The universal nature of human facial preferences suggests the possibility that such preferences are adaptations to the problem of mate choice. Sexual selection will have favored preferences for facial traits which are associated with reproductive success. (…)

One way facial traits may signal mate quality is by indicating the health of the individual displaying them. Healthy individuals confer a reduced risk of infection as well as the possibility of heritable immunity for their suitors’ offspring. Preferences for facial traits that are linked with health are therefore expected to be present.

One facial cue used in the judgment of a woman’s attractiveness is facial femininity. While facial proportions diverge between the sexes in particular ways, within each sex, the extent to which an individual typifies the prototypical face structure of his or her sex varies. Given that women have smaller jaws, lighter brow-ridges, higher cheekbones and larger foreheads than men , facial femininity represents the degree to which such traits are exaggerated in a woman’s face. (…)

The present study sought to address the relationship between female facial femininity, attractiveness and perceived/actual health. It was assumed that for femininity to signal health, it must be perceived as healthy and consequently be rated as attractive. Actual health was assessed by multiple self-reports detailing the number of colds, stomach illnesses and frequency of antibiotic use across a number of time periods, including some more recent and therefore less susceptible to error than previous studies employing such a measure. Based on previous results, we would predict that the rated femininity, healthiness and attractiveness of the faces would negatively correlate with self-reported ill-health in shorter-term time periods, as well as over the preceding three years. (…)

This study supports the finding that facial femininity and attractiveness may indicate women’s health history, which partially supports (although without confirmation of such relationships in future health, does not confirm) the hypothesis that female facial structure is a direct indicator of health functioning.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | PDF }

photo { Ed van der Elsken }

When objects are arranged in an array from left to right, the central item (…) calls out to you “Pick me, pick me!” (…)

In a new study psychologists have provided further evidence for what’s called the “Centre Stage effect” - our preferential bias towards items located in the middle.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

David Eagleman, neuroscientist: Take the vast, unconscious, automated processes that run under the hood of conscious awareness. We have discovered that the large majority of the brain’s activity takes place at this low level. The conscious part – the “me” that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. (…)

Raymond Tallis, former professor of geriatric medicine: [You] present us as more helpless, ignorant and zombie-like than is compatible with the kinds of lives we actually live and, what’s more, with doing brain science.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

related { How free is the will? }

photo { Heiner Luepke }

Exercise, done right, has been found to reduce the risk of dying from any cause by at least one third with a 9% reduction for every one hour of vigorous exercise performed per week. To be fair, studies which calculate such risks are inherently flawed. They assess exercise through questionnaires, which makes it difficult to reliably judge the amount and intensity of exercise, and whether people stick with a given exercise level and for how long. That’s why I like to look at the exercise-health correlation using fitness as the marker. Because fitness is a direct consequence of exercise, and it is something we can objectively measure in the lab.

A fit 45 years old man has only one quarter the lifetime risk of dying from cardiovascular causes compared to his unfit peer. And 20 years later, at the age of 65, being fit means having only half the risk of an unfit 65-year old. (…)

The association of fitness with cancer is not as well researched as with cardiovascular disease. But the available data clearly point to a substantial effect. In a study performed in 1300 Finnish men who were followed for 11 years, the physically fit ones, when compared to their least fit peers, had a 60% reduced risk of dying from non-cardiovascular causes, which means mostly cancer.

{ Chronic Health | Continue reading }

photo { Jason Florio }

Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large.

Known primarily as a female reproductive hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during labor, which is where many women encounter it as Pitocin, the synthetic version that doctors inject in expectant mothers to induce delivery. Oxytocin is also responsible for the calm, focused attention that mothers lavish on their babies while breast-feeding. And it is abundant, too, on wedding nights (we hope) because it helps to create the warm glow that both women and men feel during sex, a massage or even a hug.

Since 2001, my colleagues and I have conducted a number of experiments showing that when someone’s level of oxytocin goes up, he or she responds more generously and caringly, even with complete strangers. (…)

In our studies, we found that a small percentage of subjects never shared any money; analysis of their blood indicated that their oxytocin receptors were malfunctioning.

{ Paul J. Zak/WSJ | Continue reading }

polaroid { Robert Whitman }

Recent years has seen the emergence of a popular ‘raw food’ movement. Dehydrating food to make it palatable, raw-foodies argue that cooking food destroys valuable vitamins and enzymes, rendering it nutritionally impoverished. It sounds logical, but – especially with vegetables – is often false. Many vegetables actually gain nutritional value after careful cooking or steaming. Furthermore, a strict vegan raw food diet is not good for long term health. (…)

Red meat is notable in that it contains a good source of B-vitamins that are essential for healthy muscles, skin and nerves. It also contains iron and other important minerals. Like most things however, steak should be in moderation as a high intake is associated with colon cancer and other health nasties. (…)

• The longer steak is cooked, the fewer vitamins it contains

• Cooking meat in water reduces its vitamin content further (the vitamins leech out into the water)

• The levels of iron and zinc increase with cooking

• Fat levels drop with cooking

{ Doctor Stu | Continue reading }

photo { Thomas Demand, Junior Suite [Whitney Houston’s last supper], 2012 | NY Times | DesignBoom }

In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone. (…)

Hotz’s YouTube video received nearly two million views and made him the most famous hacker in the world. The media loved the story of the teen-age Jersey geek who beat Apple. (…)

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who hacked telephone systems early in his career, sent Hotz a congratulatory e-mail. (…)

Hotz continued to “jailbreak,” or unlock, subsequent versions of the iPhone until, two years later, he turned to his next target: one of the world’s biggest entertainment companies, Sony. He wanted to conquer the purportedly impenetrable PlayStation 3 gaming console. (…)

But many were angry at Hotz, not at Sony. “Congratulations geohot, the asshole who sits at home doing nothing than ruining the experience for others,” one post read. Someone posted Hotz’s phone number online, and harassing calls ensued.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

The scientists individually told each member of another group of randomly selected people, “I hate to tell you this, but no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with.” (…) the whole point of going through all of this as far as the students knew, was to sit in front of a bowl containing 35 mini chocolate-chip cookies and judge those cookies on taste, smell, and texture. The subjects learned they could eat as many as they wanted while filling out a form commonly used in corporate taste tests. The researchers left them alone with the cookies for 10 minutes.

This was the actual experiment – measuring cookie consumption based on social acceptance. How many cookies would the wanted people eat, and how would their behavior differ from the unwanted? (…) Why did the rejected group feel motivated to keep mushing cookies into their sad faces? (…)

The answer has to do with something psychologists now call ego depletion, and you would be surprised to learn how many things can cause it, how often you feel it, and how much in life depends on it.

{ You Are Not So Smart | Continue reading }

A single-celled organism in Norway has been called “mankind’s furthest relative.” It is so far removed from the organisms we know that researchers claim it belongs to a new base group, called a kingdom, on the tree of life. (…)

The organism, a type of protozoan, was found by researchers in a lake near Oslo. (…) They found it doesn’t genetically fit into any of the previously discovered kingdoms of life. It’s an organism with membrane-bound internal structures, called a eukaryote, but genetically it isn’t an animal, plant, fungi, algae or protist (the five main groups of eukaryotes).

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

Face recognition techniques usually come with a certain amount of controversy. A new application, however, is unlikely to trigger any privacy concerns because all of the subjects are long dead.

Before photography took over, oil painting and portraiture was used to record what important people looked like. As a result for every artistically important painting there are a lot of “instant snaps” that fill museums and art gallery vaults. What would make these paintings much more valuable is knowing who all of the people in the portraits are.

The solution might be to apply face recognition software. This is the project for which three University of California, Riverside researchers have just received funding.

{ I Programmer | Continue reading | UCR }

art { Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail), 1452-1466 }

Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000.

On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.

The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.

The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.”

“That never occurred,” the report says.

Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. (…)

Ever since information about the secret data collection first began to emerge two years ago, Google has portrayed it as the mistakes of an unauthorized engineer operating on his own and stressed that the data was never used in any Google product.

The report, quoting the engineer’s original proposal, gives a somewhat different impression. The data, the engineer wrote, would “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” Google says this was never done. (…)

The Street View program used special cars outfitted with cameras. Google first said it was just photographing streets and did not disclose that it was collecting Internet communications called payload data, transmitted over Wi-Fi networks, until May 2010, when it was confronted by German regulators.

Eventually, it was forced to reveal that the information it had collected could include the full text of e-mails, sites visited and other data.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Bill Henson }

The buy, driven entirely by Zuckerberg, was made because Facebook’s CEO was petrified of Instagram becoming a Twitter-owned property.

Zuckerberg, we’re told, lives in perpetual anxiety, preoccupied by the fear of Facebook losing its place, terrified that youngsters will get their social networking fix from other services. That fear served as the catalyst behind his decision to buy Instagram and keep it out of the hands of a cross-town competitor.

This type of paranoia is relatively normal at Silicon Valley’s largest technology companies.

{ VentureBeat | Continue reading }

Not only is it accurate enough to compensate for the tiny aberrations in the optics, but it’s so accurate that we don’t know how accurate it is because we don’t yet have instruments accurate enough to measure the level of its accuracy.

The point is it’s pretty accurate.

{ Gizmodo | Continue reading }

{ How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Global Taxes | NY Times }

Physicists from the University of Zurich have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. (…)

In particle physics, the baryon family refers to particles that are made up of three quarks. Quarks form a group of six particles that differ in their masses and charges. The two lightest quarks, the so-called “up” and “down” quarks, form the two atomic components, protons and neutrons. All baryons that are composed of the three lightest quarks (”up,” “down” and “strange” quarks) are known. Only very few baryons with heavy quarks have been observed to date. They can only be generated artificially in particle accelerators as they are heavy and very unstable.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

previously { A new experiment indicates that neutrinos don’t move faster than the speed of light, adding to evidence that an earlier measurement may have been inaccurate. }

Women differ from men in circulating levels of certain hormones, and some of those hormones change across the menstrual cycle. Estradiol, progesterone, the lutenizing hormone, and the follicle-stimulating hormone all change over the menstrual cycle. (…)

We find that naturally cycling women bid significantly higher than men and earn significantly lower profits than men except during the midcycle when fecundity is highest. We suggest an evolutionary hypothesis according to which women are predisposed by hormones to generally behave more riskily during their fecund phase of their menstrual cycle in order to increase the probability of conception, quality of offspring, and genetic variety. We also find that women on hormonal contraceptives bid significantly higher and earn substantially lower profits than men. This may be due to progestins contained in hormonal contraceptives or a selection effect.

{ University of California | PDF }

related { The Impact of Female Sex Hormones on Competitiveness }

photos { Raymond Meeks }

Man charged with assault after demanding moonwalk dance at gunpoint.

Conductor Kurt Masur Falls Off Podium During Concert.

Vatican Reprimands a Group of U.S. Nuns and Plans Changes. The Sisters had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” [NYT]

Starbucks Corp said that it will stop using a natural, government-approved coloring made from crushed beetles in its strawberry flavoring by late June, bowing to pressure from some vegetarian customers.

The source of loud “booms” accompanied by a bright object traveling through the skies of Nevada and California on Sunday morning has been confirmed: it was a meteor. A big one.

Samsung has become the largest manufacturer of smartphones (overtaking Apple) and of mobile phones (overtaking Nokia).

Austerity policies are driving us towards a double-dip recession, warns US economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Women Seek Less-Dominant Dates in Recession.

While male victims are more likely to be bullied by male homophobic bullies, female victims are bullied by both males and females equally.

Commonly prescribed anti-depressants appear to be doing patients more harm than good, say researchers.

A computer game designed to lift teenagers out of depression is as effective as one-on-one conselling, New Zealand doctors reported.

Cocaine Eats Up Brain Twice as Fast as Normal Aging.

It is what you do in old age that matters more when it comes to maintaining a youthful brain not what you did earlier in life.

Hearing readjusts after head movements.

‘Lie detectors’ are highly fallible, yet suspects are more likely to tell the truth when wired up to them.

Erasing Memories Cell by Cell.

Why can smells unlock forgotten memories?

A new study finds that a high intake of flavonoid rich berries, such as strawberries and blueberries, over time, can delay memory decline in older women by 2.5 years.

The More Informed You Are, the More Likely You Are to Change Your Mind.

Psychologists Use Social Networking Behavior to Predict Personality Type.

New App Watches Your Every Move.

The Chinese character for epilepsy has been changed to avoid the inaccuracies and stigma associated with the previous label which suggested links to madness and, more unusually, animals.

A team of researchers has performed the first-ever computer model simulation of the structuring of the entire observable universe, from the Big Bang to the present day.

Currently the strongest contender for such a unifying theory is something called M-theory.

Mathematics of Eternity Prove The Universe Must Have Had A Beginning. [Part II]

Researchers study costs of ‘dirty bomb’ attack in L.A.

A new method reveals which pages of ancient religious texts were most frequently used—and which prayers perpetually put readers to sleep.

Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?

How quantum immortality works. [thanks Tim]

Is Bad Urban Design Making Us Lonely?

What do you sell? Marijuana. The Economics of a Part-time Drug Dealer.

They’ve become a part of the pop-culture landscape: sexy, private shots of celebrities stolen from their phones and e-mail accounts. They’re also the center of an entire stealth industry. The Man Who Hacked Hollywood.

An Essay on the New Aesthetic.

Russia Today, the politsiya, and Western punks alike all want to know: Who is Pussy Riot, when is their next gig, and where can I get their album?

Cargo cult science refers to practices that have the semblance of being scientific, but do not in fact follow the scientific method.

Nipples at the Met. [thanks GG]

Black and white portrait of famous rapper superimposed with misattributed quote. Text-Only Instagram.

Sadness.

People with A.I.D.S. Plaza, NYC.

If you don’t die from an accident, a serious infection or a cancer, you’ll live as long as your arteries let you. And how long they let you is all in your hands. I know this sounds over-simplified, but it’s biomedical knowledge in a nutshell. Let’s look at what happens in and to your arteries and what that means for keeping them in mint condition. 

You may have thought about your arteries as elastic tubes, which transport blood to where its oxygen and nutrient load is needed. But there is more to it. For example, there is this very thin lining which separates the muscular elastic wall of the arteries from the blood stream. This lining is called the endothelium, and it is where the difference is made between lifestyle and death style.

{ Chronic Health | Continue reading }

photo { Nick Meek }