Intuition is one of those iffy concepts. Its purpose, use, and ontology have been heavily debated in its long and contentious history. Western proverbial jargon illustrates this: we’ve been told that he who hesitates is lost, but shouldn’t we look before we leap? And believe that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but don’t the clothes make the man?

Now, psychology is weighing in. However, in place of armchair-rationality, it is using empirical data to illustrate how we actually behave. With concrete data, it seems like the intuition debate could finally be put to rest. But the opposite has occurred. Psychology has shown both the powers and perils of intuition only to complicate matters. (…)

First, there is a question about perception: How much do we see? (…)

Second, there is a question about judgment and decision-making: Should I go with my gut? Or think things through?

{ Why We Reason | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Ingres, Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845 }

It seems hard to imagine that anyone of sound mind would take the blame for something he did not do. But several researchers have found it surprisingly easy to make people fess up to invented misdemeanours. Admittedly these confessions are taking place in a laboratory rather than an interrogation room, so the stakes might not appear that high to the confessor. On the other hand, the pressures that can be brought to bear in a police station are much stronger than those in a lab. The upshot is that it seems worryingly simple to extract a false confession from someone—which he might find hard subsequently to retract.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

Having pain that persists creates a lot of stress, but there are many people who can limit the effect on their life and carry on. These people seem to return to their everyday activities even if their pain hasn’t settled. Then there are the other people. This group have much more trouble managing with their pain. They have more disability, more distress, seek more treatments and the impact of their pain spreads from the direct effect on their life, to effects on people around them.

If we could identify, then treat the risk factors that can lead to trouble recovering from pain, we might be able to limit the long term effects that chronic pain can have on people and our community. While maybe 25 years ago the factors were thought to be biomechanical, or things like the extent of tissue damage – and yes, these do have some effect – over time it has become clear that psychosocial factors play an important role. (…)

Catastrophising has been identified as a risk factor for greater disability and distress. Catastrophising is the tendency to “think the worst” and has been viewed as an independent risk factor for longterm disability for some time.

{ HealthSkills | Continue reading }

What could be wrong with a gentleman opening a door for a lady? According to some social psychologists, such acts endorse gender stereotypes: the idea that women are weak and need help; that men are powerful patriarchs. Now a study has looked at how women are perceived when they accept or reject an act of so-called “benevolent sexism”* and it finds that they’re caught in a double-bind. Women who accept help from a man are seen as warmer, but less competent. Women who reject help are seen as more competent, but cold.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

{ In May 2010, a tattered and brittle map was discovered in storage at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Experts identified it as a rare item, a Bernard Ratzer “Plan of the City of New York” map in its 1770 state. Until then, only three copies were thought to exist. After a painstaking restoration to remove layers of shellac and grime and repair dozens of breaks, the map is now behind plexiglass and ready to be displayed to the public. | NY Times | full story }

Swedish man arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen.

California man gets stuck in manhole with legs in the air trying to get lost wallet. [with photo]

Live rat found in loaf of bread was actually a mouse.

Group of Tibetan Buddhists buy 534 live lobsters and free them off a boat in the Atlantic.

Actress Used CGI Nipples to Fake a Nude Scene.

An Indian farmer and father of two had a hysterectomy after doctors discovered a “full female reproductive system” in his lower abdomen.

Kidnappers Introduce Victim’s Girlfriend To Wife.

Cancer-stricken WTC worker gets $0 settlement check.

Minnesota asked MillerCoors brewing company to stop selling its beer in the state because of expired licenses. The Department of Public Safety told the brewer it must stop distribution in Minnesota and devise a plan to pull its product from the shelves, including Coors, Coors Lite, Miller Lite, Miller High Life and 35 other name-brand beers.

Women spend more than $160,000 on make-up during their lifetime, a study claims.

What happens in the brain during addiction? How could it be similar to doing yoga? Or learning? An expert explains.

Since 9/11, researchers have been racing to replace the polygraph. Now they’re getting close — and it’s scary.

Are there more connections in a cubic millimeter of your brain than there are stars in the Milky Way?

Superheroes Who Share a Power with Dolphins.

Science’s theories on the origins of life on Earth. More: The theory that complex life on our planet owes its existence to the Moon.

Europe’s Plan to Move An Asteroid.

A piece of debris from NASA’s space shuttle Columbia has been discovered in Texas, eight years after the 2003 disaster that destroyed the spacecraft.

New hints of saltwater on Mars.

How we think about landscapes.

How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man.

Making Music Proves to be Powerful Antidepressant.

What can urine tell us?

Mindless eating: Losing weight without thinking. Dieters may not need as much willpower as they think, if they make simple changes in their surroundings that can result in eating healthier without a second thought.

A simple tweak in the tense of a verb could make the difference between electoral victory and defeat, according to a study by US researchers.

The mysteries of infinity could lead us to a fantastic structure above and beyond mathematics as we know it.

A new study has found that northern peoples have bigger eyes - and bigger brains.

Creativity dampened by observing anger, but enhanced by sarcasm.

The human impulse to be kind to unknown individuals is not the biological aberration it might seem.

Meanness is often a mask for insecurity. Understanding Mean Girls.

Why we need more mentally ill leaders.

Glow-in-the-dark shark can become invisible.

Harmless snakes avoid danger by mimicking the triangular heads of vipers.

70 percent of 8-month-olds consume too much salt.

Study exposes habit formation in smartphone users.

Millions of US drivers cross faulty or obsolete bridges every day, highway statistics show, but it’s too costly to fix these spans or adequately monitor their safety, says a University of Maryland researcher who’s developed a new, affordable early warning system.

Global population is expected to hit 7 billion in 2011, up from 6 billion in 1999.

We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters. From 1999 through the present, the VC industry has posted negative mean and median returns, with only a handful of funds having done very well. What happened?

What If You Wrote a Book and Only One Person Read It?

Back in September, he sent the following message to her via Twitter: “@SarahPalinUSA kudos to your dirty hole, you fucking jackoff cunt-face jazzy wondergirl.”

This article examines the use of Twitter by famous people to conceptualize celebrity as a practice.

This article looks at how previous practice of portraiture prepared the way for self-presentation on social networking sites. A portrait is not simply an exercise in the skillful or “realistic” depiction of a subject. Rather, it is a rhetorical exercise in visual description and persuasion and a site of intricate communicative processes.

Silicon Valley’s self-styled Thomas Edison has found a way to increase wireless capacity by a factor of 1,000.

When they leave, their start up idea gets VC funded. Ex-Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Facebook-ers Start Ups.

Type “why am I” into a Google search and autocomplete will suggest “why am I here?”

Space, Cyberspace and Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps.

For at least five years, a high-level hacking campaign—dubbed Operation Shady rat—has infiltrated the computer systems of national governments, global corporations, nonprofits, and other organizations, with more than 70 victims in 14 countries. Lifted from these highly secure servers, among other sensitive property: countless government secrets, e-mail archives, legal contracts, and design schematics.

New types of devices that monitor activity, sleep, diet, and even mood could make us healthier and more productive.

Yes, our children are growing up too soon. But blame capitalism, not sex.

The Online Sex Industry.

How Nixon stopped backing the dollar with gold and changed global finance, a 40-year-old decision.

No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. The operatives had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course.

Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Psychology in the United States, 1940–2010.

The World of Blind Mathematicians.

Trees brighten city streets and delight nature-starved urbanites. Now scientists are learning that they also play a crucial role in the green infrastructure of America’s cities.

What Are Speed Shows? A New Media Art Phenomenon Swoops Into New York’s Chinatown.

I’m at the Vent Haven ConVENTion where, each July, hundreds of ventriloquists, or “vents,” as they call themselves, gather from all over the world.

Is your basement the best shelter from a tornado?

How to Build a Stone Wall. [NY Times]

7 Must-Read Books on Maps.

The History and Mystery of the High Five.

How to unlock and start a car - with a text message.

Making of: MTV spot, Balloons. [video]

See if you can figure out how this classic con works.

Where children sleep.

Cyclops skull.

Prices subject to change…

Honor Your Dead Loved Ones by Stuffing Their Ashes in a Bullet and Shooting It.

When lost in the desert or a thick forest — terrains devoid of landmarks — people tend to walk in circles. Blindfolded people show the same tendency; lacking external reference points, they curve around in loops as tight as 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter, all the while believing they are walking in straight lines. (…)

The researchers believe that loopy paths follow from a walker’s changing sense of “straight ahead.” With every step, a small deviation is likely added to a person’s cognitive sense of what’s straight, and these deviations accumulate to send that individual veering around in ever tighter circles as time goes on.

{ Life’s Little Mysteries | Continue reading }

related { Where did humans learn to walk? }

Here is the great irony: S&P (and the rest of the ratings agencies)  helped contribute in no small way to the overall economic crisis. The toadies rated junk securitized mortgage backed paper AAA because they were paid to do so by banks.

They are utterly corrupt, and should have received the corporate death penalty (ala Arthur Anderson).

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

related { Standard & Poor’s removed the United States government from its list of risk-free borrowers for the first time since it was granted an AAA rating in 1917. | Standard & Poor’s (S&P) is a United States–based financial-services company, headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies. | S&P’s credit ratings }

photo { Scott Eells }

Turns out that your name is more influential than you think.

Researchers found that the “speed with which adults acquire items [correlates] to the first letter of their childhood surname.”

This means that when it comes to purchasing goods, people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the end of the alphabet tend to acquire items faster than people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet. They call it the “Last Name Effect,” and hypothesize that it is caused by “childhood ordering structure.”

In their words, “since those late in the alphabet are typically at the end of lines, they compensate by responding quickly to acquisition opportunities.”

{ Why We Reason | Continue reading }

photo { Louis Stettner, Rue des Martyrs, 1951 }

‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background

The idea that other universes — as well as our own — lie within “bubbles” of space and time has received a boost.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “bubble universes” may have left marks on our own.

This “multiverse” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by. The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

In our Solar System, planets fall into two types. First, there are the rocky planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus, which are similar in size and support gaseous atmospheres. Then there are the gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. These huge puff balls are two or more orders of magnitude bigger than their rocky cousins.

Perhaps strangest of all, there are no planets in between; nothing that sits on the borderline between rocky minnow and gas giant.

This sharp distinction has driven much of astronomers’ thinking about planet formation. One of the main challenges they have faced is to come up with a theory that explains the formation of two entirely different types of planet, but no hybrids that share characteristics of both.

That thinking will have to change. It now looks as if we’ve been fooled by our own Solar System. When astronomers look elsewhere, this two-tiered planetary division disappears.

Astrophysicists have now spotted more than 500 planets orbiting other stars and all of these systems seem entirely different to our Solar System. They’ve seen entirely new class of planets such as the Super-Jupiters that are many times larger than our biggest planet with orbits closer than Mercury.

But the one we’re interested in here has a mass that spans the range from Earth to Uranus, exactly the range that is missing from our Solar System.

Astronomers are calling these new types of planet Super-Earths, and so far they have found more than 30 of them.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

According to a new study on tiny shrimp (Artemia franciscana), sex with partners from a different time could kill you.

Researchers at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE) in Montpellier, France, collected preserved brine shrimp eggs from various generations, and then reanimated them with water. Nicolas Rode and colleagues mated pairs of brine shrimp that had been reanimated from eggs preserved since 1985, 1996 and 2007, a period representing roughly 160 generations. They found that females that mated with males from the past or future died off sooner than those that mated with their own generation. The longer the time-shift, the earlier they died.

{ PopSci | Continue reading }

One potential contributing factor to increasing rates of overweight and obesity is the availability and affordability of a wide range of food choices. A variety of inexpensive fast food options provides consumers the ability to rotate restaurant selection and reduce the risk of monotony in food selection.

Animal studies demonstrate that animals provided the same types of food (or other types of rewards) tend to reduce the level of consumption. This is a behavioral trait known as habituation. Habituation represents the tendency to reduce total caloric intake when eating the same foods and to increase caloric intake when presented novel food choices. (…)

If you are interested in losing weight, eating the same thing daily may be a way to use the habituation process to aid calorie restriction.

{ Brain Posts | Continue reading }

photo { Brian Ulrich }

Male seed beetles (Callosobruchus maculatus) have long spikes covering their penises [photo]. These spikes are thought to have evolved in response to female promiscuity, as a way of increasing the male’s chances of fertilizing a female’s eggs. Females, in response to the spikes, have evolved every man’s worst nightmare: spikes inside her vagina.

This is what evolutionary biologists call sexual conflict.

Males and females of a species have a common goal: to pass on their genes to the next generation. Sometimes, however, males and females have conflicting best strategies for getting that done. (…)

The penis of the male seed beetle punctures the female’s reproductive tract and, eventually, all those injuries will kill her. Females even have to kick the male constantly during mating to lessen the severity of the injuries–but she still won’t be deterred from hooking up again.

Why would male beetles want to harm females like this? (…)

While we’re on the topic of sharp penises that harm females, I thought I would throw in a little bed-bug action as well. Bed-bugs mate using what is known as “traumatic insemination.” Males bypass the female genitals entirely and pierce them in a specialized location on their bellies. They then ejaculate into the female sperm storage organ directly.

{ Molecular Love | Continue reading }

I’m going to break this down very simply, and as nonlibelously as possible.

On February 25, 1970, my mother received a call from Oliver Steindecker, Mark Rothko’s studio assistant, informing her that Rothko had committed suicide and was lying on the floor of his studio in a pool of blood. My mom took a cab from her house on East Eighty-Ninth to Rothko’s studio, twenty blocks south, and helped identify the body. She then took another cab uptown, to Rothko’s brownstone on East Ninety-Fifth, to tell Rothko’s estranged wife, Mell. She left a message with my father, who was, curiously, attending a funeral. Eventually he showed up as well, and helped to arrange Rothko’s funeral two days later. My mom was one month pregnant with me.

Five months later, Mell Rothko died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving their two children, Kate and Christopher, parentless. My mother was by now six months pregnant. Because of an inconsistency between the Rothkos’ wills, Kate, nineteen, became the ward of one Herbert Ferber, dentist-sculptor. Christopher, seven, became the ward of my parents. That arrangement ended badly. Christopher left my parents’ house the day before I was born.

{ Triple Canopy | Continue reading }

photos { Henry Elkan, Mark Rothko in his West 53rd Street studio, 1953-54 }

The 1980s was a heady and decadent time for rock stars. Stories of bad behavior by some of rock’s finest – be it trashing hotel rooms or simple prima donna demands – were splashed all over the headlines. And few of those stories were as famous as the “Van Halen and M&Ms” story.

In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed.” (…)

David Lee Roth: “I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean “What is this before me?” …you know, with the skull in one hand… and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”

{ Jim Cofer | Continue reading | Thanks Daniel! }

From amoeba to human, nearly all living things run on an internal clock, a circadian rhythm that regulates our respective business over a 24-hour period. (…)

But what if night stops coming, if daylight lasts all day? Stargazers already are seeing it. The illumination from streetlights and other artificial night lighting is now so persistently bright that 10 percent of the world’s population, and 40 percent of Americans, no longer view a night sky that the human eye perceives as fully dark. It’s a scientific loss for astronomers and a psychic one for the rest of us.

More and more, ecologists are finding that this false light also takes a toll on the natural world. Every year, night-migrating birds collide with bright buildings by the millions. Field studies have shown that artificial light changes the spawning times of certain species of coral and fish whose reproductive cycle depends on a lunar clock. It washes out the mating signals flashed by fireflies. One scientist found that a group of tree frogs halted their mating calls whenever the nearby football stadium held a night game and caused the sky to glow.

{ OneEarth | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Snowden }

Selbee bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively obscure game called Cash WinFall, tying up the machine that spits out the pink tickets for hours at a time. Down the road at Jerry’s Place, a coffee shop in South Deerfield, Selbee’s husband, Gerald, was also spending $307,000 on Cash WinFall. Together, the couple bought more than 300,000 tickets for a game whose biggest prize - about $2 million - has been claimed exactly once in the game’s seven-year history.

But the Selbees, who run a gambling company called GS Investment Strategies, know a secret about the Massachusetts State Lottery: For a few days about every three months, Cash WinFall may be the most reliably lucrative lottery game in the country. Because of a quirk in the rules, when the jackpot reaches roughly $2 million and no one wins, payoffs for smaller prizes swell dramatically, which statisticians say practically assures a profit to anyone who buys at least $100,000 worth of tickets.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Kate Peters }

A tiny molecule harvested from a soil bacterium on Easter Island that evolved billions of years ago for no obvious purposes should have nothing to do with human beings. Yet it turns out miraculously to have potent immunosuppressive properties that allow doctors to successfully perform a liver transplant in a young girl.

In India, an excited young bride celebrates her upcoming wedding by coloring her hands bright yellow with turmeric, a spice that has been used for centuries as a key culinary ingredient. In France, a similar hallowed tradition demands a copious flow of red wine at weddings. In China, a bride and groom offer ginseng tea to their parents as part of a ritual.

Oblivious of all these events, thousands of miles away in the United States, scientists are struck by the remarkable effect that the active ingredients in turmeric, red wine and ginseng tea seem to have on a variety of disorders, from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Perhaps, they ardently hope, there’s a cure in there somewhere.

Chemistry is the human science. What the general public refers to as “chemicals” have a profound effect on our way of life. They can forge a bridge between the metabolism of a billion year-old sponge and the fervent hopes of a mother for her daughter’s life, between the joy of traditional weddings and food and that of seeing a loved one being cured of a terrible malady. Physics may concern itself with the beginnings of deep time and biology turns its eye on the origin of humanity itself. The wonders of physics and biology are undoubtedly spectacular, but chemistry is the science that most directly engages with our senses, the discipline that confronts us face-on every single day of our lives and demands that we react.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

painting { Alex Brown, The Michael Channel, 2010 }

{ Face recognition technology can reveal much more than your image. Researchers could identify people based on nothing more than a photo, as well as predict part of their Social Security numbers. }