How kids are getting tipsy. “What we’re hearing about is teenagers utilizing tampons, soak them in vodka first before using them. It gets absorbed directly into the bloodstream.”

Dog Eats $1000 in Cash, Only Returns $900.

Physicians in India discovered seven-year-old Kura Nitya cries stones from her eyes.

Hu Xiao says his job as one of China’s executioners is usually not very complicated, except for the time when a prisoner he was about to kill stood up and ran toward his loaded rifle.

Painting by fictional artist sells for $11,000. David Bowie was part of the hoax.

Europe Bans Airport X-Ray Body Scanners Amid Cancer Concerns.

European Children More Likely to Outperform Parents Than Americans.

What Iceland Teaches Us: “Let Banks Fail.”

Analysis of phallic decorations in Paleolithic art may also show evidence of the world’s first known surgery performed on a male genital organ.

Live forever? Scientists are now able to reverse old age.

Sounds Like a Winner: Voice Pitch Influences Perception of Leadership Capacity.

Evolution of Narcissism: Why We’re Overconfident, and Why It Works. Overestimating our abilities can be a strategy for success, model shows.

What triggers an Earworm - the song that’s stuck in your head?

Tortoises Don’t Catch Yawns. Sleepiness and boredom aren’t always contagious.

Buy More Experiences and Less Stuff. Experiences improve with time, resist unfavourable comparisons and are often mentally revisited (unlike stuff).

Why is it so difficult to develop drugs for cancer?

How Has Magic Johnson Survived 20 Years with HIV?

In 1960, 68%) of all Americans in their twenties were married. By 2008, just 26% of twenty-somethings were wed. How Marriage Became Optional: Cohabitation, Gender, and the Emerging Functional Norms.

Why do experts seek negative feedback to get motivated?

Did I do that? The psychology of alcohol-induced blackouts.

The strange and curious history of lobotomy.

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs. One moment, he is remembering the details of his life as an addict; the next, he is reconstructing, based on newer scientific findings, what the drugs were doing to his brain.

From 1997: How the practice of consuming heroin by ‘chasing the dragon‘ – inhaling vapours after heating the drug on tin foil – spread across the world.

The developers of “Project black mirror” claim to have developed a BCI that can control an  iphone using Siri. The developers of “Neurowear” claim to have developed a pair of wearable rabbit ears containing a BCI that moves based on your mood. Can you tell which one is an elaborate hoax?

The Economist says lie-detectors bring “disaster.” I think they exaggerate.

Do ads with facts work better than ads that appeal through emotion and aspiration?

What’s your beef? This is funny. My beef? It’s not funny, the concept sucks, and the retouching work is bad student level.

The Impact of New Media on Customer Relationships.

Demonology is not simply the study of demons, but of noise’s assault on signal.

Her article ‘Psychology Constructs the Female’ was originally published in 1968 and became an instant classic.

Vladimir Nabokov’s understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day.

Correspondence between between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx began in 1961.

Germany’s biggest Catholic-owned publishing house has been rocked by disclosures that it has been selling thousands of pornographic novels with titles such as Sluts Boarding School.

Who wrote the Bible?

Great written works from authors such as Shakespeare and Homer that you’ll never have a chance to read. The Top 10 Books Lost to Time.

Amazon Reveals the Most Well-Read Cities in America.

You wouldn’t think it by looking at the long line of Shakespeare biographies on the library shelves, but everything we know for sure about the life of the world’s most revered playwright would fit comfortably on a few pages. William Shakespeare, Gangster.

NFL great saves former L.A. gang member.

If a medical professional prescribes medication to you and that medication is known to have psychiatric side effects, are they responsible when you kill your spouse? The Utah Supreme Court is considering that very question in the case of David Ragsdale, who killed his wife almost three years ago, but says he wouldn’t have done it if not on medications.

In the summer of 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was on top of the world. Paramount Pictures had paid him an unprecedented $3 million over three years to star in 18 silent films, and he’d just signed another million-dollar contract with the studio. By the end of the week, Fatty Arbuckle was sitting in Cell No. 12 on “felony row” at the San Francisco Hall of Justice, held without bail in the slaying of a 25-year-old actress named Virginia Rappe.

Dwolla is an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely. Unlike PayPal, it doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25  whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000. We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer.

The bookstore chain that did everything wrong. Bought long leases on huge shops in second-rate locations. Bet heavily on CDs just as the music business slumped. Outsourced online sales to Amazon.

A Preliminary Analysis of Privacy On Google+. Computer scientists say there are privacy concerns over some data that Google+ shares.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs. Topics include Isaacson’s failings as an author and biographer, the technical cluelessness on display in the book, and Steve Jobs, Enemy of Progress. [audio]

A History of the word Oops. [Thanks Tim]

Brian Eno on bizarre instruments.

Hair Metal’s Proto-Punk Roots.

The decline of horse racing.

Why don’t Americans eat horse meat?

Maurizio Cattelan announced that after his Guggenheim retrospective, he will retire.

The Clock is a 24-hour long montage meticulously constructed by Marclay and sound designer Quentin Chiappetta from several thousand film scenes that feature clocks or references to time. It took two years and a team of six researchers to assemble all the footage. A work of art that tells the precise time of day, minute by minute, wherever it is shown, exactly matching the time in the real world.

Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.

Here’s a map of every McDonald’s in America.

Dolphin laughs.

Mousthair. [via copyranter]

…suggesting that brains have two distinct molecular learning mechanisms, one to learn about relationships among events in the world around them, and one to learn about the effects of their own behavior on the world.

{ Bjoern Brembs | Continue reading }

Do you really know what you want in a partner?

“People have ideas about the abstract qualities they’re looking for in a romantic partner,” said Eastwick, assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University and lead author of the study. “But once you actually meet somebody face to face, those ideal preferences for traits tend to be quite flexible.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Ruth Bernhard }

Stuart Brody, a psychology professor at the University of the West of Scotland, claims that you can discern a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm just by looking at her lips.

Vaginal Orgasm Is More Prevalent Among Women with a Prominent Tubercle of the Upper Lip

Introduction. Recent studies have uncovered multiple markers of vaginal orgasm history (unblocked pelvic movement during walking, less use of immature psychological defense mechanisms, greater urethrovaginal space). Other markers (perhaps of prenatal origin) even without obvious mechanistic roles in vaginal orgasm might exist, and a clinical observation led to the novel hypothesis that a prominent tubercle of the upper lip is such a marker.

Aims. To examine the hypothesis that a prominent tubercle of the upper lip is associated specifically with greater likelihood of experiencing vaginal orgasm (orgasm elicited by penile–vaginal intercourse [PVI] without concurrent masturbation).

{ Wiley | Continue reading | via UA }

photo { Annika von Hausswolff }

New research suggests it can take just 20 seconds to detect whether a stranger is genetically inclined to being trustworthy, kind or compassionate.

The findings reinforce that healthy humans are wired to recognize strangers who may help them out in a tough situation. They also pave the way for genetic therapies for people who are not innately sympathetic, researchers said.

“It’s remarkable that complete strangers could pick up on who’s trustworthy, kind or compassionate in 20 seconds when all they saw was a person sitting in a chair listening to someone talk,” said Aleksandr Kogan, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral student at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

{ UC Berkeley | Continue reading }

Dental health has a major effect on the overall health of an individual. A new study from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology assesses the association of dental health with other pathology on the skeleton. A number of modern studies have correlated dental diseases with other infections and pathologies, finding that individuals with poor oral health have a higher risk of mortality.

{ Bones don’t lie | Continue reading }

photo { John Vachon, Advertising, Woodbine, Iowa, 1940 }

Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 – 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is credited as being the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Using the table, he predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Daniel Everett | 2. Lars Tunbjörk, Stockbroker Tokyo, 1999 }

We examine some of the implications of the possibility that the human penis may have evolved to compete with sperm from other males by displacing rival semen from the cervical end of the vagina prior to ejaculation. (…)

During intercourse the effect of repeated thrusting would be to draw out and displace foreign semen away from the cervix. As a consequence, if a female copulated with more than one male within a short period of time this would allow subsequent males to “scoop out” semen deposited by others before ejaculating. (…)

Under conditions that raise the possibility of females engaging in extra-pair copulations (i.e., periods of separation from their partner, allegations of female infidelity), Gallup et al. (2003) also found that males appear to modify the use of their penis in ways that are consistent with the displacement hypothesis. Based on anonymous surveys of over 600 college students, many sexually active males and females reported deeper and more vigorous thrusting when in-pair sex occurred under conditions related to an increased likelihood of female infidelity.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading | PDF }

photo { Erwin Olaf }

In the story, an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called Uqbar is the first indication of Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world known as Tlön.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

{ J. L . Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, 1940 | full story | PDF }

images { 1 | 2 }

Past research, feminist theory and parental admonishments all have long suggested that when men see a woman wearing little or nothing, they focus on her body and think less of her mind. The new findings by Gray, et al. both expand and change our understanding of how paying attention to someone’s body can alter how both men and women view both women and men.

“An important thing about our study is that, unlike much previous research, ours applies to both sexes. It also calls into question the nature of objectification because people without clothes are not seen as mindless objects, but they are instead attributed a different kind of mind,” says UMD’s Gray.”

“We also show that this effect can happen even without the removal of clothes. Simply focusing on someone’s attractiveness, in essence concentrating on their body rather than their mind, makes you see her or him as less of an agent [someone who acts and plans] more of an experiencer.”

Traditional research and theories on objectification suggest that we see the mind of others on a continuum between the full mind of a normal human and the mindlessness of an inanimate object. The idea of objectification is that looking at someone in a sexual context—such as in pornography—leads people to focus on physical characteristics, turning them into an object without a mind or moral status.
However, recent findings indicate that rather than looking at others on a continuum from object to human, we see others as having two aspects of mind: agency and experience. Agency is the capacity to act, plan and exert self-control, whereas experience is the capacity to feel pain, pleasure and emotions. Various factors – including the amount of skin shown – can shift which type of mind we see in another person.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

I was working with psychotic patients at the time, and I particularly enjoyed my conversations with one of my patients, Ron, who would discourse at length on politics, art and science, and who gave cogent accounts of his brilliant, but curtailed, academic career. And then he would flip. He entered a parallel, paranoid universe; an alternative history in which he had served as Princess Anne’s bodyguard, but was now being persecuted by agents of the royal family. Why? Because he had betrayed a terrible secret: the princess had given birth to Siamese twin daughters and hidden them away. One of the brightest people I ever met, Ron was also the most resolutely insane. He refused medication, preferring to meet his madness head on. (…)

Then there are the extremely rare cases of “dicephalic parapagus” (one trunk, two heads) and “diprosopic parapagus” (one trunk, one head, two faces).

Is it possible in such cases to determine the number of persons present? Philosophers delineate various conditions of personhood, among them: humanity (membership of the human race), identity (psychological continuity over time), and individuation (factors distinguishing one person from another). Conjoined twins clearly meet the first two conditions but create confusion over the third. If bodily functions and/or brain activity are to some extent shared then, arguably, the individuation of conjoined twins is only partial. There is neither one person nor two.

{ Prospect | Continue reading }

A new study, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, suggests there’s a link between bestiality and penile cancer.

During the research, led by urologist Stenio de Cassio Zequi, 492 men from rural Brazil were examined. 118 of these men had been diagnosed with penile cancer. 45 percent of the group that suffered from penile cancer had sexual relations with animals.

Of those men who had sexual relations with animals, 59 percent reported having sex with animals for one to five years and 21 percent had been doing it for more than five years. Sexual interaction occurred as often as daily and included animals such as horses, cows, pigs, and chickens.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

The sun strikes every square meter of our planet with more than 1,360 watts of power. Half of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere or reflected back into space. 700 watts of power, on average, reaches Earth’s surface. Summed across the half of the Earth that the sun is shining on, that is 89 petawatts of power. By comparison, all of human civilization uses around 15 terrawatts of power, or one six-thousandth as much. In 14 and a half seconds, the sun provides as much energy to Earth as humanity uses in a day. (…)

It’s small wonder, then, that scientists and entrepreneurs alike are investing in solar energy technologies to capture some of the abundant power around us. Yet solar power is still a miniscule fraction of all power generation capacity on the planet. There is at most 30 gigawatts of solar generating capacity deployed today, or about 0.2 percent of all energy production. (…)

Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There’s now frequent talk of a “Moore’s law” in solar energy. (…)

The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. (…) 10 years later, in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading | via/more: Overcoming Bias }

photo { Eylül Aslan }

This week Apple introduced a new feature for the iPhone in its Apple Store app. The feature, called EasyPay, allows people to take a picture of the bar code of a product with the phone’s camera and then buy the product on the spot, using their iTunes account.

For now, use of iTunes as a traveling wallet is modest; you can use it to buy the cheaper accessories in an Apple store. The phone’s location tracker has to be on, too, so Apple can verify that you are in one of its stores.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Tina Modotti, Hands of the Puppeteer, Mexico, 1929 }

Men and women are what is termed sexually dysmorphic in terms of finger lengths. In women, the index and ring fingers are generally the same length, while in men the index finger is generally shorter.

Researchers from UC Berkeley created a stir in 2000 when they reported that lesbian women tended to have a ratio of the two finger lengths that was more typical of men. But the situation was more complicated for men. The team found no difference in the ratio between gay and straight men unless they had several older brothers — a factor which had previously been linked to being homosexual. Such men were found to have an unusually low ratio of the finger lengths.

Other recent research has suggested that men with a lower ratio have a more symmetrical face and are more attractive to women, a phenomenon known as the “sexy ratio.”

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

The longer a man’s ring finger when compared with his index finger, the longer the length of his penis, according to Korean researchers.

{ ABC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fingers can provide clues to his risk of prostate cancer, according to new research.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fourth finger has been linked to his libido.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

Men with longer ring fingers more likely to be rich.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Erica Segovia }

We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself. (…)

In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages. (…)

How many Number 1 hits did Michael Jackson have in the Netherlands? The answers were all between 1 and 10. As expected, participants gave smaller estimations when leaning left than when either leaning right or standing upright. There was no difference in their estimates between right-leaning and upright postures.

The researchers point out that body posture won’t make you answer incorrectly if you know the answer.

{ APS | Continue reading }

At the turn of the 20th century, finding a new form of radiation could put a physicist’s career on the fast track. Wilhelm Röntgen changed the world by discovering X-rays in 1895. Soon thereafter, Ernest Rutherford and Paul Villard identified three different kinds of radiation, dubbed alpha, beta, and gamma rays, emitted by radioactive compounds. In 1903 French scientist René Blondlot added to the frenzy with his announcement of N-rays, a strangely democratic form of radiation emitted by wood, iron, living organisms—just about anything at all.

Some 300 scientific papers were written about N-rays. There was just one problem: They weren’t real. A skeptical physicist named Robert Wood visited Blondlot’s lab and secretly removed a key part of his apparatus; this had no effect on Blondlot’s perception of N-rays, showing that they were purely a product of the imagination. (…)

The modern version of the search for new kinds of radiation is the search for new forces of nature. And while there may be unknown forces waiting to be discovered, we can say with great confidence that such forces must be so feeble that only a professional physicist like me would really care. (…)

According to modern physics, the world is fundamentally composed of particles interacting via forces. Over the course of the 20th century, researchers discovered many new particles interacting in many different ways. But it gradually became clear that the vast majority of such particles are merely different combinations of smaller ones, and the great variety of interactions boils down to just a few forces. When the dust settled in the 1970s, we were left with two kinds of elementary particles: quarks, which group into heavier composites like protons and neutrons; and lighter particles called leptons, like the electron and the neutrino, which can move freely without bunching into heavier combinations.

Amazingly, these particles interact through just four different forces. Two are familiar—gravity and electromagnetism. (…) The other two forces are the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. (…)

How can we be so sure there aren’t other forces that we just haven’t yet been clever enough to find? The answer is, we can look for them. We know where to look, and indeed we have looked. Other forces are not out there, at least not to any significant extent. Any new force we might someday discover must be so impotent over everyday distances that there’s no way it can affect the macroscopic world. If it could, we would already have found it.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

painting { Linnea Strid }

According to a new paper, the brains of male-to-female transexuals are no more “female” than those of men. (…) But is it so simple? (..)

Structural MRI scans were used to compare the size of various brain structures between three groups of volunteers: heterosexual men, heterosexual women and the transexuals (or “MtF”s as I will call them for short) who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and were “genetically and phenotypically males”.

There were 24 in each group, which makes it a decent sized study. None of the MtFs had started hormone treatment yet, so that wasn’t a factor, and none of the women were on hormonal contraception.

The scans showed that the non-transsexual male and female brains differed in various ways. Male brains were larger overall but women had increases in the relative volumes of various areas. Male brains were also more asymmetrical.

The key finding was that on average, the MtF brains were not like the female ones. There were some significant differences from the male brains, but they weren’t the same differences that distinguished the females from the males. (…)

There could be all kinds of chemical and microstructural differences that don’t show up on these scans.

There are lots of people with severe epilepsy, for example, whose brains clearly differ in some major way from people without epilepsy, yet they look completely normal on MRI.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

photo { Bruce Davidson }

{ Daniel Everett }