
has revealed wrapping up warm does indeed help to prevent the common
cold. There is still no effective cure for the problem, but there are
a range of treatments available. So should you rely on modern medicine
or mothers' myths? ... Researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pennsylvania found that happy people are three times less
likely to get a cold. The team studied more than 300 initially healthy
volunteers. First, each was interviewed to gauge their emotional state.
Next the researchers squirted rhinovirus, the germ that causes colds,
into each subject's nose. Follow-up interviews questioned them daily
for five days about any developing symptoms. The people scoring in the
bottom third for positive emotions were three times more likely to catch
a cold than those scoring in the top third. One possible explanation
is that happy people may lead healthier lifestyles. Happier volunteers
were found to have lower blood levels of stressrelated hormones such
as cortisol, which influences high blood pressure. Stress has been found
to compromise the immune system.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/
healthmain.html?in_article_id=368690&in_page_id=1774 | back
to top
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