Scientists have discovered a single gene that can boost a person’s IQ by about six points

Why Every Racist Mentions Their Black Friend

Arguing Too Much Increases Premature Death Risk: Study

Birth of new brain cells might erase babies’ memories

What doesn’t kill you may make you live longer: McGill research finds unexpected link between cell suicide and longevity

What does not kill me makes me stronger: Study suggests improved survivorship in the aftermath of the medieval Black Death)

Things You Cannot Unsee (and What That Says About Your Brain)

Microprocessors configured more like brains than traditional chips could soon make computers far more astute about what’s going on around them.

Any time you email somebody who uses GMail, Google has that email.

Taking a photo against a white background? Amazon owns the patent on that

Transform any text into a patent application

Anti-Surveillance Mask Lets You Pass As Someone Else

Firms almost never have enough data to justify their belief that ads work

The true story of Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient.

How 10 Minutes of Mild Exercise Gives Your Brain a Boost

Why Don’t We Eat Swans Anymore?

As tweens in the 1990s, before online porn and sex advice were as ubiquitous as they are now, we learned sex from magazines.

He said he was hired with a mandate to clean up the building, which meant “trying to get all those people who were involved with drugs out.” Duarte began by winning the residents’ trust, which he did by hiring the most destructive young male tenants to work for him.

How much would it cost to protect New York City from the next superstorm Sandy?

Google Nest Spoof By German Activists

Boxes for rocks

Woman tattoos herself with her own selfie

The US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) said the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) had so many problems we effectively need to tear it up and start again. The way forward, it said, is a new research programme to discover the brain problems that underlie mental illnesses.

That research is now taking off. The first milestone came earlier this year, when the NIMH published a list of 23 core brain functions and their associated neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and genes – and the behaviours and emotions that go with them (see “The mind’s 23 building blocks”). Within weeks, the first drug trials conceived and funded through this new programme will begin. […]

Criticism of psychiatry has been growing for years – existing treatments are often inadequate, and myriad advances in neuroscience and genetics have not translated into anything better. Vocal opponents are not confined to the US. Last week, the new UK Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry launched a campaign claiming that drugs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics often do more harm than good.

What’s more, many suspect that commonly used labels, such as depression and schizophrenia, merely group together people sharing some superficial symptoms, when their underlying brain disorders are quite different.

Genetic studies, for instance, suggest that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, supposedly distinct conditions, involve mutations in many of the same genes. And diagnostic confusion between the disorders is common. […]

So what do the mind’s 23 building blocks consist of? The best mapped-out anatomically is the brain’s fear circuitry, thanks to years of scaring volunteers as they lie in fMRI scanners. This system is probably involved in phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another is the related circuitry that deals, not with present danger, but with vaguer fears that something bad might happen in future. “That circuit is very relevant to rumination and anxiety,” says Cuthbert.

Another five neural systems are components of the brain’s reward circuitry, which is active when we find something pleasurable – like eating or sex – and drives us to repeat the experience. These can malfunction when people are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

The reward system, says Cuthbert, is very powerful because one of the most important things that organisms need to learn is to seek out things like food and water. “Drug abuse hijacks that system so the cues create urges that are very hard to resist,” he says.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Behind the scenes of the NY redesign

That includes using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments, Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework, etc.

{ Source | Continue reading }

The term ‘perspective’ comes from the language of vision. We literally see things from and with a particular perspective. Our eyes are located at a particular point in space, from which some things are visible and others are not, e.g. the top of the table, but not its underneath. A scene looks different from different perspectives. […]

Nietzsche is saying that philosophical beliefs about truth and goodness are part of a particular perspective on the world, a short-sighted, distorting perspective. One of its most important distortions is that it denies that it is a perspective, that its truths are unconditional, that it represents the world as it truly is. But philosophers are wrong to think that it is possible to represent or hold beliefs about the world that are value-free, ‘objective’, ‘disinterested’. […]

We can support Nietzsche’s argument by an evolutionary account of human cognition. We can’t possibly take in everything around us. We must be selective in order to survive at all. So from the very beginning, our intellects are responsive to our interests, our biological instincts and all that develops from them – our emotions, desires and values. So we do not and cannot experience the world ‘as it is’, but always selectively, in a way that reflects our values. […]

If Nietzsche claims that all our knowledge is from a particular perspective, then his claims about perspectives and his theory of perspectivism must itself be from a particular perspective. So is what he says about perspectives objectively true or not?

{ Michael Lacewing | PDF }

image { Camille Henrot, still from The Strife of Love in a Dream, 2011 }

Why were old scientific instruments put together with an apparent wish to make them beautiful, and not just coldly functional?

First, there is obviously a selection effect at work here of the kind that all historians and curators are familiar with. What tends to get preserved is not a representative cross-section of what is around at any time, but rather, what is deemed to be worth preserving. […]

Second, there were of course no specialized scientific-instrument manufacturers in the early modern period. When investigators like Galileo and Boyle wanted something made that they could not make themselves, they would go to metalsmiths, carpenters, potters and the like, who inevitably would have brought their own craft aesthetic to the objects they made.

[Third,] they were catering to a particular clientele that their products reflected. Reeve was making microscopes and so forth for the wealthy dilettantes. […] Scientific instruments were used to delight and entertain their noble patrons. […] For such a display, it was important that a device be impressive to look at.

{ Philip Ball | Continue reading }

{ Zhang Huan, 49 Days, 2011 | more }

What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world’s most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?

According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations — Washington is full of them — that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization’s Web site.

The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. […]

And let’s not even get started on the situation in academia, where the country’s best and brightest compete for the honor of seeing their life’s work locked away behind some publisher’s paywall.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league.

In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.

Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.

Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. […]

The process described by Cutting evokes a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls “cumulative advantage”: once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still.

{ Intelligent Life | Continue reading }

art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (crown of thorns), circa 1982 | Bill Connors }

Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius

Chinese police to patrol streets of Paris to protect high-spending tourists

Can you tell a person’s gender by their video game avatar? According to a new study, a male gamer who chooses to play as a female character will still display signs of his true gender.

“It’s simple, the less stress you have the better your memory.” The facial expression that fights memory loss

A helmet that delivers electro-magnetic impulses to the brain has shown promise in treating people with depression

Lack of sleep not only makes you ugly and sick, it also makes you dumb

A study that was published a few years ago in Nature suggests that indeed our initial inclination is to cooperate with others. We are only selfish if we are allowed to reflect.

What’s the evidence on using rational argument to change people’s minds?

In fact, nearly everyone working in cognitive science is working on an approach that someone else has shown to be hopeless

You might not realize it, but every time you order dinner digitally, you subconsciously order more

How do you price a bottle of milkshake?

Silicon Valley investors and startups are trying to improve our food.

A startup is seeking approval to sell powderized alcohol

Biologists Create Cells With 6 DNA Letters, Instead of Just 4

Controlling fear by modifying DNA

The CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. [Thanks Tim]

An influential report concludes that prohibition and the war on drugs have failed

Brooklyn is getting poorer

10 Most Stressed Out Cities In America

Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debate, 1971 (full video)

How to be perfect

Chalk Warfare 3.0

Dear Leader Tongue Scraper

Have you ever found someone particularly sexy without knowing why? It could be that you are lured in by their pheromones, invisible chemical signals that can subtly alter a person’s mood, mindset, or behavior. According to new research published last week in Current Biology, men and women give off different signals, but you subconsciously only respond to the gender you find attractive. And when you smell these pheromones, the object of your affection instantly appears even sexier in your mind.

{ Popular Science | Continue reading }

It was only a few decades ago that incision and suction were recommended snakebite first aid. However, concerns arose about injuries and infections caused when laypersons made incisions across fang marks and applied mouth suction. Meanwhile, several snakebite suction devices (eg, Cutter’s Snakebite Kit, Venom Ex) were evaluated, and it was determined that they were neither safe nor effective. So, recommendations changed, and mechanical suction without incision was advocated instead. It seemed intuitive that suction alone would probably remove venom and should not cause harm. However, when the techniques were studied rigorously, quite the opposite was discovered.

One of the most popular suction devices, the Sawyer Extractor pump (Sawyer Products, Safety Harbor, FL), operates by applying approximately 1 atm of negative pressure directly over a fang puncture wound (or wounds) without making incisions. […] Although each of these 3 studies was done independently of each other and using different methodology, they arrive at the same conclusion: the Extractor does not work, and it could make things worse.

{ Annals of Emergency Medecine | PDF }

Researchers have known for decades that the eye does much more than just detect light. The dense patch of neurons in the retina also processes basic features of a scene before sending the information to the brain. For example, in 1964, scientists showed that some neurons in the retina fire up only in response to motion. What’s more, these “space-time” detectors have so-called direction selectivity, each one sensitive to objects moving in different directions. But exactly how that processing happens in the retina has remained a mystery. […]

Although researchers have imaged the retina microscopically in ultrathin sections, no computer algorithm has been able to accurately trace out the borders of all the neurons to map the circuitry. […]

Enter the EyeWire project, an online game that recruits volunteers to map out those cellular contours within a mouse’s retina.

{ Science | Continue reading }

Artist who tied a live rooster to his penis found guilty of exhibitionism

Drunken British woman, traveling with her parents, busted for allegedly having loud sex on Las Vegas flight

Geophysicists link fracking boom to increase in earthquakes

You don’t always know what you’re saying. People’s conscious awareness of their speech often comes after they’ve spoken, not before.

People can only recognize two faces in a crowd at a time – even if the faces belong to famous people.

What makes women attractive depends on how healthy the place they live is

Difference between how men and women choose their partners

Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. [NY Times | Nature]

Bleeding wound? Relax and roll a cigarette

2.2 million Americans are diagnosed with certain types of skin cancer annually, up more than 50% in the past decade

Antibiotic resistance is now rife across the entire globe

Immortality through advanced technology and primitive diet

We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects.

In real sex, the man is supposed to place his balls into the woman’s pussy, and then her pussy flexes and crushes the balls.

The Pocket Guide to Bullshit Prevention

Spritz, the materials claim, “reimagines” and “reinvents” reading

How NYC’s gay bars thrived because of the mob

Video Reveals 140 Years Of Change At Specific NYC Locations

Latrine odor judge

This study investigated whether swearing affects cold-pressor pain tolerance (the ability to withstand immersing the hand in icy water), pain perception and heart rate. […] Swearing increased pain tolerance, increased heart rate and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing.

{ Neuroreport | Continue reading }

Previously we showed that swearing produces a pain lessening (hypoalgesic) effect for many people. This paper assesses whether habituation to swearing occurs such that people who swear more frequently in daily life show a lesser pain tolerance effect of swearing, compared with people who swear less frequently.[…] The higher the daily swearing frequency, the less was the benefit for pain tolerance when swearing, compared with when not swearing. This paper shows apparent habituation related to daily swearing frequency, consistent with our theory that the underlying mechanism by which swearing increases pain tolerance is the provocation of an emotional response.

{ American Pain Society | Continue reading }

related { Sense of ownership is necessary to anticipate pain }

photo { Steven Brahms }

As many theorists have noted, consciousness, while both familiar and intimate, remains deeply mysterious. The problem of explaining consciousness persists despite all attempts from the pre-Socratic Greeks to modern day philosophers at illuminating this perplexing subject. Throughout history many great thinkers supported the notion that consciousness or some sort of spiritual reality is distinct from matter, and indeed might be the fundamental source of all reality. However, the dominant view in the twentieth century settled on a more materialistic argument: consciousness most likely emerges from complex biological processes, which in turn are based ultimately on complex interactions between subatomic particles.

This view remains unsatisfactory for some philosophers of mind. While advances in neuroscience have led to improvements in our understanding of how processes within the brain work, we still are no closer to understanding experience at the most basic level. This is what Chalmers (1995) has termed the “hard problem” of consciousness. According to Chalmers, materialistic explanations of consciousness would be consistent with a world populated by zombies acting like people in the world, yet devoid of interior experience. Tackling the hard problem of conscious- ness, Chalmers argues, likely requires abandoning a purely materialistic view of consciousness.

The various theories of consciousness can arguably be grouped into five categories: materialism, dualism, panpsychism, neutral monism, and idealism. As noted above, the current mainstream view looks for materialistic explanations. This typically takes the form of arguing that consciousness must be a higher level activity that has emerged from lower level processes, such as complex biological processes. […]

Material dualism holds that matter and consciousness are two substances that differ fundamentally in a number of ways.1 This and other differences lead to the perhaps unsolvable problem of how such fundamentally different substances can interact. Historically, support for dualism fits well with such religious notions as the soul or supernatural agency. Dualism has attracted fewer adherents, however, as philosophy gravitated toward more naturalistic explanations. […]

Two closely related alternatives are panpsychism and neutral monism. Panpsychism holds that matter and mind are joined as one. The usual view of panpsychism holds that all matter, even electrons, has some aspect of mind, albeit at a rudi- mentary level. While panpsychism has relatively few adherents today, this class of explanations has had a long history in philosophy, being a close relative to animism that was common in early cultures (Skrbina, 2007). Neutral monism holds that matter and consciousness are aspects of some more neutral and fundamental reality. […]

One last alternative is idealism, which holds that the physical universe is composed of mind. […]

After a brief survey of the evidence, I conclude that the best explanation would probably be neutral monism. I then explore a framework for neutral monism, using well-known features of quantum mechanics, to develop a ground or bridge between consciousness and matter.

{ The Journal of Mind and Behavior | PDF }

art { Ellsworth Kelly, Black Forms, 1955 }

Possible Food Poisoning Sickens 100 at Food Safety Summit

The male Y chromosome seems to hold genetic keys that stave off cancer and add years to a man’s life, according to new research.

Stanford study finds walking improves creativity

Using A Foreign Language Changes Moral Decisions

Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. [Thanks Tim]

Scientists may have solved one of history’s biggest biomedical mysteries—why the deadly 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, which killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, largely targeted healthy young adults.

The Mathematical Con of Hedge Funds and Financial Advisers

Corporate cash holdings are at the lowest level in 15 years

Vox has a piece claiming that there’s a ‘much better way’ to board planes. Are the airlines just stupid?

What you actually get when the package is labelled “Organic”

Why Is There No Pill For ‘Asian Glow’? Plus, why Esquire’s consequence-free drinking method sounds like total bunk.

10 of the weirdest birth control methods from throughout time. [via gettingsome]

Lab-Grown Organs: Yes. Lab-Grown Meat: No.

Flexible battery, no lithium required

How to Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors

Man With Genius Strategy Poses As Cupcake On Tinder And It Actually Worked [Thanks Tim]

A cardboard cutout of Paris Hilton has a painkilling effect on mice

Why Cats Paint

Imagining watching a video of oneself driving a car, playing basketball, or speaking to a friend is an experience as the self-as-actor. […]

Another way of accessing motivation is by asking people questions about their lives. Open-ended verbal responses (e.g., narratives or implicit measures) require the respondent to produce ideas, recall details, reflect upon the significance of concrete events, imagine a future, and narrate a coherent story. In effect, prompts to narrate ask respondents, “What is it like to be you?” Imagining actually driving a car, playing basketball, or speaking to a friend is an experience as the self-as-agent (McAdams, 2013). Asking people to tell about their lives also recruits the self-as-agent. […]

Taken together, this leads to the prediction that frames the current research: Inventory ratings, which recruit the self-as-actor, will yield moral impressions, whereas narrated descriptions, which recruit the self-as-agent, will yield the impression of selfishness.

{ JPSP via Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

Can you ever be reasonably sure that something is random, in the same sense you can be reasonably sure something is not random (for example, because it consists of endless nines)? Even if a sequence looked random, how could you ever rule out the possibility that it had a hidden deterministic pattern? And what exactly do we mean by “random,” anyway?

These questions might sound metaphysical, but we don’t need to look far to find real-world consequences. In computer security, it’s crucial that the keys used for encryption be generated randomly—or at least, randomly enough that a potential eavesdropper can’t guess them. Day-to-day fluctuations in the stock market might look random—but to whatever extent they can be predicted, the practical implications are obvious. Casinos, lotteries, auditors, and polling firms all get challenged about whether their allegedly random choices are really random, and all might want ways to reassure skeptics that they are.

Then there’s quantum mechanics, which famously has declared for a century that “God plays dice,” that there’s irreducible randomness even in the behavior of subatomic particles.

{ American Scientist | Continue reading }

image { Matt Waples }

We tend to characterize art as “self-expression,” but that’s really more a description of bad art. The immature artist, as Eliot wrote, is constantly giving in to the urge to vent what’s inside, whereas the good artist seeks to escape that urge. […]

Social media turns us all into bad poets.

{ Rough Type | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }

{ Scientific Illustrations | more }