Exposure to Christian Concepts or Imagery Decreases Tolerance for Ambiguity
Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologists Christina Sagioglou of the University of Innsbruck and Matthias Forstmann of the University of Cologne note that “one prototypical characteristic of Christian morality seems to be the two-tier distinction between ‘virtuous’ and ‘sinful’ behaviors.” With that in mind, the researchers reasoned that exposing people to Christian content would “shift a person’s cognitive style” so that he or she thinks in more dualistic terms, and is less comfortable with ambiguity. They present evidence supporting their theory in the form of five experiments. (Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard)

When Apes and Monkeys Split
Palaeontologists working in Tanzania have discovered the oldest known fossils from two major primate groups—Old World monkeys, which include baboons and macaques, and apes, which include humans and chimpanzees. The study, published in Nature, reveals new information about primate evolution. (Chris Palmer, Nature)

Which Emotions Are the Hardest to Fake?
Unlike the commonly deployed social smile, distressed expressions—anger, fear, sadness, and occasionally surprise—prove much more difficult to display on command. (Emily Ferber, Popular Science)

Music-Color Associations
A new study found that people associate upbeat, major-key music with lighter, more vibrant yellow-toned colors, while slower music in minor keys actually gives people the blues. These results were the same for participants in both California and Mexico, suggesting humans may have a surprisingly universal emotional color palette. (LiveScience)

Order of the Good Death
Founded by Caitlin Doughty, a thoughtful young mortician in Los Angeles, the Order of the Good Death is a collective of death professionals, artists, and academics who promote real talk about death and dying. While its name has an occult quality, the Order’s mission is actually quite public: to encourage people to be “death positive,” or open to exploring their thoughts, feelings, and fears about mortality. (Kim O’Connor, Pacific Standard)

Water Isolated for More Than a Billion Years Has Ingredients Necessary to Support Life
The isolated water supply, Chris Ballentine says, provides “secluded biomes, ecosystems, in which life, you can speculate, might have even originated.” His colleagues are now working to establish whether the water does harbor life. The findings may also have implications for life on Mars, Ballentine says, though he acknowledges that the idea is speculative. The surface of Mars once held water and its rocks are chemically no different from those on Earth, he says. “There is no reason to think the same interconnected fluids systems do not exist there.” (Jessica Marshall, Nature)

Investigation at Ball State University
Ball State University has agreed to investigate complaints that a course taught by a physics and astronomy professor has crossed a line from being about science to being about Christianity. (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed)

Q&A
Jaak Panksepp
Jaak Panksepp recently sat down with Discover executive editor Pamela Weintraub at the magazine’s offices in New York City to explain his iconoclastic take on emotion. His new book, The Archaeology of Mind: 
Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion, will be published in July. (Discover)

Human Embryonic Stem Cells Created Using Cloning
Scientists have finally succeeded in using cloning to create human embryonic stem cells, a step toward developing replacement tissue to treat diseases but one that might also hasten the day when it will be possible to create cloned babies. The researchers, at Oregon Health & Science University, took skin cells from a baby with a genetic disease and fused them with donated human eggs to create human embryos that were genetically identical to the 8-month-old. They then extracted stem cells from those embryos. (Andrew Pollack, The New York Times)

More on the Cloning Breakthrough and the Ethical Issues It Raises
Arthur Caplan: A team of experts in cloning at Oregon Health & Science University who have extensive experience and success with primate cloning have announced the cloning of human embryos. This announcement is sure to set off a heated debate about the morality of what they have done and what could be done with cloned human embryos. But while there is some reason for concern, there is more reason for excitement. (Vitals, NBC News)

Is This the End of the Kepler Mission?
NASA officials announced that the Kepler spacecraft, which has found more than 2,700 planetary candidates outside the solar system, has lost the ability to point in a specified direction due to the malfunctioning of one of its reaction wheels. The spacecraft has been put into safe mode while engineers attempt to figure out how to resolve the malfunction. (Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, ScienceInsider)

Cosmic Neutrinos
The South Pole IceCube neutrino observatory has seen a handful of ghostly high-energy neutrinos that almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy. “We are witnessing the birth of this field,” says Dan Hooper, a theoretical astrophysicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, who is not a member of IceCube. (Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist)

The Emotionary
The Emotionary calls itself “an emotional toolbox that can help you figure out exactly what you’re feeling.” The site, basically, is trying to define as many different, currently undefined emotions that it can, so we can “actually be aware of our emotions so we can talk about them together.” (Ryan O’Hanlon, Pacific Standard)

Lessons From the National Center for Science Education
Science is necessary to defuse anti-science efforts, but not sufficient. Rather than simply deploying artilleries of scientific facts, the NCSE addresses the motivations and tactics of those who would misrepresent research. (Nature)

Cool Temperatures Help Us Take the Perspective of Others
Newly published research suggests warm temperatures inhibit our ability to get beyond our own egocentric perspective and see things from a different point of view. “We show that perspective-taking is enhanced when participants are exposed to cooler rather than warmer temperature cues,” writes a research team led by Claudia Sassenrath of the University of Ulm in Germany. (Tom Jacobs, Pacific Standard)

Racial Bias and the Rubber Hand Illusion
Lara Maister and her colleagues wanted to know if using a rubber hand in a dark skin tone might influence the way white people perceived race. Previous studies have found that people’s brains activate to mirror actions they watch other people doing; this effect is stronger when a person is watching someone of his or her own race and weakens when they see someone of another race. Perhaps, the researchers thought, if people came to see a limb with darker skin as their own, they might perceive more overlap between themselves and someone of another race. (Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience)

Sustaining a Colony on Mars
“Single-planet species don’t survive,” says former astronaut John Grunsfeld, who still works at NASA. “That’s a pretty sound theorem—just look at the dinosaurs. But we don’t want to prove it.” As the only other planet in the solar system we are likely to be able to settle on, Mars looks like the best first step toward establishing an off-Earth foothold. But making Mars a sustainable destination will require a few advances beyond those needed for one-off trips. (Victoria Jaggard, New Scientist)

Can Time Travel Really Be Done?
Paul Davies: Travel into the future is not only possible, we have done it, although so far in only paltry amounts. How about going back in time? That is far more problematic and remains an active area of research. (CNN)

On Bioethical Expertise
Nathan Emmerich: Expert bioethicists cannot allow themselves to become a priestly caste. They must engage with the public and, in doing so, become more fully engaged by and with their concerns. Bioethics must become part of the drive to make science public and part of the politics of scientific expertise. (guardian.co.uk)

Are Rituals Effective?
Francesca Gino and Michael Norton: Rituals performed after experiencing losses—from loved ones to lotteries—do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks—like singing in public—do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence. What’s more, rituals appear to benefit even people who claim not to believe that rituals work. While anthropologists have documented rituals across cultures, this earlier research has been primarily observational. Recently, a series of investigations by psychologists have revealed intriguing new results demonstrating that rituals can have a causal impact on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. (Scientific American)

New Science of Loneliness
Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. (Judith Shulevitz, The New Republic)

More Emotional Emoticons
In 1872, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a book that cataloged emotional expressions in humans and their link to the animal world. In the book, Darwin described more than 50 universal emotions. Now Facebook, with the help of a psychologist who studies emotions and a Pixar illustrator, has turned some of the emotions Darwin described in the 19th century into a set of emoticons. The hope: to create emoticons that better capture the vast range of human emotion. (Shaunacy Ferro, Popular Science)

Three Ways to Catch a Liar
Paul Ekman: When we teach people how to catch liars, it takes us 32 hours. And there are over 30 different things you look for. I’ll tell you a couple of them in a minute, but if you’re going to remember them and use them and spot them you need a lot of practice. (In Their Own Words, Big Think)

BOOKS
The Serpent’s Promise
In The Serpent’s Promise, Steve Jones, a British geneticist and outspoken anti-religionist, sets out to retell the Bible from the point of view of science. Well, not exactly. Instead of a point-by-point fact-checking of the Christian holy book, Jones has opted to pick some of its main themes. From big topics such as the origins of the world and of humans, Noah’s flood and other epic disasters, and the ultimate fate of Earth, he sketches out our scientific knowledge for each. (Bob Holmes, New Scientist)