World’s most pierced man barred from Dubai

Women college students average 10 hours a day on their cellphones and men students spend nearly eight

Hangover Cure Finally Comes to the U.S.

Date rape drug-detecting nail polish won’t work

There were no associations between childhood family income and subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse

When you are in the middle of negotiation, is it best to make the first offer, or to wait for the other party to make the first offer and then respond to it?

Music helps you focus on your own thoughts, but only if you like it

Neuroscientists watch imagination happening in the brain

The use of hallucinogens in research and therapy

The more strongly people believed in free will, the more they liked making choices

Panic disorder and epilepsy were associated with low belief in free will.

Here, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty [PDF]

Researchers have found that “solid-head” power toothbrushes have up to 3,000 times less bacteria when compared to “hollow-head” toothbrushes.

Home is where the microbes are

Schrödinger’s cat caught on quantum film

The smell of rain: what is petrichor?

Quantification of Pizza Baking Properties of Different Cheeses, and Their Correlation with Cheese Functionality [study abstract]

Vending machine dispenses food for stray dogs when people insert recyclable bottles and cans

Inside Google’s Secret Drone-Delivery Program

This Is Uber’s Playbook for Sabotaging Lyft

When A Machine Learning Algorithm Studied Fine Art Paintings, It Saw Things Art Historians Had Never Noticed

Today, around 75% of all IKEA’s product images are CG

Crying Infant Assuager (new patent)

Camel toe challenge [more]

There seems to be wide support for the idea that we are living in an “age of complexity,” which implies that the world has never been more intricate. This idea is based on the rapid pace of technological changes, and the vast amount of information that we are generating (the two are related). Yet consider that philosophers like Leibniz (17th century) and Diderot (18th century) were already complaining about information overload. The “horrible mass of books” they referred to may have represented only a tiny portion of what we know today, but much of what we know today will be equally insignificant to future generations.

In any event, the relative complexity of different eras is of little matter to the person who is simply struggling to cope with it in everyday life. So perhaps the right question is not “Is this era more complex?” but “Why are some people more able to manage complexity?” Although complexity is context-dependent, it is also determined by a person’s disposition. In particular, there are three key psychological qualities that enhance our ability to manage complexity:

1. […] higher levels of IQ enable people to learn and solve novel problems faster […]

2. […] individuals with higher EQ [emotional quotient] are less susceptible to stress and anxiety […]

3. […] People with higher CQ [curiosity quotient] are more inquisitive and open to new experiences […] they are generally more tolerant of ambiguity.
 
{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

photo { Never before seen Corinne Day shots }

Who will guard the guards?

In posing the famous question, the Roman poet Juvenal was suggesting that wives cannot be trusted, and keeping them under guard is not a solution—because the guards cannot be trusted either.

Half a millennium or so earlier, Plato in The Republic expressed a more optimistic view regarding the guardians or rulers of the city-state, namely that one should be able to trust them to behave properly; that it was absurd to suppose that they should require oversight.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Flight diverted after fight over legroom. One passenger was using the Knee Defender, a $21.95 gadget that attaches to a passenger’s tray table and prevents the person in front of them from reclining.

Seattle doctor accused of sexting during surgery

A chemistry startup, developed by undergrads, is creating a nail polish that, when exposed to date rape drugs, changes color.

Drinking small amounts of alcohol boosts people’s sense of smell

Effect of maternal coffee, smoking and drinking behavior on adult son’s semen quality

A whole functional organ has been grown from scratch inside an animal for the first time

Why do humans grow up so slowly? Blame the brain.

How Temperatures In Manhattan Differ From Block To Block

Egypt feminist defecates on IS flag in the nude

Husband takes his wife to court over honeymoon photos she posted on Facebook

Chinese man sues wife over ugly baby—before they met, she had undergone about $100,000 worth of cosmetic surgery.

Woman Sues FDA for Right to Free Sperm

Reading ‘Fifty Shades’ linked to unhealthy behaviors

Douglas also admitted to having sex with bodies being stored while awaiting autopsies.

A recent paper said PMS can drive spouses apart. But that paper is based on bad science and flat-out lies.

Does Seeing the Doctor More Often Keep You Out of the Hospital? [PDF]

On average, people’s memories stretch no farther than age three and a half. Everything before then is a dark abyss. Psychologists have named this dramatic forgetting “childhood amnesia.”

We are now beginning to crack the brain’s code, which allows us to answer such bizarre questions as “what is the speed of thought?”

States with faster Internet speeds have smarter people

Researchers find it’s terrifyingly easy to hack traffic lights

Systems that can secretly track where cellphone users go around the globe

Does terrorism help perpetrators to achieve their demands?

The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

The Role of Artists in Ship Camouflage During World War I

Radical New Theory Could Kill the Multiverse Hypothesis

Horses And Sleep

Celebs before their signature Hollywood smiles

London restaurant creates champagne glass modelled on Kate Moss’ left breast

Images from opening scenes of adult movies

Facial Recognition Software for Cats

On Facebook, people frequently express emotions, which are later seen by their friends via Facebook’s “News Feed” product. Because people’s friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view, the News Feed filters posts, stories, and activities undertaken by friends. News Feed is the primary manner by which people see content that friends share. Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging. One such test is reported in this study: A test of whether posts with emotional content are more engaging. […]

For people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks, and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.

{ PNAS | Continue reading }

polaroid prints { Barbara Allen photographed by Andy Warhol, 1977 }

[T]he Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. […]

[T]he Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings. […]

A musical work created solely by an animal would not be registrable, such as a bird song or whale song. Likewise, music generated entirely by a mechanical or an automated process is not copyrightable. […]

To qualify as a work of authorship a choreographic work must be created by a human being and it must be intended for execution by humans. Dances performed or intended to be performed by animals, machines, or other animate or inanimate objects are not copyrightable and cannot be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

{ U.S. Copyright Office /Popular Science | Continue reading }

Carrying a backpack may negatively affect the posture of schoolchildren and contribute to spinal pain.

The aim of this study was to examine changes in the body posture parameters defining asymmetry of the trunk and lateral flexion of the spine in children while carrying a backpack weighing 10% of a child’s weight. […]

Results show that carrying a backpack in an asymmetrical manner negatively affects spine, even if the backpack weight constitutes 10% of the child’s weight.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

illustration { Rockin Jellybean }

{ Sex Ratio: The number of men for every 100 women in a population. High sex ratios means there are more men. […] Does Love last? No. Romantic/Passionate love declines after marriage. After two years of marriage, average spouses express affection for each other only half as often as they did when they were newlyweds. Divorces occur more frequently in the fourth year of marriage than at any other time. | Psychology of Romantic Relationships | PDF }

Fifty-eight adolescent girls and 60 young adult women viewed a Facebook profile with either a sexualized profile photo or a nonsexualized profile photo and then evaluated the profile owner.

Results indicated that the sexualized profile owner was considered less physically attractive, less socially attractive, and less competent to complete tasks.

{ APA/PsycNET | Continue reading }

photo { Dirk Braeckman }

Couple walled in by angry neighbours

An ad-free internet would cost each user at least £140 a year ($230)

Psychologists investigate why some people see the future as being behind them

Women were more threatened than men when imagining another person complimenting their partner’s physical appearance. [PDF]

Fixing a Work Relationship Gone Sour

Ever since the first hack of a commercial quantum cryptography device, security specialists have been fighting back. Here’s an update on the battle.

With enough technical savvy, simply touching a laptop can suffice to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it.

Recently, another chapter in the Toynbee Tile saga was written, when a tile showed up on Greenwich Street and North Moore in SoHo.

The ‘chairless chair’ that lets you relax anywhere

Is there life after death?

In a little over a century, we’ve discovered that what we once thought was the fundamental, smallest unit of matter — the atom — is actually made up of even smaller particles: nuclei and electrons. The nuclei themselves are made of protons and neutrons, and those protons and neutrons are made of still smaller particles: quarks and gluons.

Those particles — quarks, gluons, and electrons — are just some of the particles that cannot be broken up into smaller constituents to the best of our knowledge. All told, when we count up the fundamental particles that we know of, the ones that cannot be broken apart into anything smaller or lighter, we count a number of different types:

— six quarks (and their antiquark counterparts), each coming in three different color possibilities and two different spins,

— three charged leptons, the electron, muon and tau (and their anti-lepton counterparts), each allowed two different spin states,

— three neutral leptons, the neutrinos, along with the three anti-neutrinos, where the neutrinos all have a left-handed spin and the antis have a right-handed spin,

— the gluons, which all have two different spin states and which come in eight color varieties,

— the photon, which has two different allowable spins,

— the W-and-Z bosons, which come in three types (the W+, W-, and Z) and have three allowable spin states apiece (-1, 0, and +1), and

— the Higgs boson, which exists in only one state.

That’s the Standard Model of elementary particles. […] However, we know there must be more to the Universe, as this doesn’t account for dark matter, for one. Furthermore, there are theoretical limitations and inconsistencies to the physics we presently know and so we suspect there’s more physics beyond the Standard Model to explain it.

{ Ethan Siegel | Continue reading }

Merely changing the face of a model in an ad increases the number of potential purchasers by as much as 15% (8% on average), according to a study being published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

{ Informs | Continue reading }

art { Martial Raysse, Life is so complex, 1966 | more }

related { Real-time makeup using projection mapping }

Three Swiss couples copulating in a van fined for not wearing seatbelts

Google has to reinforce its internet cables because sharks keep biting them

New Yorkers go to bed earlier than people in Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo and Madrid, study

Why Some People Only Need Five Hours’ Sleep a Night

The Real Secret to Detecting Lies (And It’s Not Body Language) [more]

How to help an anxious interviewee - be mean to them

Mother’s diet modifies her child’s DNA

Love makes sex better for most women

Study reveals that men experience orgasm during sexual activity with a familiar partner 85% of the time on average, compared with 63% of the time for women.

Representing Sex in the Brain, One Module at a Time

Scientists may have identified an intermediate-sized black hole for the very first time

Two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the “anternet.” [Thanks Tim]

The Slack software borrows from social sites such as Twitter and Facebook to turn the middle of your screen into a stream of messages. E-mail is dead—or at least that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on.

Google’s driverless cars designed to exceed speed limit

Managers of Walgreen’s drugstores in the US “often retire in their 40s.” […] In India, hair dressers can earn more than employees in the software industry.

French treasure hunter finds 50 pieces of jewellery on Mont Blanc from Air India crash 48 years ago

The “Blue Star” solution activates the physical memory of blood through its contact with the remaining DNA proteins on the walls

With a local anesthesia, he operated himself to remove the appendix.

Maine Man, 19, Poses For New Mug Shot Wearing T-Shirt With Photo Of His Old Mug Shot

Justin Bieber Tartare with Ham

selling positive pregnancy urine - $45

[They] analyzed a database of 6,500 restaurant menus describing 650,000 dishes from across the U.S. Among their findings: fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, use fancier—and longer—words than cheaper restaurants do (think accompaniments and decaffeinated coffee, not sides and decaf). Jurafsky writes that “every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish.” […]

Cheaper establishments also use terms like ripe and fresh, which Jurafsky calls “status anxiety” words. Thomas Keller’s Per Se, after all, would never use fresh—that much is taken for granted—but Subway would.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Maurizio Di Iorio }

related { Guests given the numeral-only menu (00.) spent significantly more than those who received a menu with prices showing a dollar sign ($00.00) }

Regular exercise may alter how a person experiences pain, according to a new study. The longer we continue to work out, the new findings suggest, the greater our tolerance for discomfort can grow.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

In two longitudinal studies, university students, their roommates, and parents assessed the quality and forecast the longevity of the students’ dating relationships. […] Students assessed their relationships more positively, focusing primarily on the strengths of their relationships, and made more optimistic predictions than did parents and roommates. Although students were more confident in their predictions, their explicit forecasts tended to be less accurate than those of the two observer groups. Students, however, possessed information that could have yielded more accurate forecasts.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

related { peers tend to avoid the degree of overoptimism so often seen in self-predictions }

photo { Antoine D’Agata }

Although many studies have reported that women’s preferences for masculine physical characteristics in men change systematically during the menstrual cycle, the hormonal mechanisms underpinning these changes are currently poorly understood. Previous studies investigating the relationships between measured hormone levels and women’s masculinity preferences tested only judgments of men’s facial attractiveness. Results of these studies suggested that preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s faces were related to either women’s estradiol or testosterone levels.

To investigate the hormonal correlates of within-woman variation in masculinity preferences further, here we measured 62 women’s salivary estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone levels and their preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s voices in five weekly test sessions. Multilevel modeling of these data showed that changes in salivary estradiol were the best predictor of changes in women’s preferences for vocal masculinity.

These results complement other recent research implicating estradiol in women’s mate preferences, attention to courtship signals, sexual motivation, and sexual strategies, and are the first to link women’s voice preferences directly to measured hormone levels.

{ Hormones and Behavior }

related { Evidence to Suggest that Women’s Sexual Behavior is Influenced by Hip Width Rather than Waist-to-Hip Ratio }

Peter Drucker once observed that, “Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” […]

Bain & Company studied a sample of big firms, finding that their managers spent 15% of their time in meetings, a share that has risen every year since 2008. Many of these meetings have no clear purpose.

The higher up you go, the worse it is. Senior executives spend two full days a week in meetings with three or more colleagues.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

Alleged phone thief calls 911 because victim won’t leave her alone

About 100,000 German employees can now choose to have all their incoming emails automatically deleted when they are on holiday so they do not return to a bulging in-box.

Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis said he can’t return the vehicles, a 2007 Cadillac Escalade and a 2012 Bentley Flying Spur, because a strip-club owner in Mexico—angry that several Girls Gone Wild promotions fell through— took them.

The evolution of PMS: It may exist to break up infertile relationships

Is the absence of biological fathers related to their daughters’ earlier age at menarche?

The stability of your personality peaks in mid-life, then grows increasingly wobbly again

Dartmouth researchers demonstrate in a new study that a previously understudied part of the brain, the retrosplenial cortex, is essential for forming the basis for contextual memories, which help you to recall events ranging from global disasters to where you parked your car.

Angry faces increase the effectiveness of threats

New study finds that antiperspirant deodorants alter your armpit bacteria and may actually worsen body odor as a result.

Is there a cannabis epidemic model? Evidence from France, Germany and USA

People fake to look authentic on social media

Solving the puzzle of why Finns have the highest IQ, but one of the lowest number of Nobel prizes in Europe

People recall more and learn better when they expect to teach that information to another person, a new study finds.

Starting removal of John Hancock Building west antenna

I’m not here to make friends