When a healthy person watches a smoothly moving object (say, an airplane crossing the sky), she tracks the plane with a smooth, continuous eye movement to match its displacement. This action is called smooth pursuit. But smooth pursuit isn’t smooth for most patients with schizophrenia. Their eyes often fall behind and they make a series of quick, tiny jerks to catch up or even dart ahead of their target. For the better part of a century, this movement pattern would remain a mystery. But in recent decades, scientific discoveries have lead to a better understanding of smooth pursuit eye movements.

{ Garden of the Mind | Continue reading }

Sex and the City’s ante­penultimate episode… […] This was the episode in which gauche, chain-smoking “Page Six” staple “Lexi Featherston” did some coke at a geriatric party, yelled, “This used to be the most exciting city in the world, and now it’s nothing but smoking near a fuckin’ open window,” and then took a header out said window. […]

Minimum estimates now put the number of New York City millionaires at around 400,000; there could be as many as 650,000. […] It’s a bedrock pillar of nickels and dimes all the way down, a billion fees a second, a burn rate, a waste, a dick joke, a $40,000 storefront in Brooklyn, one more year of fat bonus before you say you’ll finally quit, one more “space” disrupted, a Balthazar breakfast, a billion uniques, a whale, a Citation X, an acquisition, a bomb, a deposition, a bust.

{ Choire Sicha/NY Magazine | Continue reading }

Walk-in vagina installed in Johannesburg women’s prison.

TomTato, a plant grows both tomatoes and potatoes.

Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter.

19-year-old computer science student arrested for allegedly hijacking webcams of young women — among them Miss Teen USA — taking nude images.

Sex 4 Days Per Week Will Raise Your Salary Up To 5%.

1/6 of US deaths from hospital errors.

Size, shape and color of wine glass affect how much you pour.

Medical experts have been powerless to stop the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and are increasingly desperate to develop novel drugs. But a new study finds that smarter use of current antibiotics could offer a solution.

What if finding “The One” meant finding the person whose genome is most compatible with your own?

When presented with a baby, you’ve experienced a fleeting desire to eat it. Now science has an explanation. More: Cuteness Inspires Aggression. [both, thanks Tim]

Designs that borrow from biology are making robots flexible.

A new system called Sedasys, made by Johnson & Johnson, would automate the sedation of many patients undergoing colon-cancer screenings called colonoscopies. That could take anesthesiologists out of the room, eliminating a big source of income for the doctors.

How Google Converted Language Translation Into a Problem of Vector Space Mathematics.

“I personally wouldn’t invest in beachfront property anymore.”

Wealth in Africa Mapped Using Mobile Phone Data.

People who believe in one conspiracy theory are likely to espouse others, even when they are contradictory.

Errol Morris deconstructs the Zapruder Film.

Taken once daily, the pill Truvada can prevent HIV. It’s safe, effective, FDA -approved, and usually covered by health plans. So why are so few gay men taking it?

Are people in the Central time zone more productive because TV schedules let them sleep more?

How a Social Media Guy Took an Underground Drug Market Viral.

A Mercedes sport utility vehicle stripped of its body panels and chassis sat on a platform like a cadaver on an autopsy table, components of its exhaust system arranged neatly on a cart for examination. GM engineers are tearing apart the competition. Literally.

Socotra Island in Yemen, The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth. [more

We’ve banned pennies!

DATE ___________ HOUR ______________

In 2005, Harry Frankfurt wrote a monograph entitled On Bullshit and this work received a flurry of attention. At its core, Frankfurt argues that while lying is a misrepresentation of the truth, bullshit is a misrepresentation of the self, and an indifference to truth, which in his mind is worse than lying. […]

Bullshit is more dangerous to democracy than lying. Unlike a lie, bullshit is destructive of even concern for the truth. Thus, in politics, it creates conditions where it is easier to present a lie as truth, and indifference to truth in public discourse renders public discourse impotent or worse. Even more destructively, it infects thinking. The corruption of language is bad enough, but even worse is the corruption of thinking. This is Plato’s insight into the problem with rhetoric, where the weaker argument can defeat the stronger.

{ Paul Babbitt /SSRN | Continue reading }

Who knew Martha Stewart had it in for patent trolls? The decorating queen’s media empire has filed a lawsuit to crush Lodsys, a shell company that claims the Martha Stewart Weddings iPad app infringes its patents.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Lodsys, the firm — which doesn’t make any products or do anything other than sue people — gained infamy two years ago by launching a wave of legal threats against small app makers, demanding they pay for using basic internet technology like in-app purchases or feedback surveys.
Many of the app companies, which are usually one or two-person operations, simply capitulate and agree to hand over a portion of their revenues rather than go up against Lodsys’ battery of lawyers and a Texas jury. But not Martha.
In a complaint filed this week in federal court in Wisconsin, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia asked a judge to declare that four magazine iPad apps are not infringing Lodsys’ patents, and that the patents are invalid because the so-called inventions are not new.

The complaint explained how Lodsys invited the company to “take advantage of our program” by buying licenses at $5,000 apiece. It also calls the Wisconsin court’s attention to Lodsys’ involvement in more than 150 Texas lawsuits.

In choosing to sue Lodsys and hopefully crush its patents, Martha Stewart is choosing a far more expensive option than simply paying Lodsys to go away. The good news is that the decorating maven has some unlikely allies in the campaign: tech rivals Google and Apple are also lining up against Lodsys in an effort to protect the app developers, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation this week filed an anti-Lodsys brief of its own.

{ Gigaom | Continue reading }

photo { Diane Arbus, Woman on the Street With Two Men, NYC, 1956 }

Animals living in marine environments keep to their schedules with the aid of multiple independent—and, in at least some cases, interacting—internal clocks. […] Multiple clocks—not just the familiar, 24-hour circadian clock—might even be standard operating equipment in animals.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Thomas Prior }

The study was published in the journal PNAS, and asks the questions:

How did human societies evolve from small groups, integrated by face-to-face cooperation, to huge anonymous societies of today, typically organized as states? Why is there so much variation in the ability of different human populations to construct viable states? […]

An empire is only as strong as its people are altruistic towards each other. Essentially, the more they can act collectively, the stronger they can become. […] Turchin et al. argue that altruism appeared for one simple reason: warfare. […] Societies that have more collective solidarity can more easily conquer others and are less likely to be conquered themselves. This allows more altruistic cultures to spread.

{ Evolution and you | Continue reading | PNAS }

Subjective experience of time is just that—subjective. Even individual people, who can compare notes by talking to one another, cannot know for certain that their own experience coincides with that of others. But an objective measure which probably correlates with subjective experience does exist. It is called the critical flicker-fusion frequency, or CFF, and it is the lowest frequency at which a flickering light appears to be a constant source of illumination. It measures, in other words, how fast an animal’s eyes can refresh an image and thus process information.

For people, the average CFF is 60 hertz (ie, 60 times a second). This is why the refresh-rate on a television screen is usually set at that value. Dogs have a CFF of 80Hz, which is probably why they do not seem to like watching television. To a dog a TV programme looks like a series of rapidly changing stills.

Having the highest possible CFF would carry biological advantages, because it would allow faster reaction to threats and opportunities. Flies, which have a CFF of 250Hz, are notoriously difficult to swat. A rolled up newspaper that seems to a human to be moving rapidly appears to them to be travelling through treacle.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

photo { Paul Andrews }

Lying well is hard — but not in the way you might think.

We usually look for nervousness as one of the signs of lying. Like the person is worried about getting caught. But that’s actually a weak predictor.

Some people are so confident they don’t fear getting caught. Others are great at hiding it.

Some get nervous when questioned so you get false positives. And others are lying to themselves — so they show no signs of deliberate deception.

So lying isn’t necessarily hard in terms of stress. But it is hard in terms of “cognitive load.” What’s that mean?

Lying is hard because it makes you think. You need to think up the lies. That’s extra work.

Looking for nervousness can be a wild goose chase. Looking for signs of thinking hard can be a great strategy.

[…]

They tend not to move their arms and legs so much, cut down on gesturing, repeat the same phrases, give shorter and less detailed answers, take longer before they start to answer, and pause and hesitate more. In addition, there is also evidence that they distance themselves from the lie, causing their language to become more impersonal. As a result, liars often reduce the number of times that they say words such as “I,” “me,” and “mine,” and use “him” and “her” rather than people’s names. Finally, is increased evasiveness, as liars tend to avoid answering the question completely, perhaps by switching topics or by asking a question of their own.

To detect deception, forget about looking for signs of tension, nervousness, and anxiety. Instead, a liar is likely to look as though they are thinking hard for no good reason, conversing in a strangely impersonal tone, and incorporating an evasiveness that would make even a politician or a used-car salesman blush.

{ Barking Up The Wrong Tree | Continue reading }

Hyperlink cinema uses cinematic devices such as flashbacks, interspersing scenes out of chronological order, split screens and voiceovers to create an interacting social network of storylines and characters across space and time. […]

Krems and Dunbar wondered if the social group sizes and properties of social networks in such films differ vastly from the real world or classic fiction. They set out to see if the films can side-step the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships people can generally manage. Previous studies showed for instance that conversation groups of more than four people easily fizzle out. Also, Dunbar and other researchers found that someone can only maintain a social network of a maximum of 150 people, which is further layered into 4 to 5 people (support group), 12 to 15 people (sympathy group), and 30 to 50 people (affinity group).

Twelve hyperlink films and ten female interest conventional films as well as examples from the real world and classical fiction were therefore analyzed. Krems and Dunbar discovered that all examples rarely differed and all followed the same general social patterns found in the conventional face-to-face world. Hyperlink films had on average 31.4 characters that were important for the development of plot, resembling the size of an affinity group in contemporary society. Their cast lists also featured much the same number of speaking characters as a Shakespeare play (27.8 characters), which reflects a broader, less intimate sphere of action. Female interest films had 20 relevant characters on average, which corresponds with the sympathy group size and mimics female social networks in real life.

{ Springer | Continue reading }

Man’s Penis Amputated After “Enthusiastic” Viagra Overdose.

Study suggests men succumb to sexual temptations more than women — for example, cheating on a partner — because they experience strong sexual impulses, not because they have weak self-control.

Why parents think your partner isn’t good enough.

Most of what we perceive as flavor is not mouth-derived but actually due to your sense of smell.

Blood Sugar Linked to Dementia.

Vaccines: what is the meaning of phase I, II and III?

The big money has moved from developing psychiatric drugs to manipulating our brain networks.

Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts.

We compare the productivity of Fields medalists (winners of the top mathematics prize) to that of similarly brilliant contenders. The two groups have similar publication rates until the award year, after which the winners’ productivity declines. [PDF]

The case of the disappearing teaspoons: 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months. 56 of the 70 teaspoons disappeared during the study. The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons’ value.

How to Design a City for Women.

China just bought 5% of Ukraine.

There are now half a million people over 100, and the number is growing at 7 per cent a year. Why are there so few people over 115 years of age?

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.

Placenta prints, live tweeting labor: Pregnancy trends gone too far?

From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information.

But scientists are discovering that […] it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people. […]

In 1953, a British woman donated a pint of blood. It turned out that some of her blood was Type O and some was Type A. The scientists who studied her concluded that she had acquired some of her blood from her twin brother in the womb, including his genomes in his blood cells.

Chimerism, as such conditions came to be known, seemed for many years to be a rarity. But “it can be commoner than we realized,” said Dr. Linda Randolph, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.

Twins can end up with a mixed supply of blood when they get nutrients in the womb through the same set of blood vessels. In other cases, two fertilized eggs may fuse together. […] Women can also gain genomes from their children. After a baby is born, it may leave some fetal cells behind in its mother’s body, where they can travel to different organs and be absorbed into those tissues. […] In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons. […]

Medical researchers aren’t the only scientists interested in our multitudes of personal genomes. […] Last year, for example, forensic scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division described how a saliva sample and a sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn’t match.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

First Genetic Evidence That Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA

The discovery that friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins has huge implications for our understanding of human evolution, say biologists.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

A team of scientists in the UK claims they’ve found evidence for alien life coming to Earth. According to their paper, published in the Journal of Cosmology (more on that in a moment) they lofted a balloon to a height of 22-27 kilometers (13-17 miles). When they retrieved it, they found a single particle that appears to be part of a diatom, a microscopic plant. This, they claim, is evidence of life coming from space. […]

The team publishing this paper includes […] a man who has claimed, time and again, to have found diatoms in meteorites. However, his previous claims have been less than convincing: The methodology was sloppy, the conclusions were not at all supported by the evidence, and heck, he hadn’t even established that the rocks they found were in fact meteorites. He also has a history of seeing life from space everywhere based on pretty thin evidence.

Moreover, this team published their results in the Journal of Cosmology, an online journal that doesn’t have the most discerning track record with science.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe.

{ Quanta | Continue reading }

{ You need to see this 17-minute film set entirely on a teen’s computer screen | thanks Stella }

By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing.

{ Aeon | Continue reading }

Woman swallows toothbrush while talking on the phone.

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Man with brewer’s yeast in his gut gets drunk from beer he generates.

Swedish court: Public masturbation not a crime.

What if someone told you the stock market crashed and spiked 18,000 times since 2006, and you had no idea? The secret financial market only robots can see.

In 2012, real median household income was 8.3% lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession. [PDF]

Always Emerging, Never Arriving: The Middle Class.

New Revelations about the Biodiversity of Belly Buttons.

Women’s feelings toward their partners shift subtly during peak fertility.

Researchers analyzed how the body language of the potential customer helps bartenders to identify who would like to place an order and who does not.

Forget good cop, bad cop - the real psychology of two-person interrogation.

Is it ethical to instil false hope in people with mental illness?

Happiness = Reality - Expectations

Scientists have proven again and again that major life events usually influence your well-being for no longer than three months.

The 10,000-hour theory: More than 20 percent of the best players made even quicker work of the process, becoming masters in 5,000 hours or fewer.

Political extremism is supported by an illusion of understanding.

Perceiving causes; why knowledge doesn’t trump perception.

Why Are Some People Left-Handed?

The Science Behind Napping.

We’re told studies have proven that drugs like heroin and cocaine instantly hook a user. But it isn’t that simple – little-known experiments over 30 years ago tell a very different tale.

Vaccine against cocaine.

How people argue with research they don’t like.

Parking space strategy: pick a row, closest space.

The most famous models for how cities grow are wrong.

These 20 cities have the most to lose from rising sea levels.

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. The Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole, theorists propose.

We discuss how a creature accustomed to Euclidean space would fare in a world of spherical geometry, and conversely.

Slaves as grave gifts for the Vikings.

Flying Snakes: Aerodynamic Secrets Finally Revealed.

Power outages caused by squirrels. [NY Times]

How Iran built a skyscraper in the middle of New York City and held onto it for decades.

A fake hospital to figure out what saves money.

US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing.

Pseudonymity, part of Net culture since its early beginnings, may become a quaint relic of the early Internet.

Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world.

How to Boost Your WiFi Signal.

How a Food Delivery Service Got into Porn.

How to Raise Money. “Treat investors as saying no till they unequivocally say yes, in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies.”

In 1858, a stationer named Hymen Lipman patented a newfangled pencil with a rubber plug embedded in one end of its wood shaft. An entrepreneur named Joseph Reckendorfer guessed that the pencil-plus-eraser would become a blockbuster product and bought the patent from Lipman for $100,000, about $2 million in today’s dollars. [NY Times]

The best pen.

The languages on Chinese banknotes.

Five Years Of Hard Work By The Federal Reserve.

How to make a clubbing dress out of a boy’s turtleneck.

A video shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying.

A comparison of the real stars of Back To The Future almost 30 years later compared to their “30 years older” makeup from the movie.

Putting All the World’s Water into a Big Cube.

Yekaterinburg’s Mafia Cemeteries.

P.E.N.I.S. Foundation

For a common affliction that strikes people of every culture and walk of life, schizophrenia has remained something of an enigma. Scientists talk about dopamine and glutamate, nicotinic receptors and hippocampal atrophy, but they’ve made little progress in explaining psychosis as it unfolds on the level of thoughts, beliefs, and experiences. Approximately one percent of the world’s population suffers from schizophrenia. Add to that the comparable numbers of people who suffer from affective psychoses (certain types of bipolar disorder and depression) or psychosis from neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. All told, upwards of 3% of the population have known psychosis first-hand. These individuals have experienced how it transformed their sensations, emotions, and beliefs. […]

There are several reasons why psychosis has proved a tough nut to crack. First and foremost, neuroscience is still struggling to understand the biology of complex phenomena like thoughts and memories in the healthy brain. Add to that the incredible diversity of psychosis: how one psychotic patient might be silent and unresponsive while another is excitable and talking up a storm. Finally, a host of confounding factors plague most studies of psychosis. Let’s say a scientist discovers that a particular brain area tends to be smaller in patients with schizophrenia than healthy controls. The difference might have played a role in causing the illness in these patients, it might be a direct result of the illness, or it might be the result of anti-psychotic medications, chronic stress, substance abuse, poor nutrition, or other factors that disproportionately affect patients.

One intriguing approach is to study psychosis in healthy people. […] This approach is possible because schizophrenia is a very different illness from malaria or HIV. Unlike communicable diseases, it is a developmental illness triggered by both genetic and environmental factors. These factors affect us all to varying degrees and cause all of us – clinically psychotic or not – to land somewhere on a spectrum of psychotic traits. Just as people who don’t suffer from anxiety disorders can still differ in their tendency to be anxious, nonpsychotic individuals can differ in their tendency to develop delusions or have perceptual disturbances. One review estimates that 1 to 3% of nonpsychotic people harbor major delusional beliefs, while another 5 to 6% have less severe delusions. An additional 10 to 15% of the general population may experience milder delusional thoughts on a regular basis.

{ Garden of the Mind | Continue reading }

photo { Edgar Degas, After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back, 1896 }

Language is not the only vehicle for many aspects of thought. Many assume that without language it is impossible to think, to remember, to communicate, to have categories/plans/procedures, to have culture and to even have consciousness. Slowly it is being shown that other animals can do many of the things that used to be classed as only-with-language skills. We just do them more effectively with language.

{ Thoughts on Thoughts | Continue reading }

art { Caravaggio, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 1608 }