We use data from the 2002–2013 National Surveys of Family Growth to examine change across U.S. cohorts born between 1966 and 1995 in whether individuals have had sex with same-sex partners only, or with both men and women, and in whether they have a bisexual or gay identity. Adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, immigrant status, and mother’s education, we find increases across cohorts in the proportion of women who report a bisexual identity, who report ever having had sex with both sexes, or who report having had sex with women only. By contrast, we find no cohort trend for men; roughly 5 percent of men in every cohort have ever had sex with a man, and the proportion claiming a gay or bisexual attraction changed little. We speculate that this gender difference is rooted in a broader pattern of asymmetry in gender change in which departures from traditional gender norms are more acceptable for women than men.

{ Sociological Science | PDF }

photo { Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin }

Mobsters ran a fake U.S. Embassy in Ghana for 10 years, flying the flag and issuing visas for $6,000

Ransomware offers decryption keys if you infect two other people

Uber employees have access to customer trip information, and they’re using it to spy on ex-girlfriends and celebrities

Since the mid-1990s, it’s estimated that at least 100,000 Japanese men and women vanish annually

Encounters with ‘familiar strangers’ play overlooked role in human interactions

Our results indicate that sisters might be particularly tuned to select suitable perfumes for their siblings.

Facial and vocal attractiveness were found to positively correlate in women but not in men

In the present work, we investigate the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called “gaydar,” to detect who is gay.

Psychiatrists Must Face Possibility That Medications Hurt More Than They Help

Does One Armpit Smell Like the Other? [More: Improbable podcast]

The Heroin Overdose Mystery [PDF]

Most Americans like their choices in today’s information-saturated world, but 20% feel overloaded

The military mobilization that followed came to be known as the Crusades [PDF]

California man spent $1 million playing Game of War

Student Lets Thief Steal His Phone, Spies On Him For Weeks To Make This Documentary [Thanks Tim]

When you’re doing two things at once – like listening to the radio while driving – your brain organizes itself into two, functionally independent networks, almost as if you temporarily have two brains. That’s according to a fascinating new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientists Shuntaro Sasai and colleagues.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

art { Harri Peccinotti }

Remembering the past is a complex phenomenon that is subject to error. The malleable nature of human memory has led some researchers to argue that our memory systems are not oriented towards flawlessly preserving our past experiences. Indeed, many researchers now agree that remembering is, to some degree, reconstructive. Current theories propose that our capacity to flexibly recombine remembered information from multiple sources – such as distributed memory records, inferences, and expectations – helps us to solve current problems and anticipate future events. One implication of having a reconstructive and flexible memory system is that people can develop rich and coherent autobiographical memories of entire events that never happened.

In this article, we revisit questions about the conditions under which participants in studies of false autobiographical memory come to believe in and remember fictitious childhood experiences. […]

Approximately one-third of participants showed evidence of a false memory, and more than half showed evidence of believing that the [fictitious] event occurred in the past.

{ Memory | Continue reading }

Photo photo { Brooke Nipar }

{ Yves Klein, Monochrome jaune sans titre (M 8), 1957 | Roy Lichtenstein, Yellow brushstroke I, 1965 }

Nearly 40% of Americans Would Give Up Sex for a Year in Exchange for Better Online Security

Criminals can guess Visa card number and security code in just six seconds, experts find

Paper money and coins as potential vectors of transmissible disease [PDF]

The world’s magicians fought a hidden war over an ultra-secret website dedicated to stealing magic tricks

Uber Now Tracks Passengers’ Locations Even After They’re Dropped Off

At this very moment, dozens of Uber’s self-driving cars are touring San Francisco, Phoenix, and Pittsburgh

As transportation industry expert Hubert Horan will demonstrate in his four-part series, Uber has greatly oversold its case [part 1 part 2, part 3, part 4]

When judging other people, first impressions last

Why it’s hard to talk and make eye contact at the same time

Depression in Young People Affects the Stomach, Anxiety the Skin

Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time, Stanford researchers find

The purpose of this article is to clarify the distinction between the dying and sick roles

Eleven of the world’s 55 dictators are 69 years old or older and are in varying stages of declining health. At first blush, this paints a hopeful picture for democracy scholars who have documented a slow but steady authoritarian resurgence. Yet…

The findings confirmed that frequent laundering reduced mass, increased colour loss, and reduced tensile strength in the warp direction of the fabric.

A proposed theory of gravity does away with dark matter

In some areas, 98 per cent of female elephants now have no tusks, researchers have said, compared to between two and six percent born tuskless on average in the past.

Perspective Distortion in World War I Camouflage

Background notes and full credits for “The One Moment” Video by OK Go.

In a mixed-gender group, when women talk 25% of the time or less, it’s seen as being “equally balanced”. If women talk 25–50% of the time, they’re seen as “dominating the conversation”

[…]

A Californian company called Skinny Mirror sells mirrors that make you look thinner. When installed in the changing rooms of clothes shops, they can increase sales by 18%.

[…]

Twitter has enough money in the bank to run for 412 years with current losses.

{ Fluxx | Continue reading }

photo { Blaise Cepis }

Most people strongly believe they are just, virtuous, and moral; yet regard the average person as distinctly less so. This invites accusations of irrationality in moral judgment and perception — but direct evidence of irrationality is absent. Here, we quantify this irrationality and compare it against the irrationality in other domains of positive self-evaluation. […]

Virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities […] Irrational moral superiority was not associated with self-esteem. Taken together, these findings suggest that moral superiority is a uniquely strong and prevalent form of “positive illusion,” but the underlying function remains unknown.

{ Social Psychological and Personality Science | Continue reading }

photo { Weegee, Empire State Building Distortion, 1955 }

The idea behind power poses, that if you stand in a “powerful” position, broad posture, hands on hips, shoulders high and pushed back, you will suddenly feel psychologically and physiologically stronger, is intuitively appealing, especially for people without much confidence. The problem is that it’s simply not true, according to University of Pennsylvania researchers. […]

“We did find that […] if you’re a loser and you take a winner or high power pose, your testosterone decreases.”

In other words, Smith said, “people might not be able to ‘fake it until they make it,’ and in fact it might be detrimental.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

The Dress photograph, first displayed on the internet in 2015, revealed stunning individual differences in color perception. The aim of this study was to investigate if lay-persons believed that the question about The Dress colors was answerable. Past research has found that optimism is related to judgments of how answerable knowledge questions with controversial answers are. Furthermore, familiarity with a question can create a feeling of knowing the answer.

Building on these findings, 186 participants saw the photo of The Dress and were asked about the correct answer to the question about The Dress’ colors (“blue and black,” “white and gold,” “other, namely…,” or “there is no correct answer”). Choice of the alternative “there is no correct answer” was interpreted as believing the question was not answerable. This answer was chosen more often by optimists and by people who reported they had not seen The Dress before.

{ Frontiers Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Gregory Halpern }

More than one-third of California trees are dead

The relationship between pupil size and intelligence

Eye trauma in Laurel and Hardy movies

Successful removal of a wedding ring constricting an erect penis

The percent of older US adults with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, declined from 11.6 percent in 2000 to 8.8 percent in 2012.

The Medallion Fund, known for its intense secrecy, has produced about $55 billion in profit over the last 28 years. The fund almost never loses money. Its biggest drawdown in one five-year period was half a percent.

The NSA’s Spy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain Sight

Anish Kapoor is Banned From Buying the World’s Pinkest Paint

Elliptical Pool Table

Hipster nativity scene

When one draws a correlation between body mass and brain mass for living primates and extinct species of Homo, it is not humans—whose brains are three times larger than those of chimpanzees, their closest primate relative—that are an outlier. Instead, it is the great apes—gorillas and the orangutan—with brains far smaller than would be expected in relation to their body mass. We are the new normal in evolution while the great apes are the evolutionary oddity that requires explanation.

But we remain special in another way. Our 86 billion neurons need so much energy that if we shared a way of life with other primates we couldn’t possibly survive: there would be insufficient hours in the day to feed our hungry brain. It needs 500 calories a day to function, which is 25 percent of what our entire body requires.

{ New York Review of Books | Continue reading }

art { Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2006 }

The Dutch prison crisis: A shortage of prisoners

His initial work implanting the testicles of executed prisoners into older prisoners hadn’t worked out as he hoped since there weren’t enough executed criminals to go around

Facebook routinely buys stolen passwords from the black market

The rising trend in hospital presentation of foreign bodies retained in the rectum over a 5-year period

The startling rise in oral cancer in men, and what it says about our changing sexual habits

Talking Sex Robots With Warm Genitals Will Be on Sale Next Year [Thanks GG]

Crafting a “six-pack” from excess body fat

Prediction of Mortality Based on Facial Characteristics

Lexical and semantic knowledge related to food is relatively well preserved even in diseases that lead to a general decline in memory and cognition

Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda

The convex glass mirror was a Venetian invention of about 1300. By the late fourteenth century, you could find such mirrors in northern Europe.

App Lets You Buy Restaurant Leftovers for Really Cheap

Fake shopping apps are invading the iPhone

Browser extension named “Web of Trust” is caught selling users’ browsing histories

Watch a drone hack a room full of smart lightbulbs from outside the window

Introducing V.I.Poo. The new pre-poo toilet spray [Thanks GG]

Trump Election Reporting Devices will make voting great again for all Americans [more]

Grapefruit Technique [Thanks TG]

Stock trading strategies: competition is so stiff that there are only two ways to succeed: (1) insider trading, e.g. you try to obtain job interviews with small publicly traded companies, then based on information glanned during the interview, perform trades and (2) use trading strategies that professional traders will never use, e.g. stay “all cash” for several years on your trading account, and when the right event occurs, massively trade major indexes for a couple of days, then go dormant for another few years. You need sophisticated statistical models to succeed in this, with good back testing, walk-forward and robustness based on state-of-the-art cross-validation.

{ analyticbridge | Continue reading }

art { Rochelle Goldberg, The Cannibal Actif, 2015 }

The first column shows that the sun setting one hour later within a location reduces nighttime sleep by roughly 20 minutes per week. […] The second column shows that daily sunset time also affects earnings in a location. A sunset time one hour later reduces earnings by a significant 0.5%, on average.

Our analysis demonstrates that workers experiencing an earlier sunset get more sleep. […] In the short run the additional sleep largely comes at the expense of leisure, while in the long run it comes at the expense of both work and leisure. Insofar as these changes in other time uses impact worker productivity, our instrumental variables estimate of the effect of sleep on wages will also contain those effects. […]

We show that increasing short-run weekly average sleep in a location by one hour increases worker wages by 1%. Increasing long-run weekly average sleep in a location by one hour increases wages by 4.5%.

{ Time Use and the Labor Market: The Wage Returns to Sleep | PDF }

photo { Marton Perlaki }

Fertility doctor used his own sperm to inseminate patients

Human brain is predisposed to negative stereotypes, new study suggests

The Neural Bases of Disgust for Cheese: An fMRI Study

Spinach can be engineered to detect explosives, and send an email warning

Scientists identified for the first time the region of the brain that’s responsible for the “placebo effect” in pain relief

Another classic finding in psychology—that you can smile your way to happiness—just blew up.

Partners who induced high-orgasm rates were rated as more humorous, creative, warm, faithful, and better smelling

We review the history of the clitoral versus vaginal orgasm debate. A new synthesis is presented that acknowledges the enormous potential women have to experience orgasms from one or more sources of sensory input.

Polyembolokoilamania is the insertion of foreign objects into body orifices for sexual gratification

A Poker Champ Identifies Clinton and Trump’s Tells: When Trump’s challenged on things, you’ll notice sometimes his chin raises and he looks up and feigns confidence.

We reassess Achen and Bartels’ (2002, 2016) prominent claim that shark attacks influence presidential elections, and we find that the evidence is, at best, inconclusive. [PDF]

Does Technology Substitute for Nurses? [PDF]

Sunshine matters a lot to mental health; temperature, pollution, rain not so much

Does Daylight Saving Time Really Save Energy?

The new solar tax is so high that it means that, in some months, it would be cheaper for my family to not have solar panels at all.

Pasadena is going to tax subscribers of streaming video providers such as Netflix, HBO Go and Hulu

Despite its Nefarious Reputation, New Report Finds Majority of Activity on the Dark Web is Totally Legal and Mundane

Why are there so many books with “girl” in the title?

Marriage is a risky undertaking that people enter with incomplete information about their partner and their future life circumstances. A large literature has shown how new information gained from unforeseen but long-lasting or permanent changes in life circumstances may trigger a divorce.

We extend this literature by considering how information gained from a temporary change in life circumstances - in our case, a couple having a child with infantile colic - may affect divorce behavior. Although persistent life changes are known to induce divorce, we argue that a temporary stressful situation allows couples more quickly to discern the quality of their relationship, in some cases leading them to divorce sooner than they otherwise would have.

{ Demography | Continue reading }

Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context–make people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large–and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood’s approach to the concept has been, from a biologist’s perspective, hopelessly naïve. Absolute size cannot be treated in isolation; size per se affects almost every aspect of an organism’s biology. Indeed, the effects of size on biology are sufficiently pervasive and the study of these effects sufficiently rich in biological insight that the field has earned a name of its own: “scaling.” […]

Take any object–a sphere, a cube, a humanoid shape. […] If you change the size of this object but keep its shape (i.e., relative linear proportions) constant, something curious happens. Let’s say that you increase the length by a factor of two. Areas are proportional to length squared, but the new length is twice the old, so the new area is proportional to the square of twice the old length: i.e., the new area is not twice the old area, but four times the old area (2L x 2L).

Similarly, volumes are proportional to length cubed, so the new volume is not twice the old, but two cubed or eight times the old volume (2L x 2L x 2L). As “size” changes, volumes change faster than areas, and areas change faster than linear dimensions.

[…]

In The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), the hero is exposed to radioactive toxic waste and finds himself growing smaller and smaller. When he stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He’s clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.

Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he’s going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he’ll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He’ll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).

Because of these relatively larger surface areas, he’ll be losing water at a proportionally larger rate, so he’ll have to drink a lot, too.

{ Fathom Archive | Continue reading }

art { Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1960 }

more { Delusional misidentification syndromes have fascinated filmmakers and psychiatrists alike }

Over the years, multiple people have been wrongfully convicted all over the world of which some had an alibi for the moment that the crime was committed to prove their innocence but were not believed. In the criminal justice system, there appears to be an assumption that innocent people can generate an accurate and believable alibi, which means that the alibi should be correct and be supported by strong evidence. For an innocent person, it can, however, be very difficult to provide such strong evidence as also appears in the cases of wrongfully convicted people where convincing evidence is often lacking. If people were not at the crime scene but elsewhere and they can remember where they were at that time and evidence to support their alibis, it is perhaps the best chance to prove their innocence. […]

The objective of the present study was to establish the base rate of alibis and its supportive evidence of non-offenders. Despite the fact that most non-offenders report an alibi, the vast majority of their alibis do not match the criteria of the perfect alibi by the police because strong evidence is lacking. The reported evidence is more often weak, and the evidence for their alibi differs depending on when the alleged crime was committed (i.e., during the morning, afternoon, evening, or night). In addition, an alibi without supportive evidence—the least believable alibi—is most likely to be expected during the night compared to other timeframes. An alibi supported with evidence is most likely to be expected on Saturday afternoon. The results show that the perfect alibi to which police detectives compare a suspect’s alibi is an illusion because only 7% of innocent people can present strong physical evidence (i.e., video recordings), and therefore, the base rate of alibis should be taken into account when evaluating alibis.

{ Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling | Continue reading }

This paper approaches the subject of God or a supernatural being that created the universe from a mathematical and physical point of view. It sets up a hypothesis that when the God existed before the Big Bang as an unconscious being became conscious, the energy that was produced during the process became a both highly dense and infinite temperature Cosmic Egg and exploded to create the current universe. This assumption is demonstrated by mathematical formulas and physics law, which provide a solid scientific foundation for the aforementioned theory.

{ International Education and Research Journal | Continue reading }

art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Head, 1981 }