A new meta-analysis study reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.

Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image. (…)

The findings have major implications for neuroscience and mental health research because when love doesn’t work out, it can be a significant cause of emotional stress and depression. “It’s another probe into the brain and into the mind of a patient,” says Ortigue. “By understanding why they fall in love and why they are so heartbroken, they can use new therapies.” By identifying the parts of the brain stimulated by love, doctors and therapists can better understand the pains of love-sick patients.

The study also shows different parts of the brain fall for love. For example, unconditional love, such as that between a mother and a child, is sparked by the common and different brain areas, including the middle of the brain. Passionate love is sparked by the reward part of the brain, and also associative cognitive brain areas that have higher-order cognitive functions, such as body image.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

photo { Chris Verene }

{ 1. Linnea Strid | 2. Amanda Lepore by David LaChapelle }

quote { When the Key to Good Genetics Research Isn’t in the Genes | Newsweek | full story }

{ Physicists Discover Universal “Wet-Dog Shake” Rule | How fast should a wet dog rotate its body to dry its fur? Today we have an answer thanks to the pioneering work of physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. But more than that, their work generates an interesting new conundrum about the nature of shaken fur dynamics. | The Physics arXiv Blog | full story }

During World War II, Allied forces readily admitted German tanks were superior to their own. The big question for Allied forces, then, was how many tanks Germany was producing. Knowing that would help them counter the threat. Here’s how they reverse-engineered serial numbers to find out.

To solve the problem of determining production numbers, Allied forces initially tried conventional intelligence gathering: spying, intercepting and decoding transmissions and interrogating captured enemies.

Using these methods, the Allies deduced that the German military industrial complex churned out around 1,400 tanks each month from June 1940 through September 1942. That just didn’t seem right.

To put that number in context, Axis forces used 1,200 tanks during the Battle of Stalingrad, an eight month battle that resulted in almost two million casualties. That meant the estimate of 1,400 most likely was too high.

Obviously skeptical of that result, the Allies looked for other methods of estimation. That’s when they found a critical clue: serial numbers.

Allied intelligence noticed each captured tank had a unique serial number. With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production. Using this data, the Allies created a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production. They used it to estimate that the Germans produced 255 tanks per month between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1942.

Turns out the serial-number methodology was spot on. After the war, internal German data put der Führer’s production at 256 tanks per month—one more than the estimate.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

{ Whitest Boy Alive, Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix), 2008 }

Petty does not intend to acquire a Leibovitz. Not one of the 10 “master sets” of 157 of her prints that have been offered privately at an asking price of more than $3m per set; not even a single photo. “No,” he says firmly. “I nearly bought her portrait of the Queen but then I decided against it. She is obviously well-regarded but it is a distinctively American taste, her style of photography.”

It is only one collector’s view but it is a straw in a wind that has been blowing fiercely against Leibovitz, who is struggling to repair her finances, having built up multi-million-dollar debts amid a tangle of personal, professional and property troubles. The woes of one of the world’s highest-paid photographers have mesmerised the media and the art world.

Her troubles emerged publicly a year ago when she was sued by Art Capital, a New York firm that lent her $24m against collateral including her three houses in Greenwich Village and her photographic portfolio. The suit, which she described at the time as “harassment” and was subsequently settled, claimed the right to enter her homes to appraise assets that could be sold to repay the debt.

Leibovitz had been introduced to Art Capital by Ken Starr, a financial adviser whose clients included Hollywood celebrities such as Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese. Starr is now in jail and has pleaded guilty to diverting tens of millions of dollars from his clients’ accounts to his own. Last April, Leibovitz was bought out of the Art Capital arrangement by Colony Capital, a Californian private equity fund, giving her a breathing space.

The Leibovitz story, however, is more than a tale of a photographer who got absorbed into the high-spending world of the people she portrays. It is a reflection of something unexpected – that, despite all her celebrity and talent, Leibovitz lacks earning power as an artist.

If she could sell her prints in galleries or at auction for as much as former fashion and society photographers such as Herb Ritts, Bettina Rheims and Richard Avedon – let alone contemporary artists who work in photography, such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Andreas Gursky and Gilbert & George – her financial worries would ease.

So far, she has not. The most that one of her photographs has fetched at public auction, according to Artnet, the online auction house, is £31,200. That was paid in 2005 for a signed print of a 1986 photograph of the (now dead) artist Keith Haring, naked and daubed with paint. Most of her prints auctioned this year have fetched in the single-figure thousands of dollars, and some in the hundreds. (…)

Leibovitz has one great advantage over the paparazzi – access to people who spend much of their lives trying to avoid being photographed. The Queen only gave her 25 minutes but Leibovitz usually demands two days, or at least half-days, of her subjects’ time, and spends hours on the tiniest details. Her subjects open up to her because she gets close and wears them down.

“Access is amazing – the amount of time you are given with someone. When people relax in front of you then all kinds of magic can happen,” says Hoppen. “If you have a day with Brad Pitt then potentially you can take a great photo, whereas if he walks past you in the street and you grab a picture with your phone, it is not going to happen.”

Leibovitz thus has the potential to do what Avedon and Penn did – to become as highly valued as an artist as a commercial photographer. The fact that she has not achieved it, so far at least, is because of something more vital than access, maybe even talent. It is something that has bedevilled the photography world from the technology’s earliest days. She lacks rarity value. (…)

Photographs were made to multiply – the point of the technology is that a negative can be reproduced. “Rarity is essential and it is something that photography does not naturally have,” says Boloten. “You can print thousands of the things and a collector will ask: ‘Why am I paying a lot of money for a print when Picasso only painted one of each?’” (…)

Photographers who are alive present a bigger challenge in terms of scarcity. At 61, Leibovitz has plenty of her career left and she is known as a prodigiously hard worker, constantly adding to her portfolio. Prices for work of photographers such as Ritts and Mapplethorpe increased in the years following their deaths because that placed an unambiguous limit on supply.

Galleries have tried to solve this through editioning – limiting the number of reproductions of a negative to 10 or 15 high-quality signed prints, preferably made just after the photograph was taken. The dealers who represent photographers and have exclusive rights to sell their prints have become experts in curbing the market’s tendency towards over-supply.

“There were huge editions in the 1960s but the market has gone in a totally different direction,” says Alex Novak, a dealer in Pennsylvania. “The vast majority of prints are now made in very limited editions, and that has helped the contemporary market to remain fairly stable. It crashed and burned in past recessions because there were too many prints. ”

Calculating the optimal supply is a fine art in itself, since galleries want there to be enough liquidity for prints of any photo to change hands fairly frequently – which would be impossible if there were only one. Galleries often base their prices on the last recorded auction price and, especially in a rising market, want a recent reference point.

All of this planning over decades to raise the profile of photography and place limits on supply seems to be working. Photography accounts for a tiny proportion of the auction market – 2 per cent of sales in 2009, according to ArtTactic – but it has attracted growing investor interest. There are now several dedicated art funds, including the Tosca Photography Fund and the Art Photography Fund.

Not only did the total value of the contemporary photography market rise by 285 per cent between 1993 and 2008, according to Art Market Research, but it has been more resilient than contemporary art in the post-2008 downturn.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

photo { Larry Clark, Jack & Lynn Johnson, Oklahoma City, 1973 }

{ Whitehouse.gov }

One chapter of the book is dedicated to movement. Schwartz cites an important study which found that vigorous exercise three times a week for half an hour or forty-five minutes reduced symptoms of depression as effectively as antidepressants. (…)

Is exercise the solution to depression, then? Of course not. While the findings are truly impressive, there were many who had recovered with medication alone or with a combination of the two. There is always a tendency to take the main finding of a study and proclaim it to be the new truth – but neither life nor science is that simple. However, the study is something that we need to seriously think about, or better yet, try out ourselves. One thing is for certain: the benefits of exercise far outweigh its drawbacks.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

painting { Jason Shawn Alexander }

{ May 2, 1975: Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, left, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward hold a news conference in an old Pacific Electric tunnel to propose an 80-mile light-rail system that would use the former tunnel for part of its downtown connection. The project was never built. | LA Times | Continue reading }

{ Justin Bieber Found To Be Cleverly Disguised 51-Year-Old Pedophile | watch the video }

What they found was that (…) every neuron reacts differently to the same input. (…) This all makes a lot of sense, because in this way, each neuron looks at the same stimulus from a slightly different perspective, enhancing the amount of information the animal can get from a single stimulus. From the point of view of information coding, this is an advantage, that comes with a disadvantage: some neurons will create ‘phantom’ information, information that isn’t there. (…)

I’ve been thinking about the conundrum of ‘noise in the brain’ before and it has been very suggestive to argue that the variability in neural activity is not just random, pernicious noise but has some functional significance–a significance which we don’t quite understand, yet.

The results by Padmanabhan and Urban provide further evidence that the highly variable activity of neurons is not ‘noise’ in a complex system, but actively generated by the brain not only to increase information capacity, but also to behave unpredictably, creatively and spontaneously in an unpredictable, dangerous and competitive world.

It also means that adding information to a sensory stimulus may be a disadvantage in terms of information coding, but it wasn’t eliminated by evolution because it prevented animals from becoming too predictable - a classic cost/benefit trade-off.

{ Björn Brembs | Continue reading }

collage { John Stezaker, Untitled, 1977-8 }

Behavioral studies suggest that thinking about revenge stimulates the brain but that following through doesn’t improve mood.

Most of us have revenge fantasies, human behavior researchers say, and nearly everyone believes that punishing someone who did him wrong would feel tremendously satisfying. But new studies suggest the reality of revenge is far different. Acting on vengeful thoughts often isn’t nearly as gratifying as expected and — surprisingly — can even make people feel worse.

Still, the delicious pleasure anticipated from taking revenge is such a powerful drive that it appears to be hard-wired in the brain.

{ Chicago Tribune | Continue reading }

photo { SW▲MPY }

Glover was new to the mortgage business. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t held a steady job in years. (…) As a loan officer at Ameriquest, Glover worked on commission. He knew the only way to earn the six-figure income Ameriquest had promised him was to come up with tricks for pushing deals through the mortgage-financing pipeline that began with Ameriquest and extended through Wall Street’s most respected investment houses.

Glover and the other twentysomethings who filled the sales force at the downtown L.A. branch worked the phones hour after hour, calling strangers and trying to talk them into refinancing their homes with high-priced “subprime” mortgages. It was 2003, subprime was on the rise, and Ameriquest was leading the way. The company’s owner, Roland Arnall, had in many ways been the founding father of subprime, the business of lending money to home owners with modest incomes or blemished credit histories. He had pioneered this risky segment of the mortgage market amid the wreckage of the savings and loan disaster and helped transform his company’s headquarters, Orange County, California, into the capital of the subprime industry. Now, with the housing market booming and Wall Street clamoring to invest in subprime, Ameriquest was growing with startling velocity.

Up and down the line, from loan officers to regional managers and vice presidents, Ameriquest’s employees scrambled at the end of each month to push through as many loans as possible, to pad their monthly production numbers, boost their commissions, and meet Roland Arnall’s expectations. Arnall was a man “obsessed with loan volume,” former aides recalled, a mortgage entrepreneur who believed “volume solved all problems.” Whenever an underling suggested a goal for loan production over a particular time span, Arnall’s favorite reply was: “We can do twice that.” Close to midnight Pacific time on the last business day of each month, the phone would ring at Arnall’s home in Los Angeles’s exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood, a $30 million estate that once had been home to Sonny and Cher. On the other end of the telephone line, a vice president in Orange County would report the month’s production numbers for his lending empire. Even as the totals grew to $3 billion or $6 billion or $7 billion a month—figures never before imagined in the subprime business—Arnall wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. “He would just try to make you stretch beyond what you thought possible,” one former Ameriquest executive recalled. “Whatever you did, no matter how good you did, it wasn’t good enough.”

Inside Glover’s branch, loan officers kept up with the demand to produce by guzzling Red Bull energy drinks, a favorite caffeine pick-me-up for hardworking salesmen throughout the mortgage industry. Government investigators would later joke that they could gauge how dirty a home-loan location was by the number of empty Red Bull cans in the Dumpster out back. Some of the crew in the L.A. branch, Glover said, also relied on cocaine to keep themselves going, snorting lines in washrooms and, on occasion, in their cubicles.

The wayward behavior didn’t stop with drugs. Glover learned that his colleague’s art work wasn’t a matter of saving a borrower the hassle of coming in to supply a missed signature. The guy was forging borrowers’ signatures on government-required disclosure forms, the ones that were supposed to help consumers understand how much cash they’d be getting out of the loan and how much they’d be paying in interest and fees. Ameriquest’s deals were so overpriced and loaded with nasty surprises that getting customers to sign often required an elaborate web of psychological ploys, outright lies, and falsified papers. “Every closing that we had really was a bait and switch,” a loan officer who worked for Ameriquest in Tampa, Florida, recalled. ” ‘Cause you could never get them to the table if you were honest.” At companywide gatherings, Ameriquest’s managers and sales reps loosened up with free alcohol and swapped tips for fooling borrowers and cooking up phony paperwork. What if a customer insisted he wanted a fixed-rate loan, but you could make more money by selling him an adjustable-rate one? No problem. Many Ameriquest salespeople learned to position a few fixed-rate loan documents at the top of the stack of paperwork to be signed by the borrower. They buried the real documents—the ones indicating the loan had an adjustable rate that would rocket upward in two or three years—near the bottom of the pile. Then, after the borrower had flipped from signature line to signature line, scribbling his consent across the entire stack, and gone home, it was easy enough to peel the fixed-rate documents off the top and throw them in the trash.

At the downtown L.A. branch, some of Glover’s coworkers had a flair for creative documentation. They used scissors, tape, Wite-Out, and a photocopier to fabricate W-2s, the tax forms that indicate how much a wage earner makes each year. It was easy: Paste the name of a low-earning borrower onto a W-2 belonging to a higher-earning borrower and, like magic, a bad loan prospect suddenly looked much better. Workers in the branch equipped the office’s break room with all the tools they needed to manufacture and manipulate official documents. They dubbed it the “Art Department.”

{ Michael W. Hudson, How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis | Continue reading }

image { Peter Garfield }

So why do women live longer than men? One idea is that men drive themselves to an early grave with all the hardship and stress of their working lives. If this were so, however, then in these days of greater gender equality, you might expect the mortality gap would vanish or at least diminish. Yet there is little evidence that this is happening. Women today still outlive men by about as much as their stay-at-home mothers outlived their office-going fathers a generation ago.

Furthermore, who truly believes that men’s work lives back then were so much more damaging to their health than women’s home lives? Just think about the stresses and strains that have always existed in the traditional roles of women: a woman’s life in a typical household can be just as hard as a man’s.

Indeed, statistically speaking, men get a much better deal out of marriage than their wives—married men tend to live many years longer than single men, whereas married women live only a little bit longer than single women. So who actually has the easier life?

It might be that women live longer because they develop healthier habits than men—for example, smoking and drinking less and choosing a better diet. But the number of women who smoke is growing and plenty of others drink and eat unhealthy foods. In any case, if women are so healthy, why is it that despite their longer lives, women spend more years of old age in poor health than men do? The lifestyle argument therefore does not answer the question either.

As an experimental gerontologist, I approach this issue from a wider biological perspective, by looking at other animals. It turns out that the females of most species live longer than the males. This phenomenon suggests that the explanation for the difference within humans might lie deep in our biology.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

How much do you confide in friends?

In the United States, friends often share intimate details of their lives and problems, but in Japan this degree of self-disclosure between friends is much less common. A new study published in Psychological Science by an American researcher living in Japan suggests that this difference may be due to distinct social systems, in particular the extent to which there are opportunities to make new friends in each culture.

{ APS | Continue reading }

In 1904, King Gillette — who names their kid King? — received two patents on razors, blades, and the combination of the two. As the patents make clear, Gillette had a clear vision of the markets that he would create: “Hence,” stated the patent application, “I am able to produce and sell my blades so cheaply that the user may buy them in quantities and throw them away when dull without making the expense … as great as that of keeping the prior blades sharp.”

But Gillette did more than invent a new razor and a new blade. As Chris Anderson notes in his recent business bestseller, Free, Gillette invented an entire business strategy, one that’s still invoked in business schools and implemented today across many industries — from VCRs and DVD players to video game systems like the Xbox and now ebook readers. It’s pretty simple: invest in an installed base by selling a product at low prices or even giving them away, then sell a related product at high prices to recoup the prior investment. King Gillette launched us down this road.

Or did he?

{ Randy Picker/Harvard Business School | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Half Face with Collar, 1963 }

Some astronauts report losing their fingernails on spacewalks because of bulky gloves that cut off circulation and chafe against their hands. To avoid this inconvenience, a couple astronauts have taken to ripping off their own fingernails before reaching orbit.

{ PopSci | Continue reading }

Of the nearly 500 planets known beyond our solar system, nearly all appear to be gas-shrouded giants like Jupiter or Neptune, and most are either too hot or too cold to harbor life-giving liquid water. In contrast, with only three to four times the mass of Earth, Gliese 581g is probably mostly made of rock, and is at the proper distance from its star to have lakes, seas, even oceans of water upon its surface. If confirmed by follow-up observations, Gliese 581g will be the most promising potentially habitable planet discovered so far.

{ Seed | Continue reading }

photo { Li Wei }

The Return of the Three-Martini Lunch

If you have a mixologist making complicated drinks from esoteric-sounding ingredients, people don’t even feel guilty that they’re drinking. Jon Kamen, chairman and CEO of New York-based production company @radical.media, doesn’t. He only goes out to lunch once a week, but when he does, he often goes to EN Japanese Brasserie and orders a drink, such as their combination of Japanese liquor shochu and oolong tea. “They’ve created certain cocktails that I don’t look at as a drink so much as a complement to the meal I’m having,” he says.

{ Businessweek | Continue reading }

photo { Sarah Lucas }