The authors’ basic idea is that many men, wishing to appear ‘manly’, don’t talk about or get help for their problems, especially psychological issues: boys don’t cry, and men certainly don’t. However, the authors argue that gay men, generally less encumbered by traditional masculinity, may be an exception to this rule. […]

In accordance with the authors’ predictions, gay men were indeed more open to seeking psychological help.

But unexpectedly, they were actually less likely to report experiencing psychological distress. That’s surprising, given several previous reports of higher rates of mental illness in homosexuals, which has been dubbed ‘velvet rage’.

Sánchez et al’s data suggest that gay men may be, er, more gay (…the other kind), and that their increased rates of diagnosed mental illness are a product of their greater willingness to seek help: maybe straight men are just in denial.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Mapplethorpe }

{ Researchers have discovered a way to generate new human neurons from another type of adult cell found in our brains. }

photo { Joel Sternfeld }

Most of the occasional singers sang as accurately as the professional singers. Thus, singing appears to be a universal human trait.

However, two of the occasional singers maintained a high rate of pitch errors at the slower tempo. This poor performance was not due to impaired pitch perception, thus suggesting the existence of a purely vocal form of tone deafness.

{ Acoustical Society of America | PDF }

The idea that humans walk in circles is no urban myth. This was confirmed by Jan Souman and colleagues in a 2009 study, in which participants walked for hours at night in a German forest and the Tunisian Sahara. […]

Souman’s team rejected past theories, including the idea that people have one leg that’s stronger or longer than the other. If that were true you’d expect people to systematically veer off in the same direction, but their participants varied in their circling direction.

Now a team in France has made a bold attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery. […] [It] suggests that our propensity to walk in circles is related in some way to slight irregularities in the vestibular system. Located in inner ear, the vestibular system guides our balance and minor disturbances here could skew our sense of the direction of “straight ahead” just enough to make us go around in circles.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Hans Bellmer }

{ ARTINFO }

{ Joel Sternfeld }

A woman has successfully grown a new ear on her arm.

A woman woke from brain surgery to find quarter of her head missing - and it was being stored in her stomach.

Farmer eaten by his own hogs.

Connecticut man shoots burglar dead, turns out to be own son.

Maria TV, a new Egyptian channel that solely features veiled women, might be the first in the industry without a makeup room.

Oklahoma Survivalist Claims Motor will Run on Anything.

Could Psychoanalysis Be a Science?

California has become the third state to explicitly legalize driverless vehicles.

Phones to drive cars in future of “ubiquitous computing.”

Newspaper sales suffer due to lack of stimulating content.

Can You Change Your Political Beliefs? New research suggests that most people may not be as committed to their moral principles as they think they are.

Genetics may make some women more vulnerable to the pressure of being thin.

Can glass shape really affect how fast you drink?

Black mamba venom makes a great painkiller.

Genetically engineered cow makes anti-allergy milk.

Vampyroteuthis infernalis – the ‘Squid from Hell’ – is the only species in the order Vampyromorpha, where it was placed in 1903. Secrets of the squid from Hell revealed

In late 2011, Broad built a 30-story building in 15 days; now it intends to use similar methods to erect the world’s tallest building in just seven months.

The New MakerBot Replicator Might Just Change Your World

How To Build A Black Hole Laser.

Evidence Emerges That Iran Is Building Its Own Hidden Internet.

Where Do India’s Billionaires Get Their Wealth? [PDF]

A hole in the head. More tales in the history of neurosciences. [PDF]

When she asked why Tom Cruise would not break up with her himself, she was told he was not to be disturbed. […] She was also harangued for hours and made to confess what a horrible human being she was. Normal education was minimized because of Scientology’s belief in reincarnation—everyone was already millions of years old.

“This would be from 1983. Hair length, and H.R. missing that tooth he knocked out hitting a huge stage divider pole at the Reggae Lounge. Brooke would have been around 18, maybe still a Ford model.”

Jewelry in motion: Kinetic architecture for your hands and optimization of parenthood. [Thanks Tim]

Dog shaming.

Exhausted Renegade Elephant, 1979.

Hands-free automatic sperm extractor for donors.

[A possible explanation for why we enjoy watching sad films]

Media psychologists have long puzzled over how individuals can experience enjoyment from entertainment such as tragedies that often elicit profound feelings of sadness. The present research examines the idea that a focus on “meaningful” entertainment and affective responses identified as “elevation” may provide a framework for understanding many examples of sad or dramatic entertainment. The results of this study suggest that many types of meaningful cinematic entertainment feature portrayals of moral virtues (e.g., altruism). These portrayals, in turn, elicit feelings of elevation (e.g., inspiration) that are signified in terms of mixed affect and unique physical responses (e.g., lump in throat). Ultimately, elevation also gives rise to motivations to embody moral virtues, such as being a better person or helping others.

{ Wiley | via BPS }

pastel on paper { Johannes Kahrs }

{ Progress in Automatic Giraffe Recognition | Improbable Research | Detecting, Localizing and Recovering Kinematics of Textured Animals | PDF }

{ Julian Wolkenstein’s Symmetrical Portraits take individual faces, split them down the middle, then mirror each side, creating two “new” identities from the same person }

How can you live in a city like Karachi with all its rampant violence? I can’t really confess to the folks in my village that, unlike in the rest of Pakistan, in Karachi you can buy beer without much hassle. (Alcohol is illegal throughout the country.)

Nobody knows how many people live in Karachi. Current estimates range between 17 and 20 million. I have never met anyone who has seen the whole of the city. Every few months, you’ll hear of a neighborhood that you’ve never heard of before. […]

Half a dozen people are killed on an average day: for political reasons, for resisting an armed robbery, for not paying protection money, and sometimes for just being in the wrong spot when two groups are having a go at each other.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

Mr. Romney’s practice debates have gone worse than expected, with the former Massachusetts governor getting trounced by a variety of opponents, including the Apple personal assistant Siri.

{ Andy Borowitz/The New Yorker | Continue reading }

Canadian researchers have come up with a new, precise definition of boredom based on the mental processes that underlie the condition.

Although many people may see boredom as trivial and temporary, it actually is linked to a range of psychological, social and health problems, says Guelph psychology professor Mark Fenske. […]

After reviewing existing psychological science and neuroscience studies, they defined boredom as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” which arises from failures in one of the brain’s attention networks.

In other words, you become bored when:



• you have difficulty paying attention to the internal information, such as thoughts or feelings, or outside stimuli required to take part in satisfying activity;

• you are aware that you’re having difficulty paying attention; and

• you blame the environment for your sorry state (“This task is boring”; “There is nothing to do”).


{ University of Guelph | Continue reading }

art { Picasso, Femme couchée lisant, 1960 }

A popular but misinformed POV, adhered to by perhaps 30-45% of the general public, is that living a radically long life would become excruciatingly tiresome due to unavoidable “boredom.” […] No one will understand what “boring” means in a century; “Boredom” will be defined as a mysterious, extinct mental condition that disappeared from human consciousness.  It will be a mere sound, a rough primitive noise that got flushed down the toilet of vocabulary history.

Why do I believe the future will infinitely intrigue us?

In the past (and present), activity options were limited due to requisite drudgery of multiple tasks - should I wash dishes first, or pay bills? - but… as automation annihilates our mind-numbing chores, we’ll be provided with Time, Wonderful Time, Long Hours of Happy Relaxed Time that we devote to endless intriguing challenges and interactions.

Plus, pharmacology will provide us with a wide menu of euphoric states of consciousness.

{ Hank Pellissier/IEET | Continue reading }

{ The artworks presented are typified by their transformation of a functioning musical composition or mapping document from a sound-based performance into a work of visual art. | Render Visible | 29 Wythe Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211 | Reception: Friday, October 5, until October 28 | Photo: Hannah Whitaker }

According to an influential and controversial theory, autism is the manifestation of an “Extreme Male Brain.” The reasoning goes something like this - the condition is far more prevalent in males than females; people with autism think in a distinctive style that’s more commonly observed in men than women (that is, high in systematising and low in empathising); and greater testosterone exposure in the womb appears to go hand in hand with an infant exhibiting more autism-like traits in later childhood.

Simon Baron-Cohen, the psychologist who first proposed the theory, always conjectured that there may also be such a thing as an “Extreme Female Brain.” Now in a new paper, a pair of researchers in the USA have made the case that the Extreme Female Brain exists, it’s highly empathic, and it comes with its own problematic consequences, in terms of a fear of negative evaluation by others, and related to that, a greater risk of eating disorders (which are known to be far more prevalent in women than men).

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Andrew Miksys }

Players build their own spaceships and traverse a galaxy of 7,500 star systems. They buy and sell raw materials, creating their own fluctuating markets. They speculate on commodities. They form trade coalitions and banks. […]

Nowadays, many massively multiplayer online video games have become so complex that game companies are turning to economists for help. […]

In Eve Online, Guðmundsson oversees an economy that can fluctuate wildly — he says it expanded 42 percent between February 2011 and February 2012, then contracted 15 percent by the summer. His team will periodically have to address imbalances in the money supply. For instance, they can curb inflation by introducing a new type of weapon, say, to absorb virtual currency.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Our patent system is a mess. It’s a fount of expensive litigation that allows aging companies to linger around by bullying their more innovative competitors in court.

Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on ”trolls” who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be better off without any patents at all?

That’s the striking suggestion from a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working paper by Michele Boldrin and David Levine, professors at Washington University in St. Louis who argue that any patent system, no matter how well conceived, is bound to devolve into the kind of quagmire we’re dealing with today.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

Labs like mine are now developing 3-D assemblers (rather than printers) that can build structures in the same way as the ribosome. The assemblers will be able to both add and remove parts from a discrete set. One of the assemblers we are developing works with components that are a bit bigger than amino acids, cluster of atoms about ten nanometers long (an amino acid is around one nanometer long). These can have properties that amino acids cannot, such as being good electrical conductors or magnets. The goal is to use the nanoassembler to build nanostructures, such as 3-D integrated circuits. Another assembler we are developing uses parts on the scale of microns to millimeters. We would like this machine to make the electronic circuit boards that the 3-D integrated circuits go on. Yet another assembler we are developing uses parts on the scale of centimeters, to make larger structures, such as aircraft components and even whole aircraft that will be lighter, stronger, and more capable than today’s planes — think a jumbo jet that can flap its wings.

A key difference between existing 3-D printers and these assemblers is that the assemblers will be able to create complete functional systems in a single process. They will be able to integrate fixed and moving mechanical structures, sensors and actuators, and electronics. Even more important is what the assemblers don’t create: trash. Trash is a concept that applies only to materials that don’t contain enough information to be reusable. All the matter on the forest floor is recycled again and again. Likewise, a product assembled from digital materials need not be thrown out when it becomes obsolete. It can simply be disassembled and the parts reconstructed into something new.

The most interesting thing that an assembler can assemble is itself. For now, they are being made out of the same kinds of components as are used in rapid prototyping machines. Eventually, however, the goal is for them to be able to make all their own parts.

{ Foreign Affairs | Continue reading }

Large-scale surveys indicate that on average people spend more time sleeping than working. […]

Negative effects of sleep deprivation are especially problematic in contemporary organizations, given recent research indicating that sleep has decreased at a rate of about 5 minutes per decade for the past three decades.

A large-scale study indicates that 29.9% of Americans get less than 6 hours per day; for those in management and enterprises, 40.5% get less than 6 hours. Large- scale studies from Korea, Finland, Sweden, and England also indicate high proportions of people functioning on low quantities of sleep or poor sleep quality. Probably as a result of insufficient sleep, 29% of Americans report extreme sleepiness or falling asleep at work in the past month. Thus, across many countries, there is an abundance of employees who work after a short night of sleep or poor quality sleep. […]

Organizational psychology researchers have recently begun to investigate this topic, highlighting effects of low sleep quantity and poor sleep quality on job satisfaction, unethical behavior, workplace deviance, lack of innovative thinking, and high risk of work injuries.

{ SAGE | PDF }

art { Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538 }