It’s hard to imagine Apple’s App store — 50 million users, 400,000 apps, 10 billion downloads — being threatened with extinction. (…) But we know that empires crumble: what’s interesting is how.

Right now pundits are focused on the threat of Android. (…) Android’s not the issue, however.

The real threat are web apps. The kind that will download to your device the moment you open then, allowing you offline access, whether they’re news, games, email or some other utility. If you don’t believe they’ll work — and eliminate dependencies on plugins outside of open web standards, like flash — go download a free copy of Angry Birds for Google Chrome and try disconnecting from your local network. (…)

Or try opening Nytimes.com/chrome in Firefox, any webkit-based browser or, of course, Google Chrome, and you’ll see what the future holds.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Apple has entered the final stages of negotiations with the major record labels and music publishers for a service that will allow people to upload and store their music on the Web and listen to it on smartphones, tablets or computers — so-called cloud-based music.

Amazon and Google introduced similar services weeks earlier. Apple’s service, though, is expected to be easier to use, and to find a ready market in the 200 million people who have iTunes accounts. (…)

“I don’t think it is something they will have to give away for free, at least initially,” said Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray. Mr. Munster said the service could be bundled with MobileMe.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Laurent La Torpille }

related { Offlining is a growing response to what is now widely recognised as a first-world social problem: we’re all addicted to the net. | And: Is Netflix Reducing Illicit File Sharing? }

Powerful people smile less, interrupt others, and speak in a louder voice. When people do not respect the basic rules of social behavior, they lead others to believe that they have power, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science. (…) Acting rudely also leads people to see power.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Individuals who took coffee from another person’s can (Study 1), violated rules of bookkeeping (Study 2), dropped cigarette ashes on the floor (Study 3), or put their feet on the table (Study 4) were perceived as more powerful than individuals who did not show such behaviors.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

{ Zdob si Zdub of Moldova perform So Lucky during the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest }

A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature ; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.

{ Spinoza, The Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 | Continue reading }

photo { Louis Porter }

{ via Clayton Cubitt }

In his talk, Gregory Longmore of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, outlined some of the complex signaling pathways responsible for metastasis. Somehow, cancer cells break off from a primary tumor, break through the layer of cells that separates them from the bloodstream, and then spread to new sites.

Of the facts and figures Longmore cited, two struck me especially. Ninety percent of cancer patients are killed by metastases, not primary tumors. Ninety-nine percent of cancer cells that make their way into the bloodstream die. “Metastasis is incredibly inefficient,” he said.

{ Charles Day/Physics Today | Continue reading | More: Oncogenes }

Charles Darwin suffered from a persistent, debilitating illness for most of his adult life with a wide range of bizarre symptoms. Attacks of nausea and vomiting were his most distressing complaint but he also experienced headaches, abdominal pains, ‘lumbago’, palpitations and chest pain, numbness and tingling in the fingers, sweating, heat and cold sensitivity, flushing and swelling of his face and extremities, eczema, recurrent boils, attacks of acute anxiety, a sensation of dying and hysterical crying.

Apart from these major symptoms Darwin also occasionally vomited blood, he developed dental decay and skin pigmentation. (…) Darwin also had mild dyslexia. (…) With the dyslexia there is a frequent association of amusica – tone deafness, and Darwin was tone deaf.

{ Butterflies and wheels | Continue reading }

photo { Sanna Kannisto }

A link between late-night eating and weight gain has been debated for years. But though many dieters suspect a connection, it has not been borne out in studies.

Most of the research on the matter has been carried out in animals, and with mixed results. A 2005 study of primates at Oregon Health & Science University found that late-night meals did not lead to extra weight gain; whether consumed at 10 a.m. or 10 p.m., a calorie was just a calorie.

But a study on adult men and women, published in April in the journal Obesity, has added support to the claim that eating late does have a greater effect on the waistline. (…)

Eating at night may in fact lead to more weight gain, though it’s not clear why.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Researchers have found that while cell phone use appears to increase the level of testosterone circulating in the body, it may also lead to low sperm quality and a decrease in fertility. (…)

More in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility.

{ Queen’s University | Continue reading }

Friday, August 12, 1988. On the sidewalk outside 57 Great Jones Street, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in the burning sun. (…) In the months before his death, Basquiat claimed he was doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

images { Odette England }

{ Juliana Santacruz Herrera, Knitted street interventions }

One group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they’ve taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The robots, called LingoDroids, are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don’t share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn’t speak their language.”

{ Slashdot | Continue reading }

artwork { Thomas Schütte, United Enemies, 1994-95 | fimo, fabric, wood glass and PVC }

Science knows approximately how, and when, our Earth will end. In about five billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen, which will upset its self-regulating equilibrium; in its death-throes it will swell, and this planet will vaporize. Before that, we can expect, at unpredictable intervals measured in tens of millions of years, bombardment by dangerously large meteors or comets. Any one of these impacts could be catastrophic enough to destroy all life, as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago nearly did. In the nearer future, it is pretty likely that human life will become extinct – the fate of almost all species that have ever lived.

{ Richard Dawkins/Washington Post | Continue reading }

artwork { Dan Holdsworth, Blackout 08, 2010 }

related:

This paper considers what motivates people to improve themselves. Across four studies the authors find that benign envy stimulates better performance. They reveal that admiration feels good but does not lead to a motivation to improve oneself. This has been labelled happy self-surrender, a feeling that the other is so good at something that one can only look with appreciation at how good the other is.

Benign envy (not malicious envy), on the other hand, feels frustrating but it does lead to a motivation to improve.

{ Why Envy Outperforms Admiration | Continue reading }

Who is harder to raise, sons or daughters? I’ve asked by a show of hands and with iClickers, over the years, and the room of 750 is almost unanimous: daughters are harder to raise. (…)

So then I show them this.

It is a graph of maternal longevity based on the number of sons or daughters they have. This data was based on a historical population from Finland from 1640-1870 using church records (Helle et al 2002). As you can see, the more sons mothers bear, the shorter their lifespans.

{ Context and Variation | Continue reading }

Whether in Greek theaters or Roman courts, buying people to clap for you was once common practice. In fourth century BC Athens, for example, comic playwright Philemon defeated his contemporary Menander in theatrical competitions, not because he was better (he wasn’t) but because of hired hands that swayed the judges. The Roman emperor Nero went further, establishing an entire school of applause and keeping in his train a claque of five thousand; all soldiers, they would sing Nero’s praises before subjecting the citizenry to His Majesty’s stagecraft.

The claque was revived in sixteenth-century France, when poet Jean Daurat bought tickets to his own plays and gave them to people on the condition that they like it loudly. By the early 1800s, the claque racket in Paris had reached boutique proportions: one could shop for rieurs (to laugh), pleureurs (to cry), or commissaires (to nudge neighboring audience members about upcoming good scenes).

{ Laphams Quarterly | Continue reading }

{ The Evolution of Lids| full story }

Television crime shows have helped popularize autopsies, but in reality these postmortem exams are becoming rarer every year. Today, hospitals perform autopsies on only about 5 percent of patients who die, down from roughly 50 percent in the 1960s.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Meat, 1962 }

Yes, there’s a correlation between early sexual initiation (this study defined this as 16 or younger) and later sexual risk-taking. But, as a causal factor for sexual risk-taking—multiple partners, drug and alcohol use during sexual encounters, or unprotected intercourse—“it doesn’t really matter whether you delay sex or not.” (…)

The researchers looked at more than 1,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins. (…) Numerous runs of the data led to the same conclusion: “You take two twins who share 100 percent of their genes. One has sex at 15 and one at 20. You compare them on risk-taking at 24—and they don’t differ.”

So why does someone end up sexually promiscuous? The researchers think it’s a combination of genetic factors—such as the strong inherited tendency to be impulsive or anti-social – and environmental ones, such as poverty or troubled family life.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Mapplethorpe, Calla Lily, 1987 }