A joint team of American and British scientists have discovered that powerful magnetic pulses to the brain can temporarily change people's feelings on a variety of subjects - from their belief in God, to their attitude to immigration.
The study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, saw scientists use a metal coil to create strong magnetic fields around certain parts of the brain.
The non-invasive practice is called trancranial magnetic stimulation, and has can be used to treat depression.
However, researchers have now found that by targeting the part of the brain that deals with threats, they can temporarily change people's beliefs and views.
Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there."
Getty
The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year
PA
Jackdaws can identify “dangerous” humans from listening to each other’s warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or “contact calls” (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average.
Getty
The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the “Goldilocks Zone” which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal
Ye et al/Current Biology
African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017.
Reuters
Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planet’s oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago
A. Gennari
A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a “transient anus” that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste
Steven G Johnson
Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands
Clay Bolt
Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal
New Mexico Museum of Natural History
Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold
Faye Levine, University of Maryland
A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males
Getty
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase
Getty
The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies
Getty/AFP
The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers
Reuters/AP
The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn"
Viktor Radermacher / SWNS
Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star.
ESO/A. Müller et al
Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the “interstitium”. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins
Getty
Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs
José Iriarte
More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly.
Getty
The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth.
Pictures by: Tom Momary
The team, comprised of scientists from the University of York and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), used 39 politically moderate students as test subjects.
The two were split into two groups - one, the control group, was given a sham dose of magnetism that was not strong enough to influence brain activity.
The other got a strong pulse of TMS that was strong enough to temporarily shut down their posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC), a part of the brain that "plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behaviour to resolve such conflicts."
In other words, this part of the brain processes threats and conflicts, and decides how to respond to them.
Before receiving their doses of TMS, both groups were asked about their own deaths. In this area, the tests built on previous studies, which have shown that being confronted with the threat of death can alter a person's belief in God.
In the second part of the study, students were asked to read two letters written by immigrants to America, one which praised the country, and another which criticised it - again, the text of the critical letter was taken from another study that proved it increased stronger feelings of loyalty and bias towards the subject's own ethnic group, at the expense of the other.
The students were then treated with their respective doses of TMS, with half receiving a dose capable of severely lessening activity in the threat-processing centre of the brain.
The collected results showed a marked difference in attitudes between the two groups.
Amongst those who received the strong magnetic dose, 32.8 per cent fewer had decreased beliefs in God, angels and heaven compared to the control group who received no dose.
And 25.8 per cent more of those who had received TMS had a more positive response to the immigrant who had written a negative letter about their country.
In other words, those given the magnetic treatment were found to have decreased beliefs in God and more positive views towards immigrants.
Dr Keise Izuma, of the authors of the study from the University of York, said: "As expected, we found that when we experimentally turned down the posterior medial frontal cortex, people were less inclined to reach for comforting religious ideas despite having been reminded of death."
Speaking about the part of the test which involved attitude to immigrants, he added: "We think that hearing criticisms of your group's values, perhaps especially from a person you perceive as an outsider, is processed as an ideological sort of threat."
"One way to respond to such threats is to 'double down' on your group values, increasing your investment in them, and reacting more negatively to the critic."
"When we disrupted the brain region that usually helps detect and respond to threats, we saw a less negative, less ideologically motivated reaction to the critical author and his opinions."
Whether we're dealing with everyday threats, such as security at work, or more abstract ones, such as the idea of God and death or the issue of immigration, our brains are using the same basic structure - and its activity can be reduced with magnetic fields.