New York police will begin asking city pharmacies to stock decoy bottles fitted with GPS devices among powerful painkillers like Oxycontin and oxycodone in the latest bid to combat gunpoint robberies of drug stores.

U.S. study warns of extreme heat, more severe storms. While U.S. agriculture will likely remain resilient in the next 25 years, yields of major crops could start declining by mid-century and warming oceans could threaten fish, the study said.

Scared Of Genetically Modified Food? It Might Be The Only Way To Feed The World.

Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.

Technology used to make us better at our jobs. Now it’s making many of us obsolete, as the share of income going to workers is crashing, all over the world. How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots.

The Algorithms That Automatically Date Medieval Manuscripts.

Cybersleuths uncover 5-Year spy operation targeting diplomats, governments and research institutions.

Here we show that curved motion, as employed by the magician in a classic sleight of hand trick, generates stronger misdirection than rectilinear motion.

How to disassemble a skyscraper.

Why trees can’t grow taller than 100 metres.

How to tell if you’re anal retentive.

Why everyone films at the same New York Chinese restaurant?

Brazilian bikini waxes make pubic lice endangered species.

Facebook testing $100 fee to mail Mark Zuckerberg.

Clients can advertise their products or events on one of her breasts for a bargain £5, with a special offer of just £9 available for both.

Ancient Egyptians Paid a Monthly Fee to Become Voluntary Temple Slaves.

A priest, handcuffed, bound and gagged in bondage gear, calls police for help.

A deaf man was stabbed several times after his sign language was mistaken for gang signs by another man.

The Quality Cafe doesn’t even function as a real diner anymore. It stopped serving meals in 2006, but it’s been doing pretty well for itself as a film location over the past few decades.

It’s almost impossible to get to a gun in Japan, and selling one or owning one is a serious crime.

The Saudi Arabian government beheaded Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan woman who had worked as a maid in the kingdom, holding her responsible for the death of the baby of her employer.

How belly fat differs from thigh fat—and why it matters.

Male protectiveness can be perceived as sexism. The perception depends on the situation, some protectiveness can be identified as benevolent while other protectiveness can be seen as contributing to women’s subordination.

Hair and eye colour: it’s all in the teeth. A new DNA test can restore at least part of the identity of long-dead people who left no trace of their image, scientists report.

At birth, some infants are already saddled with brains that carry features of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Newborns who carry certain versions of genes already show brain shrinkage reminiscent of that in adults with brain illnesses, a study of 272 newborn babies reveals.

What is the world’s most dangerous animal? Try bats.

I’ve found lots of old copies of The Phrenological Magazine in the Institute of Psychiatry library.

One of the great explosions of modern literary creativity happened in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, with the emergence of writers like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Viktor Shklovsky, Isaak Babel, and Boris Pilnyak. There’s no knowing what the Soviet writing of the subsequent decades might have been if Stalin hadn’t killed, jailed, exiled or silenced everyone. Some of the best writing from that period only surfaced after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is just now starting to filter out into the international arena. One of the most remarkable discoveries is the work of Andrey Platonov.

After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed.

As it turns out, the Weather Channel has a regular audience of hardcore fans. And, among those people, the consensus is that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Video games take off as a spectator sport. Professional gaming, or e-sports, exploded in popularity in the US and Europe last year.

Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say.

Columbia University will offer its first MOOCs this spring, while the University of Virginia fired its president (temporarily, it turned out) for foot-dragging on MOOCsDrawing from the online courses that have become increasingly popular in recent years, MOOCs blast down the two main barriers to access to higher education—having to pay tuition and having to be admitted to college—by opening themselves up to all comers, for free.

The Anti-Surveillance Clothing Line That Promises To Thwart Cell Tracking and Drones.

An Engine That Uses Half the Fuel.

MIT researcher creates Glowing, alcohol tracking ice cubes to help prevent drunken escapades

Liquid Nitrogen Cocktails: Smoking Hot Trend Or Unnecessary Risk?

We report a case of gastric perforation in an 18-year-old girl as a result of ingesting an alcoholic drink containing liquid nitrogen.

Why are dogs racist? Canine experts speak.

There is a bunch of stupidity going on right now about the recently released logo and identity for the University of California (UC) that deserves a response.

How Did Humans Figure Out That Sex Makes Babies?

This is a tardigrade. Tardigrades are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. Some can survive temperatures of close to absolute zero, or 0 Kelvin (−273 °C (−459 °F)), temperatures as high as 151 °C (304 °F), 1,000 times more radiation than other animals, and almost a decade without water. Since 2007, tardigrades have also returned alive from studies in which they have been exposed to the vacuum of space for a few days in low Earth orbit. Tardigrades are the first known animal to survive in space. [Wikipedia]

Bombora.

Anger.

Cameroon acquits two men sentenced for “looking gay.”

Apple products were the only items taken when thieves targeted Microsoft’s research and development centre in California.

Your iPhone will soon detect bad breath… and other smells.

There seem to be a lot of Barnes & Noble superstores closing lately.

The Barnes & Noble store at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in NYC closed.

New York City street cleaning policy increases car usage for those without off-street parking.

The Curious Mathematics of Domino Chain Reactions.

Do 98% of women hover over public toilet seats?

A Map Of Every Person In The U.S. And Canada.

Guide to Spanish.

Unruly passenger taped to seat on Icelandair flight.

Woman auctioned off ex-boyfriend’s secret fishing spots for $3,000.

Florida pilot spots theft at his home from his plane.

A man who dresses up as a giraffe and carries out random acts of kindness towards people across Scotland has said he does it to feel good.

Indonesia city to ban women ’straddling motorbikes.’

Disgusted people have enhanced ability to spot dirt.

Study looks into a stool sample, to see whether the whole is indicative of the parts.

Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.

Do pets get mental health disorders?

Can a computer program reproduce everything that happens inside a living cell?

Today scientists predict an ice-free Arctic in years, not decades. How the IPCC Underestimated Climate Change.

Some four years after the 2008 financial crisis, public trust in banks is as low as ever. Sophisticated investors describe big banks as “black boxes” that may still be concealing enormous risks—the sort that could again take down the economy. What’s Inside America’s Banks?

Polaroid to open stores [Fotobars] to print Facebook, phone photos.

The Use and Abuse of Taxicab Cameras in San Francisco.

Are there any technologies to prevent yourself from being captured on camera or video?

The term dap may have originated as an acronym for dignity and pride. It appears to have been introduced to Western culture through film. For example, the 1936 movie Tarzan Escapes depicts the gesture.

Disco penis.

‘Middle Finger’ Christmas Lights Are Legal, Judge Rules.

Military Must Prep Now for ‘Mutant’ Future, Researchers Warn.

Top 10 Legally Weird Stories of 2012.

33-tonne shark tank explodes in busy shopping centre in Shanghai, leaving 15 injured.

A new study, involving participants in the USA and China, is one of the first to investigate parental lies, finding that the majority of parents tell their children lies as a way to control their behaviour.

Researchers have discovered a powerful antibody in panda blood that could serve as the next frontier in the fight against increasingly prevalent superbugs.

10 reasons why India has a sexual violence problem.

Facebook Paid 0.3% Taxes On $1.34 Billion Profits.

In the virtual world of Second Life, female avatars expose substantially more skin than males, independent of their virtual body proportions, according to research.

This piece argues that the scientific testing of rats and mice – the officially prescribed animals – are not relevant to humans and cannot reliably forecast risks to humans, especially cancer risks.

New species of the year. More creatures, less Latin used to describe them.

Overall this confirms that the great majority of crimes, including violent ones, are not committed by people with mental illness, and that your chance of getting ‘murdered by a lunatic’ is incredibly low.

Mullen compares these mass killings to the Malaysian amok, a recognized “culture-bound syndrome” often defined as a “spree of killing and destruction (as in the expression “run amok”) followed by amnesia or fatigue.”

Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost.

Pre-Socratic philosophers.

It was Empedocles who established four ultimate elements which make all the structures in the world - fire, air, water, earth. Empedocles never used the term “element,” which seems to have been first used by Plato.

Which 3D printers should you buy?

Does a guy’s mood synchronize with his girlfriend’s menstrual cycle?

Could we speed up Earth’s rotation, so that we do not need Leap Seconds?

Non dovrai dire ad altri quello che ha detto a me!

Researcher says the Hawaiian Islands are dissolving.

Helicopter Parents from Hell Ordered by Court to Quit Stalking Their Daughter.

Neuroticism may have a healthy upside.

A Spider Builds Fake Spiders To Psych Out Predators. [thanks Sam]

Eat All you Want; Just Not Late at Night.

What are some things that neuroscientists know but most people don’t? 4. Our behavior is mostly automatic

How to kill an earworm.

Why Do We Blink So Frequently?

How does a traffic cop ticket a driverless car?

Debris from North Korea’s Launcher: What It Shows.

Instagram furor triggers first class action lawsuit.

For hundreds of years, Hell has been the most fearful place in the human imagination. It is also the most absurd.

Black Bookstores in the United States.

A year-long calculation proved there are no 16-clue puzzles in Sodoku, confirming the long held belief that the smallest number of starting clues a puzzle can contain is 17.

What should everyone know about cats?

Many parts of the space shuttles were built and crafted by the hands of skilled workers.

Lucian Freud by David Dawson.

What’s the difference between Holland and the Netherlands?

Guidelines against body fluid transmission via CPR manikins.

Gesture of moral support.

Owl survives head-on collision with pickup truck.

The practice of deforming skulls of children as they grew was common in Central America, and these findings suggest the tradition spread farther north than had been thought.

Is being not-greedy more important than being generous?

Facebook Test Will Let You Message Strangers for $1.

What’s it like to be face-blind?

When you want what you don’t like.

You’re most creative when you’re at your groggiest.

Marijuana Isn’t a Pain Killer—It’s a Pain Distracter.

Publishing scientific research might help prevent the next pandemic, but there is legitimate fear that critical information could fall into the wrong hands.

We recycle less than we think .

What is it like to surf the Internet in the most secretive country on Earth?

Instagram Retreats Back to Old Policies. But are those older policies really better for users?

Google’s lobbying hard for its self-driving technology, but some features may never be legal.

Hudson Yards, a series of buildings to be built over the rail yards on Manhattan’s West Side, will add a new neighborhood with the population of downtown Detroit to the Big Apple. How do you create a city within a city?

Texas still welcomes human burials alongside animals in pet cemeteries.

The de Sitter Effect showed us how stars would look if light didn’t have a speed limit.

One of the more poignant moments in Nietzsche’s long and tormented career was when the catalogue of his many ailments, both mental and physical, started to include encroaching blindness. To remedy that he turned to experimentation with the (very primitive) typewriters of the time – a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball.

What are the main differences between a Masters and a PhD in computer science?

‘Vomiting Larry’ is busy being sick over and over again in an experiment to test just how far the winter vomiting bug can travel when it makes you ill.

The World’s Fastest-Growing Cause of Death Is Pollution from Car Exhaust.

German privacy regulator orders Facebook to end its real name policy.

Why do toddlers bother learning to walk?

Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers.

Dolphins Nicer Than Humans When Forming ‘Cliques.’

Zinc may help treat box jellyfish stings.

Hacker Behind Nude Celebrity Photos Gets 10 Years.

Google’s Gmail Outage Is a Sign of Things to Come.

Following months of congressional pressure, the TSA has agreed to contract with the National Academy of Sciences to study the health effects of the agency’s X-ray body scanners.

This article critically evaluates the relationship between constructing narratives and achieving factual accuracy at trials.

Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be…

Your own personal 2012 apocalypse.

How to use toilets in Tenerife.

An expert in synthetic biology explains how people could soon live for centuries.

Superlongevity Without Overpopulation.

Chinese authorities have detained 93 people accused of spreading doomsday rumors and arrested a man who slashed 23 children at a school after he was “psychologically affected” by such predictions.

A kindergarten is being investigated after its so-called “hug fee” caused a backlash from angry parents in China.

Woman in China fined after insulting dog she named after neighbor.

Grad student demonstrates how phones can be turned into listening devices by attackers.

Scientists make fish grow “hands” in experiment that may reveal how fins became limbs.

SoHo, Murray Hill, and the Upper West Side are some of the hottest places in NYC to pick up syphilis.

Office Space Bacterial Abundance and Diversity in Three Metropolitan Areas.

Researchers have developed novel technology to detect the tumors in the body in early stages with the help of nanoparticles.

Have Scientists Found Two Different Higgs Bosons?

Climate Change Tipping Point: Research Shows That Emission Reductions Must Occur by 2020.

Innovations that will change our lives in the next five years. [ibm.com]

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel.

Louis C.K., Proust Questionnaire.

Mr. Finger. [video]

Man picks up iron instead of telephone.

“There have been no systematic studies of the safety of tattoo inks,” says Howard, “so we are trying to ask—and answer—some fundamental questions.” For example, some tattoos fade over time or fade when they are exposed to sunlight. And laser light is used to remove tattoos. “We want to know what happens to the ink,” says Howard. “Where does the pigment go?” [Thanks Tim]

The American Psychiatric Association: Being transgender is no longer a disorder.

Myers-Briggs is the world’s most widely used personality test and is beloved by Corporate America. But does it actually work?

People live more than a decade longer on average today than they did in 1970, but spend much of these boon years battling diseases like cancer, according to a global health review.

For the first time, a scholarly study has investigated the effects (in an organizational context) of not just one – but four – types of festive headgear.

The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse. The Web we lost.

The TseTse fly is unique to the African continent and transmits a parasite harmful to humans and lethal to livestock. This paper tests the hypothesis that the presence of the TseTse reduced the ability of Africans to generate an agricultural surplus historically by limiting the use of domesticated animals and inhibiting the adoption of animal-powered technologies. [PDF]

Cops use Taser on woman buying too many iPhones.

Overeating now bigger global problem than lack of food.

Sociophysicists Discover Universal Pattern of Voting Behaviour.

What goes wrong when talks break down. Nonlinear analysis explains how negotiations often fail.

Some people like to have a few close friends, while others prefer a wider social circle that is perhaps less deep. These preferences reflect people’s personalities and individual circumstances — but is one approach to social networks “better” than the other? New research suggests that the optimal social networking strategy depends on socioeconomic conditions.

Nanoscale materials are used in everything from sunscreen to chemical catalysts to antibacterial agents–from the mundane to the lifesaving. 7 ways nanotechnology is changing the world.

110 Predictions For The Next 110 Years.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection.

The western style of having both a family name (surname) and a given name (forename or “Christian” name) is far from universal. In many countries it is common for ordinary people to have only one name or mononym.

Indiana Jones Mystery Package.

Fin­ger bis­cuits.

How to Avoid Falling: A Guide for Active Aging and Independence.

‪Chinese Woman Writes With Both Hands Simultaneously in Different Languages‬.

Exreme.

Germany plans to slap a fine of up to 25,000 euros on people having sexual relations with pets, but zoophiles plan to fight the move. They say there’s nothing wrong with consensual sex.

A convicted murderer and rapist behind bars concocted a plot to murder and castrate Justin Bieber and his bodyguard.

In October, 3D-printing startup Shapeways opened its New York production facility in Long Island City, Queens, the biggest consumer-focused 3D printing factory in the world.

In 1955, L’Origine du monde was sold at auction for 1.5 million francs. Its new owner was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

The impact of alcohol in pedestrian trauma.

How to help a fat cat lose weight.

Coffee Lowers the Risk of Oral Cancer by 49 Percent.

Do genes influence personality?

Would you pay more cash to experience intense happiness or to avoid intense embarrassment? Your answer may depend on the culture you live in.

The data in this study indicate that, on a gross society basis, male parts are more often injured by products than are female parts.

Neurofeminism and Anne Jaap Jacobson.

Researchers build featherweight chips that dissolve in water.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have used genome engineering to create algae that can produce expensive biological drugs more cheaply and in larger quantities than bacteria or mammalian cells.

The Evolution of English Words and Phrases Since 1520.

The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia’s Mortality Crisis.

The quoted sentence is indicative of a nauseating and cloying posture of precociousness that permeates the entire proposal.

Workers at Jaguar Land Rover plant given bacon sandwich as their Christmas bonus.

Random House gives employees $5,000 Christmas bonuses because of 50 Shades of Grey success.

Brain cells made from urine.

We like people more when they mimic us. But only up to a point. If mimicry becomes too obvious, it can backfire, becoming mockery. A new study asks just how much imitation is enough to trigger benefits. Does the mimicker need to copy every action, or merely to move the same body parts?

Text messages direct to your contact lens.

Syrian rebels debut homemade fighting vehicle controlled by a Sony PlayStation remote control.

This paper compares corruption in China over the past 15 years with corruption in the U.S. between 1870 and 1930, periods that are roughly comparable in terms of real income per capita.

The rotting carcass of a 40-foot fin whale was quietly pulled out to sea Saturday evening by a private tugboat hired by Malibu residents who were tired of its smell.

Ice fishing shack.

Karaoke.

Extraverted gorillas enjoy longer lives, research suggests.

No One Knows What To Do With The Massive Whale Carcass Rotting Near Malibu’s Celebrity Homes.

Indian village bans mobile phone use by women, saying the phones were “debasing the social atmosphere” by leading to elopements.

Celebrities turn to encryption to keep phones private.

Builders sent in to renovate an 18th century chateau in western France’s Bordeaux wine region reduced it to rubble instead, according to the Russian owner of the property.

Female employees benefit from a male CEO’s generosity when he becomes a father, particularly when the first child is a girl.

Could boredom be curable? An elusive human annoyance may finally be yielding its secrets.

We all consider our bodies to be our own unique being, so the notion that we may harbor cells from other people in our bodies seems strange.

A new generation of researchers is heading into the weird world of psychedelic drugs. It could change their minds.

Sex in Cheese: Evidence for Sexuality in the Fungus Penicillium roqueforti.

Your Cell Phone Could Soon Become Part of a Massive Earthquake Detection System.

If you can find it on iTunes it probably won’t be on Amoeba’s Vinyl Vaults.

Rousseau’s New Heloise, the most popular novel of the eighteenth century, transformed the author from a celebrated philosopher into the object of a cult. It also transformed the history of literature through its influence on giants like Goethe, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. Today, however, the New Heloise is seldom read and even less often enjoyed.

Why aren’t green or blue naturally occurring human hair colors?

A 120-Year-Old Mechanical Device that Perfectly Mimics the Song of a Bird. [thanks GG]

The Earth’s oldest trees.

Life’s great in Miami. [gif]

Chinese astronauts are preparing to grow fresh vegetables on Mars and the moon.

Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.

Researchers believe that they have found the definitive difference between humans and other primates, and they think that the difference all comes down to a single gene.

Researchers confirm the ‘Pinocchio Effect’: When you lie, your nose temperature raises.

You are more likely to die in the late morning — around 11 a.m., specifically — than at any other time during the day.

Romantic relationships are still the most common context for sexual behavior, at least among women in their first year of college.

Mixed weight couples experience more relationship conflict.

Men with erection problems are 3 times more likely to have inflamed gums.

Many investors state bluntly that they prefer to see people under 40 in charge.

This paper presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis.

Who Can Stop Psychopaths from Ruining Companies? Insurers.

Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test.

How to track roadkill on your smartphone. [more]

By reorganizing the typewriter’s characters into ready-made clusters of commonly used words, Mao-era Chinese typists solved problems that cell phones only came to recently.

About 100 years ago, we’re told, boys wore pink clothes, but then during the early 20th century, it flipped over. However according to psychologist Marco Del Giudice, the whole “pink-blue reversal” is a ‘urban legend.’

He talks about how LA is superior to New York because you can sing in the car when you’re stuck in traffic, and also he once saw the movie Swingers here.

Jessica Simpson is pregnant again even though she just gave birth 20 minutes ago.

Why was Margaret Thatcher interrupted so often in interviews?

The only two things missing in Bach’s music are randomness and sex.

Nabokov’s letter to Hitchcock.

This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. [New York is by far the least free state.]

The Odds in a Coin Flip Aren’t Quite 50/50.

What are the real-life equivalents of trolling on the Internet? Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%; extra dark; 17 inch paper; 99 copies.

The accident happened in Shuangxi, Fujian province.

Last year, for the first time, sales of adult diapers in Japan exceeded those for babies.

Beverly Hills Caviar has unveiled its first touch-screen vending machine.

Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter.

Facebook may cause stress, study says.

China to build world’s tallest building - in just 90 days. Critics have pointed out that BSB’s construction company has never built anything taller than 30 storeys before, but the builders seem unworried.

Cellphones reshape prostitution in India, complicate efforts to prevent AIDS.

Singapore is world’s least emotional country, poll finds.

Security Flaw In Common Keycard Locks Exploited In String Of Hotel Room Break-Ins.

ADHD medication could cut crime rates.

Salivary Testosterone Levels in Men at a U.S. Sex Club.

In terms of psychological characteristics, porn actresses had higher levels of self-esteem, positive feelings, social support, sexual satisfaction, and spirituality compared to the matched group.

For the very first time researchers have streamed braille patterns directly into a blind patient’s retina, allowing him to read four-letter words accurately and quickly with an ocular neuroprosthetic device.

Psychologists Release Emotion-On-Demand Plug In For Virtual Characters.

Dogs learn to associate words with objects differently than humans do.

Drug companies’ influence over research grows. Even in the most respected of medical journals, firms’ funding and ties to studies open the door to bias.

Here, we investigated the sexual capability of the fungus Penicillium roqueforti, used as starter for blue cheese production.

The anal voice is the meeting-place of shit and the rectum (what Freud calls the first penis and the first vagina), which inaugurates the subject qua the subject of discourse, the speaking-being.

What are map bunnies, you ask? In the cartography business, it’s a small piece of erroneous information tucked away on a map on purpose.

Your brain by the numbers.

Lighter in blender.

Man arrested in Athens over ID theft of most of Greek population.

Full Moons Do Not Drive People Crazy.

The ‘enigmatic’ protein behind our heartbeat. New research has shed light on the mechanism responsible for a regular heartbeat, scientists announced, saying the findings could help explain cardiac arrest in otherwise healthy young people.

In freshwater ponds around the world live tiny animals called bdelloid rotifers. As a group, they have not had sex for somewhere between 40 and 100 million years.

Very few researchers have attempted to describe a biomechanical model for numerical simulation of front and back somersaults, as performed on the trampoline.

Which Bond Villain Plan Would Have Worked (and Which Not)?

Why do women have long hair and men don’t?

Is the Chinese word for “crisis” a combination of “danger” and “opportunity”?

List of unexplained sounds.

Directed by Michael Bay.

Two pelicans blown to Rhode Island by the winds of Hurricane Sandy will be flown in a private plane back to their natural habitat in Florida.

Faked research is endemic in China.

Why is it so hard to give good directions?

Neurophysiologically, humans are sight dominant. Thirty to forty percent of our cerebral cortex is devoted to vision, as compared to 8 percent for touch or just 3 percent for hearing.

How online video stream quality affects viewer behavior.

New study examines how health affects happiness.

Study 1 suggests that the more people value happiness, the lonelier they feel on a daily basis.

Meanings of words can be hard to locate when they are on the tip of your tongue, let alone in the brain. Now, for the first time, patterns of brain activity have been matched with the meanings of specific words.

 “Do you think that humans are still evolving?” Approximately 80% of the audience answered “no.” Recent findings, however, show otherwise.

“These results show that the humans can perform complex, rule-based operations unconsciously, contrary to existing models of consciousness and the unconscious,” say the researchers.

If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month. [Thanks Glenn]

Unlike the dramatic losses reported in the Arctic, the Antarctic sea ice cover has increased under the effects of climate change.

A number of times over the past one billion years, the Earth’s surface has “wandered” relative to its rotational axis – before returning to its original position.

In this study, a mail survey was conducted in order to examine the effects of transparent envelopes (those allowing visualization of contents) on response rate and speed.

Parodists’ fate is usually determined by the subjective judgment of courts, whose treatment of parody often seems to turn on instinct rather than trademark principles.

10 books that are better than ‘The Art of War.’

Interview with a fake Damien Hirst.

The Robot Artist.

What are the best new products that people don’t know about?

How does striped toothpaste retain its stripes after being bottled and squeezed?

Trans Antarctic Expedition.

Ancient Echo. [more]

Choosing the sex of your baby has become a multimillion-dollar industry.

1 in 3 Men Can’t See His Penis.

Denver mailman mistakes corpse for Halloween decoration.

Staff emails are not owned by firms, rules UK judge.

Meet The Texas Lawyer Suing Hundreds Of Companies For Using Basic Web Encryption.

Gay anti-mafia politician breaks mold in Sicily.

Humans can read and do arithmetic with no conscious awareness, according to new research that could lead to an updated scientific view of human consciousness.

Most people can fake a genuine “Duchenne” smile.

Research into group decision-making in social animals has shown that ants, fish, birds, and bees have all discovered strategies to make intelligent group decisions. If they can do it, we can do it, right? What can we learn from these critters about harnessing the knowledge in all of us to move our whole group in the best possible direction? We will explore these insights in this post.

Do desert ants really count their steps?


Carbon, the main component of most everything in your body, is special because of the electron configuration of the individual atoms. Why Humans Are Carbon-Based Lifeforms.

Humans dined on grass 3.5 million years ago.

Sea levels may swell much higher than previously predicted.

Any city would suffer if 500 million tons of seawater were to spin ashore at a hundred miles (160 kilometers) per hour. But it turns out New York City—which the remnants of Hurricane Sandy hit hard this week—suffers more than most.

How Larry Gagosian is like Goldman Sachs.

The French Foreign Legion: haunted men from everywhere, fighting anywhere, dying for causes not their own.

Ever wanted a life-like miniature of yourself or loved ones? Now’s your chance, thanks to Omote 3D, which will soon be opening a 3D printing photo booth in Harajuku, Japan.

How I learned a language in 22 hours.

A group of Harvard students sent a hamburger attached to a helium balloon and a camera 100,000ft into space.

Mummified bat in wholegrain wheat flakes.

Fire Penguin Disco Panda.