{ Ryan Matthew Smith | 5 consecutive frames from a high speed camera recording at 6200 frames per second. The bullet is from a 308 sniper rifle and was travelling roughly 2800 feet per second at the point of impact. }
For most of history, psychologists thought of the study of siblings as backwater: Parenting was important — siblings were not.
Then in the 1980s, a researcher named Robert Plomin published a surprising paper in which he reviewed the three main ways psychologists had studied siblings: physical characteristics, intelligence and personality. According to Plomin, in two of these areas, siblings were really quite similar.
Physically, siblings tended to differ somewhat, but they were a lot more similar on average when compared to children picked at random from the population. That’s also true of cognitive abilities.
“The surprise,” says Plomin, “is when you turn to personality.”
Turns out that on tests that measure personality — stuff like how extroverted you are, how conscientious — siblings are practically like strangers.
In fact, in terms of personality, we are similar to our siblings only about 20 percent of the time. Given the fact that we share genes, homes, routines and parents, this makes no sense. What makes children in the same family so different? (…)No one knows for sure, but there are three major theories.
photo { Katie Shapiro }
In 1978, the divorce rate was much higher than it is today. (…)
Americans still venerate marriage enough to want to try it. About 70% of us have been married at least once, according to the 2010 Census. (…)
41% of babies were born to unmarried moms in 2008, an eightfold increase from 50 years ago, and 25% of kids lived in a single-parent home, almost triple the number from 1960. Contrary to the stereotype, it turns out that most of the infants born to unmarried mothers are not the product of casual sexual encounters. (…)
Most of those unwed mothers said their chances of marrying the baby’s father were 50% or greater, but after five years, only 16% of them had done so and only about 20% of the couples were still cohabiting. This didn’t mean that the children didn’t live with a man, however, since about a quarter of their moms were now living with or married to a new partner.
screenshot { Michelangelo Antonioni, The Eclipse, 1962 }
There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.
There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.
And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.
photo { Wai Lin Tse }
Research conducted by a UCLA behavior lab found that women tend to avoid their fathers during periods of peak fertility, suggesting an evolutionary adaptation against inbreeding in humans. An examination of cell phone records found that ovulating women were half as likely to engage in conversation with their fathers and spoke to them for half as long than during low fertility periods. (…)
The reluctance to engage in conversations with fathers could not be attributed to an impulse to avoid all parental control during ovulation. In fact, the researchers found that women actually increased their phone calls to their mothers during this period of their cycle.
photo { Logan White }
Humans are known to play it safe in a situation when they aren’t sure of the odds, or don’t have confidence in their judgments. We don’t like to choose the unknown.
And new evidence from a Duke University study is showing that chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living primate relatives, treat the problem the same way we do.
In studies conducted at the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Republic of Congo and Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers found the apes prefer to play it safe when the odds are uncertain.
related { Neuroscience of instinct: How animals overcome fear to obtain food }
photo { Matthew Farrant }
{ Paco Peregrin }
The discovery that natural clay forms a protective shell around tiny air bubbles has profound implications for our theories about the origin of life on Earth.
One of the great mysteries in biology is the origin of cell membranes, the protective layers that completely surround the complex chemical soup in which many of life’s most delicate processes take place.
DNA and its attendant biochemical machinery can only operate in the carefully controlled environment that the cell membrane creates. But curiously, one of the important jobs that this machinery does is to create the chemical building blocks that then self-assemble into the membrane itself. So that creates a paradox: the membrane cannot form without the biochemical machinery but this will not work without the protection of the cell membrane.
The puzzle is which came first. How could cell membranes have evolved without biochemical machines to manufacture the building blocks? And alternatively, how could the biochemical machines have evolved without the crucial protection that cell membranes provide? It’s a chicken and egg problem.
In recent years, an answer has emerged. It very much looks as if the cell membranes came first and the evidence comes from numerous studies that show how simple organic molecules can self-assemble into bubble-like structures called vesicles.
Various groups have shown how these vesicles can form not only in the prebiotic soup that probably existed early in Earth’s history but also on the surface of ultracold crystals that we know to exist in interstellar space.
By this way of thinking, the vesicles provided a protective environment in which the molecules of life slowly evolved.
Today, we get another option. Anand Bala Subramaniam at Harvard University and a few pals have discovered that this process of vesicle formation also happens in a naturally occurring clay called montmorillonite. That’s the kind of stuff that might clogg your boots after a hike.
artwork { Dominic McGill }
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.
{ ScienceMag }
photo { Cyril Lagel }
Pont St. Esprit is a small town in southern France. In 1951 it became famous as the site of one of the most mysterious medical outbreaks of modern times.
As Dr’s Gabbai, Lisbonne and Pourquier wrote to the British Medical Journal, 15 days after the “incident”:
The first symptoms appeared after a latent period of 6 to 48 hours. In this first phase, the symptoms were generalized, and consisted in a depressive state with anguish and slight agitation.
After some hours the symptoms became more clearly defined, and most of the patients presented with digestive disturbances… Disturbances of the autonomic nervous system accompanied the digestive disorders-gusts of warmth, followed by the impression of “cold waves”, with intense sweating crises. We also noted frequent excessive salivation.
The patients were pale and often showed a regular bradycardia (40 to 50 beats a minute), with weakness of the pulse. The heart sounds were rather muffled; the extremities were cold… Thereafter a constant symptom appeared - insomnia lasting several days… A state of giddiness persisted, accompanied by abundant sweating and a disagreeable odour. The special odour struck the patient and his attendants.
In total, about 150 people suffered some symptoms. About 25 severe cases developed the “delirium”. 4 people died “in muscular spasm and in a state of cardiovascular collapse”; three of these were old and in poor health, but one was a healthy 25-year-old man.
The documents of Mozart’s life — letters, memoirs of friends, portraits, bureaucratic files — have long been scrutinized at a microscopic level. So when his name was discovered two decades ago in a Viennese archive from 1791, it caused a stir.
The archive showed that an aristocratic friend and fellow Freemason, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, had sued Mozart over a debt and won a judgment of 1,435 florins and 32 kreutzer in Austrian currency of the time (nearly twice Mozart’s yearly income) weeks before the composer died.
The entry was a mystery. No other information about the judgment has come to light, although scholars have generally assumed that it concerned a loan connected with a trip the two men made to Berlin.
Now a Mozart scholar, Peter Hoyt, has come up with a theory about the details: that the judgment stemmed from a loan of 1,000 thalers in Prussian currency made on May 2, 1789, the day the prince and his coach departed Berlin without Mozart, leaving him in need of money for his own transportation.
If true, the conclusion could add depth and texture to our understanding of Mozart’s anxieties over financial problems at the end of his life and of his reception during one of his last journeys.
How do you convert the whizz-bang acrobatics of Spider-Man into a live Broadway show? (…)
The show – directed by the award-winning creator of The Lion King, Julie Taymor, and with music by Bono and The Edge of U2 – had to be stopped five times to correct faulty technical equipment. (…) Reeve Carney, playing the superhero, was left swinging helplessly above the audience.
It took stage hands almost a minute to catch Carney by the feet to drag him down, and later there was some heckling.
When people are anxious they release a chemical signal that’s detectable on a subconscious level by those close to them. That’s the implication of a new study that collected sweat from people as they completed a high-rope obstacle course, and then tested the effect of that sweat on study participants as they played a gambling game.
Katrin Haegler’s team placed the sweat samples inside odourless tea bags which were attached with an elastic band to the underside of the gambling participants’ noses. For comparison, the participants were also exposed to sweat collected from non-anxious riders of an exercise bike.
When exposed to the anxious sweat, the participants took longer to decide over, but were more likely to bet on the highest risk scenarios. (…) In other words, the detection of another person’s anxiety made them more willing to take risks. Quite why this should be remains unclear.
photo { Gary Lee Boas }
Blue space: The importance of water for preference, affect, and restorativeness ratings of natural and built scenes
Although theorists have suggested that aquatic environments or “blue space” might have particular restorative potential, to date there is little systematic empirical research on this issue. (…)
Whereas aquatic features (rivers, lakes, coasts) are frequently present in visual stimuli representing natural environments they are rarely incorporated in stimuli portraying built environments. (…)
The current research collated a set of 120 photographs of natural and built scenes, half of which contained “aquatic” elements. Proportions of “aquatic”/“green”/“built” environments in each scene (e.g. 1/3rd, 2/3rds) were also standardised. (…)
As predicted, both natural and built scenes containing water were associated with higher preferences, greater positive affect and higher perceived restorativeness than those without water.
{ Science Direct }
photo { Harri Peccinotti, Pirelli Calendar, 1969 }
It’s time modern women got down on our knees for something other than a yoga class — to really worship his penis. (…) How do you practice phallus worship? Make love to his penis. Not him, his penis. (…)
Perfect BJ Prep
First: Get down on your knees, grasp that big boy and look at it. Have you ever really done that? A penis is a beautiful thing. Each one is a different work of art.
Every scene of the film utilizes the six colours of the spectrum, with manipulations of hue, value and chroma, according to the nature of the specific location. Colour in Eyes Wide Shut often has a symbolic role to play, communicating visually, for example, a psychological aspect of a character. Most of EWS was filmed using existing light sources such as the lamps that are visible in the frame. The amount of light reflecting off a shape determines the colour and vividness of its hue; and as a result of EWS using low light levels a series of optical illusions relating to hue results. Depending on the amount of light and the angle of the camera, a shape can be here one shade and then there another shade. Herein is a list of the most noticeable examples:
a. In Ziegler’s bathroom in 17, to the far left there is a smallish square (aftershave?) bottle on a shelf under a mirror. The first time the bottle becomes visible, near the beginning of the scene, the liquid inside is a distinctly high value chromatic blue. At the end of the scene, the camera angle having shifted, the liquid in the bottle, still on the left-hand side of the screen, now looks distinctly light green.
Although it’s set in New York, there are only the most fleeting glimpses of the real city, courtesy of a Second Unit.
The ‘Long Island’ mansions were found in the Home Counties, the ‘Greenwich Village’ streets constructed at Pinewood Studio or faked in corners of central London.
The exterior of the mansion of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack, replacing Harvey Keitel), is the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, East 37th Street at Madison Avenue in the real New York.
The party interior, though, where Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) attends to a guest after she ODs on a speedball, was filmed at Luton Hoo, Hotel, Golf and Spa, near Luton in Bedfordshire.
The interior of ‘Club Sonata’, the New York jazz club, is Madame JoJo’s, Brewer Street, in Soho, London.
Most of the ‘Greenwich Village’ street scenes were shot on huge and elaborately detailed sets at Pinewood (the proliferation of T-junctions is a dead giveaway), but for a few shots, London streets were dressed as New York.
{ Movie-locations.com | Continue reading }
Kubrick — born and raised in the Bronx but for many years an expatriate who refused to fly–didn’t go near Manhattan in the 90s, and the movie clearly reflects that. (…)
The film credits a lighting cameraman but no director of photography, which has led critic Kent Jones to surmise correctly that Kubrick shot most of it himself.
illustration { Lil Fuchs }
The universe seems vast, distant, and unknowable. It is, for example, unimaginably large and old: The number of stars in our galaxy alone exceeds 100 billion, and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In the eyes of the universe, we’re nothing. (…)
Clearly, our brains are not built to handle numbers on this astronomical scale. While we are certainly a part of the cosmos, we are unable to grasp its physical truths. (…) However, there actually are properties of the cosmos that can be expressed at the scale of the everyday. (…)
It turns out that there is one supernova, a cataclysmic explosion of a star that marks the end of its life, about every 50 years in the Milky Way. The frequency of these stellar explosions fully fits within the life span of a single person, and not even a particularly long-lived one. So throughout human history, each person has likely been around for one or two of these bursts that can briefly burn brighter than an entire galaxy.
On the other hand, while new stars are formed in our galaxy at a faster rate, it is still nice and manageable, with about seven new stars in the Milky Way each year. So, over the course of an average American lifetime, each of us will have gone about our business while nearly 550 new stars were born.
photo { 美撒guo }
{ Young Kyu Yoo }
