A new study shows how the behavior of dogs has been misunderstood for generations: in fact using misplaced ideas about dog behavior and training is likely to cause rather than cure unwanted behavior. […]

Contrary to popular belief, aggressive dogs are NOT trying to assert their dominance over their canine or human “pack.” […]

The researchers spent six months studying dogs freely interacting at a Dogs Trust rehoming centre, and reanalyzing data from studies of feral dogs, before concluding that individual relationships between dogs are learnt through experience rather than motivated by a desire to assert “dominance.”

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

{ Look at all these iPhone 5s flooding FedEx’s distribution center }

The rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. […]

All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”

{ Teju Cole | Continue reading }

photo { Nan Goldin }

The “Macbeth effect” denotes the phenomenon that people wish to cleanse themselves physically when their moral self has been threatened. In this article we argue that such a threat to one’s moral self may also result from playing a violent video game, especially when the game involves violence against humans.

{ ScienceDirect | via Autodespair | Continue reading }

photo { Camilla Akrans }

For people with a condition that some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating — chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling — can send them into an instantaneous, blood-boiling rage. […]

Many people can be driven to distraction by certain small sounds that do not seem to bother others — gum chewing, footsteps, humming. But sufferers of misophonia, a newly recognized condition that remains little studied and poorly understood, take the problem to a higher level.

They also follow a strikingly consistent pattern, experts say. The condition almost always begins in late childhood or early adolescence and worsens over time, often expanding to include more trigger sounds, usually those of eating and breathing. […]

Aage R. Moller, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas […] believes the condition is hard-wired, like right- or left-handedness, and is probably not an auditory disorder but a “physiological abnormality” that resides in brain structures activated by processed sound. […]

Taylor Benson, a 19-year-old sophomore at Creighton University in Omaha, says many mouth noises, along with sniffling and gum chewing, make her chest tighten and her heart pound. She finds herself clenching her fists and glaring at the person making the sound.

“This condition has caused me to lose friends and has caused numerous fights,” she said.

Misophonia (“dislike of sound”) is sometimes confused with hyperacusis, in which sound is perceived as abnormally loud or physically painful. But Dr. Johnson says they are not the same. “These people like sound, the louder the better,” she said of misophonia patients. “The sounds they object to are soft, hardly audible sounds.” One patient is driven crazy by her beloved dog licking its paws. Another can’t bear the pop of the plosive “p” in ordinary conversation.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ BIOswimmer robofish will be able to search and inspect the hulls of ships, and even the ocean floor should drug dealers attempt to ditch their contraband overboard. }

The summer’s most talked about working paper in economics is by Robert Gordon, and it is simply titled “Is US Economic Growth Over?” […]

Gordon has been arguing since the days of the dotcom mania that the information revolution looks rather puny compared with earlier waves of innovation, such as the internal combustion engine, indoor plumbing, electrification and the telephone – all of which took hold from about 1850 to 1900. This claim was plausible then and it’s plausible now. (Would you rather give up the smartphone, Facebook and broadband – or hot running water and your flush toilet?) […]

Economic growth is a modern invention: 20th-century growth rates were far higher than those in the 19th century, and pre-1750 growth rates were almost imperceptible by modern standards. Many have seen this as an encouraging trend, but Gordon draws a different lesson: growth is a recent phenomenon, so why assume that it will last?

If Gordon is right to claim that modern inventions are less impressive than those of the late 19th century, we would expect to see slow growth in US real GDP per capita. And, indeed, growth has been slowing since the 1960s, even setting the current recession to one side. […]

Even assuming that climate change can be managed, there are limits to the rate at which we can burn fossil fuels, grow food and mine metals. Renewable energy sources are available, but less plentifully than we might hope. […]

We’ve lived with astonishing economic growth for 250 years; perhaps we are starting to take this exciting companion for granted.

{ FT | Continue reading }

images { 1. Nick Meek | 2 }

It seems as if stealing bikes shouldn’t be a lucrative form of criminal activity. Used bikes aren’t particularly liquid or in demand compared to other things one could steal (phones, electronics, drugs). And yet, bikes continue to get stolen so they must be generating sufficient income for thieves. What happens to these stolen bikes and how to they get turned into criminal income?

{ Priceonomics | Continue reading }

Sweden’s successful waste-to-energy program converts household waste into energy for heating and electricity. But they’ve run into an unusual problem: they simply aren’t generating enough trash to power the incinerators, so they’ve begun importing waste from European neighbors. […]

Sweden has recently begun to import about eight hundred thousand tons of trash from the rest of Europe per year to use in its power plants. The majority of the imported waste comes from neighboring Norway because it’s more expensive to burn the trash there and cheaper for the Norwegians to simply export their waste to Sweden.

In the arrangement, Norway pays Sweden to take the waste off their hands and Sweden also gets electricity and heat. But dioxins in the ashes of the waste byproduct are a serious environmental pollutant. Ostlund explained that there are also heavy metals captured within the ash that need to be landfilled. Those ashes are then exported to Norway.

{ PRI | Continue reading }

Finding rats in the town dump is hardly cause for comment in most of the world. Rattus norvergicus (the Norway rat) has spread to all but a few bits of the planet, giving rise to the urban myth that city dwellers are never more than six feet away from a rodent.

However, the western Canadian province of Alberta has prided itself on being one of those rat-free bits for more than half a century. So when an infestation was discovered in early August outside Medicine Hat, a city of 72,000 people, it was headline news.

Pest-control officers installed high-definition cameras to track the rats, set up poisoned traps to catch them and released two bull snakes to kill those too wary to be trapped. The snakes, which look like rattlesnakes but are non-venomous constrictors, had been caught after citizens complained. They are normally released in a wilderness area when found in town, but in this case they were deployed to the dump.

Pictures of dead rats (those not disposed of by the snakes) seemed to signal early success. But as the corpses continued to pile up—there were 103 by August 27th—and rats were sighted in residential areas, the city opened a new front in the war: Operation Haystack. This involved stacking bales of hay stuffed with poison at 15 locations. Alison Redford, the provincial premier, promised the extermination effort would be “unrelenting.”

{ Business Insider | Continue reading }

{ Larry Sultan }

Newly formed emotional memories can be erased from the human brain. This is shown by researchers from Uppsala University in a new study now being published by the academic journal Science. The findings may represent a breakthrough in research on memory and fear. […]

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Samad Ghorbanzadeh }

{ Mickey Smith }

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008. […] The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States in international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. […] Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ How to get Google Maps on iOS 6 }

Detectives tracking murderers, rapists and other criminals may be able to reconstruct their faces from a speck of blood left at the crime scene.

The significant advance in forensic investigation has been brought a step closer by scientists who believe they can produce portraits of suspects from a scrap of their DNA. The development would mean inaccurate photofits and unreliable eyewitness testimony would be consigned to history.

Researchers in the Netherlands working with photographs of individuals and MRI scans of their heads have identified genetic factors that contribute to facial appearance. […] The researchers from the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam identified nine facial “landmarks”, including the position of the cheekbones, the distance between the eyes, and the height, width and length of the nose. By analysing the genomes of almost 10,000 individuals, they found five genes that controlled the positioning of the nine landmarks which affected their facial appearance.

{ Independent | Continue reading }

related { ‘Psychopaths’ have an impaired sense of smell }

photo { Richard Barnes, Unabomber 01, 1998 }

New research traces the dramatic rise in feminine pronouns in books over the past century.

Using the Google Books database, the researchers examined the ratio of male pronouns (he, him, his, himself) to female ones (she, her, hers, herself) in the texts of 1.2 million books published in the U.S. between 1900 and 2008. They suspected feminine references would represent a larger percentage of such words over time, as women gained in power and status.

They were right. But there were periods of regression, and a real shift didn’t occur until the late 1960s.

{ Pacific Standard | Continue reading }

Sir George Reresby Sitwell (1862 - 1943) believed that novel-writing could bring about physical ruin, and travelled with an extensive collection of medicines, but all were mislabelled to confound anyone helping themselves.

{ The Age | BBC | Thanks James! }

screenshot { Gérard Jugnot in Le Père Noël est une ordure, 1982 }

Man tries to buy beer with bartender’s credit card.

Rapper Tweets ‘YOLO’ About Driving Drunk At 120 MPH, Dies Minutes Later.

Rats fed a lifetime diet of Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) corn or exposed to its top-selling weedkiller Roundup suffered tumors and multiple organ damage, according to a French study published on Wednesday.

Drunk airline passenger stole other passengers’ food and demanded crew put some ‘f****** music on.’

The cats brought home just under a quarter of what they killed, ate 30% and left 49% to rot where they died. When researchers attached kittycams to house cats, they found a secret world of slaughter.

Israel sperm banks find quality is plummeting. Sperm quality is down everywhere, but Israel is worse off than other developed countries. Theories about why vary from cellphones in pockets to estrogen in milk or water.

Menstruating women do not attract bear attacks.

Deaf police officers have been recruited to monitor security cameras in the Mexican city of Oaxaca because of their ‘heightened visual abilities.’

Women speak less when they’re outnumbered.

Men with divorced parents are significantly more likely to suffer a stroke than men from intact families, shows a new study.

Does sleeping face-down induce more sexual dreams?

How do we ignore the obvious grossness of sex for long enough to propagate the species? Maybe, researchers say, by turning off our disgust reflex whenever we get turned on.

Pacifiers may have emotional consequences for boys.

The orientation of a diagram on the page of a textbook may seem inconsequential, but it can have a significant impact on a reader’s ability to comprehend the information as presented.

Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park, advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.

Green tea is good for brain cells, specifically for memory and spatial learning.

Acupuncture Works, Even if It’s a Placebo.

Why Does Coffee Smell Better than It Tastes?

Eating more fruits and vegetables may help smokers quit and stay tobacco-free for longer.

Scientists have found the answer to why female killer whales have the longest menopause of any non-human species - to care for their adult sons.

Diagnosing Skin Cancer via iPhone. [Thanks Tim]

Nanotechnology used in fight against counterfeiters. An invisible tag made of nanoparticles, similar to a ‘quick response’ or QR code, could be used to help thwart banknote forgers and criminals who sell bogus drugs or fake vintage wine.

Self-taught technologists are almost always better hires than those with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a huge student loan. Is a computer science degree worth the paper it’s printed on?

If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?

We surveyed some current analysts about the classic and ridiculous questions they were asked when applying to the Wall Street internship that got them to their current position.

Did journalist David Sanger discover the true story behind Stuxnet, or was he caught in a deeper web of deception?

Dumbo is Walt Disney’s myth of modernity, a film in which he uses a story about infant-mother separation as a vehicle for assimilating modern technology and management structure to the evolved mechanisms of the human mind.

I know why Bret Easton Ellis hates David Foster Wallace. I edited both authors when they were starting out and can attest that the enmity between the two goes back decades.

So in April Vorobyev ploughed 400,000 roubles ($12,500) of savings into a self-styled ‘mutual aid fund,’ known as MMM-2011, promoted by Sergei Mavrodi, a guru-like financier, former lawmaker and convicted fraudster.

Facebook leads to fall of two Brooklyn gangs.

“My tattoos are poison. People can tell.” When I ask what they communicate he says, “My propensity for sudden and horrific violence.”

“He’s kind of a slender guy but he inserts these huge objects to an incredible depth. I admire his capabilities.”

the death of the fresh prince of bel air. the death of molly ringwald…

Although I am not a painter, I think that the subaqueous qualities of the purity of line makes resonant the distinctive formal juxtapositions. The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator.

17 Euphemisms for Sex From the 1800s.

Jon Hamm’s Penis Takes Its Owner Out for a Walk.

One guy who really wanted to get on TV making blowjob faces.