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The article focuses on research of Psychologist John Watson of Johns Hopkins University and his graduate student Rosalie Rayner on strengthening branch of natural science able to predict and control behavior of people and animals. Topics discussed include influence on the treatment of psychological ailments exerted by psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud, irrational decision making by people and focus on studying people's thoughts and feelings.

At the base of Monticello Mountain, just below Thomas Jefferson's historic estate in Charlottesville, Va., sits a 90-meter-long greenstone wall. The Rivanna River runs on one side. On the other, [...]

Pressurized fizz and industrial processing aside, modern soft drink makers lag millions of years behind the curve, still catching up with the original purveyors of tasty, sugary beverages. Flowering plants [...]

Step aside, Europa. Make way, Titan. Saturn's small moon Enceladus is becoming one of the hottest places to look for signs of life in the chilly outer solar system. NASA's [...]

By July 1610, Galileo Galilei had already viewed Jupiter and its large moons, watched mysterious dark spots march across the sun, and studied craters on the moon. But when he [...]

Kilauea, a volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, has been erupting for more than 22 years. That marathon eruption is just one of the features that make this tropical [...]

Pity the ravaged galaxy known as C153. As far as astronomers can tell, this eviscerated body once resembled a grand spiral galaxy like out Milky Way, its several slender, starlit [...]

In the movie The Lion King, hyenas are the villains. They're portrayed as slobbering, mangy, stupid scavengers always ready to do someone else's dirty work. It's entertaining, but the caricature [...]

Described by a trapper in the 1830s as a 'beautiful Vale' with 'wild romantic scenery,' the Lamar Valley stretches 1 to 2 miles wide and 7 miles long. High, rounded [...]

Seeing the forest through the trees Casual hikers probably don't notice the faded orange and green ribbons lying half buried in the leaf litter of the tropical forest on Barro [...]

Biographies Etched in Bone Melissa, one of about 50 chimpanzees living together in Tanzania's Gombe National Park, crawled up a tree and sprawled into her nest of branches and leaves [...]

Tibet's Tectonic Escape Act Like most visitors to Tibet, geoscientist Mark Harrison moved very slowly during his first few days in Lhasa. 'I had the feeling I was walking on [...]

Focuses on the Entamoeba histolytica. Percentage of the population harboring the organism; Natural history of the amoeba; Differences of the vulnerability of amoebas to the cell-rupturing proteins of the immune system.

Judy Jernstedt admits that the plant she went almost halfway around the world to see looks 'like a pile of trash.' That's part of its charm. And to be fair [...]

A bird with toxic feathers may have taken on the colors of a poisonous neighbor, according to a new genetic analysis. Plenty of butterflies have evolved copycat warning colors, but [...]

Since the round goby arrived in the Great Lakes more than a decade ago, the small but feisty fish has spread rapidly and has caused local extinctions of a native [...]

Alaskan seabirds called crested auklets carry a citrus-smelling chemical in their feathers that could be one of the few examples ever found of a homegrown avian pest repellant. Birds rub [...]

A new study of the genetics of African elephants shows that forest dwellers differ so much from those roaming the savannas that the two may be separate species. And that [...]

The common waxbill's habit of adorning its nests with fur plucked from carnivore scat turns out to discourage attacks from predators. In southern Africa, these songbirds build enclosed grass nests [...]

By the end of this century, the world's hottest desert will be even hotter. The Sahara will also be smaller and drier than it is now, according to an international [...]

A primitive marine creature has natural-glass fibers that hint at high tech As a heavy rod of glass sinks into a searing furnace, a wheel below it whirs. Every second [...]

Scientists have turned to mites fossilized in cave formations to show in a novel way that the American Southwest at times during the past few thousand years was much wetter [...]

The slavery racket in the ant world is more violent in New York than in West Virginia, even though the same species are involved. That's the conclusion of the first [...]

A survey of ticks on golf courses adds new reasons to keep shots out of the rough. The tiny deer ticks that spread Lyme disease typically don't turn up on [...]

The Tibetan Plateau, an area in central Asia half the size of the United States and with an average altitude of more than 5 kilometers, has a powerful effect on [...]

Two recent studies have enlivened the argument that an ancient meteorite contains fossils of bacteria from Mars. But several scientists say the reports fall short of proving that the Mars [...]

Australian biologists have discovered live specimens of a dramatic insect species given up as extinct decades ago. A special expedition in February sponsored by the New South Wales National Parks [...]

A study of the short but enthusiastic lives of the male quoll--a ferretlike marsupial--may demand new theories of male die-offs after mating, say Australian biologists. Many plants put all their [...]

Most angst over emerging diseases has focused on infections that suddenly strike people, the way AIDS appeared to have done in the early 1980s. However, a new study indicates that [...]

What could be better than landing a spacecraft for the first time on an asteroid? The ability to do research once the craft has landed. On Feb. 12, the unmanned [...]

Federal researchers have added new evidence to the growing case that agricultural pesticides blowing into California's wilderness areas have played a role in mysterious declines in frog populations. Traces of [...]

Biologists say the way to stop killing sprees by male juvenile delinquents is to bring in older males, at least if you're dealing with elephants. Until recently, the orphan male [...]

Scientists reported last week that they've found genetic confirmation of their assumption that a newfound rogue alga in California waters is the same strain that has been smothering seafloor communities [...]

Ifrita kowaldi, a blue-capped handful with the tree-poking habits of a nut-hatch, concentrates in its feathers and skin the same alkaloids that defend poison dart frogs. This explains why the [...]

Kookaburras may have the most famous laugh in the bird world, but life for their nestlings doesn't sound particularly funny. The chunky Australian kingfishers usually lay three eggs in a [...]

After 9,000 years of thriving in the absence of mammalian predators, tammar wallabies still startle at some signs of dangerous mammals, according to an Australian study. No mammal has threatened [...]

Scientists recently found that Greenland's central ice sheet isn't getting any thinner overall, although particular areas show significant gains or losses (SN: 7/22/00, p. 54). Other researchers report in the [...]

Cadmium, the white metal used in rechargeable batteries, is poisoning the white ptarmigan, a species of grouse, in Colorado. Stretching from Denver to Durango, the state's ore belt is rich [...]

After 5 years of mystery, California pathologists announced Monday that they may have found the cause of a new disease that makes oak trees ooze red liquid and then die. [...]

In an anti-intuitive tale of predators and prey, riverside birds are prospering more outside a national park designed to protect them than inside the park, say wildlife biologists. Strips of [...]

After 3 decades of armed conflict, what remains of Cambodia's wildlife riches? Plenty, according to a photographic survey begun 2 months ago. Biologists from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and [...]

The latest inventory of life in the United States has turned up an extra 100,000 species. The nation has at least 200,000 animals, plants, and fungi, according to Precious Heritage [...]

Mars may once have been a far wetter place than researchers have realized. Laying bare a network of long-buried secrets, new gravity maps suggest that the Red Planet has an [...]

A year-round supply of lovely, available mates gives male butterflies on the island of Madeira something extra to live for--something that Swedish males don't have. Male Pararge aegeria butterflies live [...]

Afflicted with a bipolar personality, the Pacific Ocean has apparently veered from one temperature extreme to the other--a change that could alter North American weather for the next decade or [...]

Marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands are the first vertebrates shown to shorten and then regrow, say researchers in the United States and Germany. The seagoing reptiles shrank by as [...]

Meteorological measurements may force historians to change their cold-hearted appraisals of Robert Falcon Scott, who lost the race to the South Pole in 1912 and then perished trying to return. [...]

What robbed the Americas of their most charismatic mammals? A little over 12,000 years ago, Kansas looked like Kenya's Serengeti Plain on steroids. Cheetahs stalked the Midwestern prairie, cheek by [...]

An eating style and jaw structure unlike that of any other known vertebrate may give a minute predator an edge in its perilous hunts. Texas threadsnakes raid ant nests to [...]

The Great Lakes have some new inhabitants. Nestling side by side, 50 to 80 of them could fit within 1 square inch of space. But their small size belies the [...]