Normal aging is known to be accompanied by loss of brain substance.
Machine learning was used to estimate brain ages in meditators and controls.
At age 50, brains of meditators were estimated to be 7.5 years younger than that of controls.
These findings suggest that meditation may be beneficial for brain preservation.
image { Jonathan Puckey }
London toilet for rent at £3,000 per month
New York Democrats claim Republican-controlled Senate won’t give them enough toilet paper
The states with the highest life expectancies for individuals in the bottom income quartile (>80.6 years) were California, New York, and Vermont. The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014
What The Hell Happened In East New York?
We study the effect of the illicit drug business on terrorism for a sample of 58 countries for the 1984–2007 period. We find that in the long run, higher drug prices are associated with more terrorism
Homo erectus differs from earlier hominins in having relatively smaller teeth, reduced chewing muscles, weaker maximum bite force capabilities, and a relatively smaller gut. This paradoxical combination of increased energy demands along with decreased masticatory and digestive capacities is hypothesized to have been made possible by adding meat to the diet.
The Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome
My terrifying – and valuable – time in a psychiatric ward
According to film mythology, the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted an experiment in which he combined a close-up of an actor’s neutral face with three different emotional contexts: happiness, sadness, and hunger. The viewers of the three film sequences reportedly perceived the actor’s face as expressing an emotion congruent with the given context.
It is not clear, however, whether or not the so-called “Kuleshov effect” really exists. The original film footage is lost and recent attempts at replication have produced either conflicting or unreliable results.
The current paper describes an attempt to replicate Kuleshov’s original experiment using an improved experimental design. In a behavioral and eye tracking study, 36 participants were each presented with 24 film sequences of neutral faces across six emotional conditions. For each film sequence, the participants were asked to evaluate the emotion of the target person in terms of valence, arousal, and category. The participants’ eye movements were recorded throughout.
The results suggest that some sort of Kuleshov effect does in fact exist.
[Researchers found that] when one is actively looking for an event with loose probabilistic and temporal expectancies on its occurrence, the awareness of otherwise unnoticed events improves.
This finding provides new insights on the attentional mechanisms behind the initial stages of serendipity.
The Lunar Flag Assembly (LFA) was a kit containing a flag of the United States designed to be planted by astronauts on the Moon during the Apollo program. Seven such flag assemblies were sent to the Moon, six of which were planted.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Do the Apollo flags remain where they were planted or have they fallen or have they disintegrated after four decades of exposure the lunar environment? […] The (Apollo 11’s) flag is probably gone. Buzz Aldrin saw it knocked over by the rocket blast as he and Neil Armstrong left the moon 39 summers ago. […]
Intuitively, experts mostly think it highly unlikely the Apollo flags (See Platoff’s article Where No Flag Has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon for details), could have endured the 42 years of exposure to vacuum, about 500 temperature swings from 242 F during the day to -280 F during the night, micrometeorites, radiation and ultraviolet light, some thinking the flags have all but disintegrated under such an assault of the environment. […]
The high-resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera of the Apollo sites enable us to see if any of the flags still cast shadows. […] Combined with knowledge of the Apollo site maps which show where the flag was erected relative to the Lander, long shadows cast by the flags at three sites - Apollo 12, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17 - show that the these flags are still “flying”, held aloft by the poles.
NASA has finally answered a long-standing question: all but one of the six American flags on the Moon are still standing up. The only problem is that they aren’t American flags anymore. They are all white.
Scientists To Open Mass-Cloning Factory in China This Year To Clone Cows, Pets, Humans The ambitious and futuristic facility hopes to be mass-producing one million cows every 12 months by 2020.
Renter says security camera inside apartment is an invasion of privacy
New York taxi drivers to be banned from flirting with or ejaculating on passengers
Coffee consumption linked to lower risk of colorectal cancer
Touching a robot can elicit physiological arousal in humans
TSA paid $1.4 million for Randomizer app that chooses left or right
Interactive shop in virtual reality for futuristic clothing
A tampon alternative you can wear during sex
Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism No. 1
Secret Rooms Installed Inside Abandoned Manhole Covers on the Streets of Milan
Street Artist and City Worker Have Year Long Exchange on a Red Wall in London
“you only have 100k because of ur url.”
“uh no i had 93k before i got this url so excuse u.”
art { Ellsworth Kelly, Diagonal lines, 1951 | James Marshall, Untitled 7, 2015 }
Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to understand the perspectives, mental states and beliefs of others in order to anticipate their behaviour and is therefore crucial to social interactions.
Although fMRI has been widely used to establish the neural networks implicated in ToM, little is known about the timing of ToM-related brain activity.
We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the neural processes underlying ToM, as MEG provides very accurate timing and excellent spatial localization of brain processes. We recorded MEG activity during a false belief task, a reliable measure of ToM, in twenty young adults (10 females). […]
Our findings extend the literature by demonstrating the timing and duration of neural activity in the main regions involved in the “mentalizing” network, showing that activations related to false belief in adults are predominantly right lateralized and onset around 100 ms.
still { Total Recall, 1990 }
The air-support division of the Los Angeles Police Department operates out of a labyrinthine building on Ramirez Street in the city’s downtown, near the Los Angeles River. […]
The division began with a single helicopter in 1956, and it now has 19 in all, augmented by a King Air fixed-wing plane. The aircrews operate in a state of constant readiness, with at least two helicopters in flight at any given time for 21 hours of every day. A ground crew is suited up and on call for the remaining three, between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. On weekends, considered peak hours, the number of airborne helicopters goes up to three, although in a crisis the division might send as many as four or five “ships” up at once. […]
The heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport, Burdette pointed out, has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city: Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes.
painting { Michael Chow }
Katy Perry, Billy Joel and Rod Stewart are asking the U.S. government to reform provisions of copyright law that they say enrich large technology companies at their expense.
The three are among the more than 100 artists and managers who have filed petitions asking the U.S. Copyright Office to amend parts of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The office has said it will study the effects of so-called safe harbor provisions in the law, which shield services such as YouTube from liability when users upload copyrighted material without permission. […]
The industry is stepping up its fight as streaming becomes a more significant source of sales. Revenue from such services increased 29 percent last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, with most of that growth coming from paid subscription services that license music. Sales of CDs, along with online purchases of music, are shrinking.
painting { Dan Witz }
Scientists figured out how to steal any 3D printed product just from the sounds the printer make
Demolition company knocks down wrong house, blames Google Maps
Unfamiliar with irony, Swiss bankers are complaining of a “lack of transparency”
Exposed to a deluge of digital photos, we’re feeling the psychological effects of image overload.
The paradox of fiction: Emotional response toward fiction and the modulatory role of self-relevance.
What Engineers Can Learn From the Design of the Penis
This Negative Facial Expression Is ‘Universal’
How many decimals of pi do we actually need?
Poker Theory and Analytics is a graduate-level MIT course taught by Kevin Desmond, a former pro player and Morgan Stanley analyst. The school offers the course online, meaning video lectures, assignments, and class notes are available to anyone for free.
Welcome to the Hotel Antartica
Japan invents electric ’salt-flavoured fork’
Scientists Slowly Reintroducing Small Group Of Normal, Well-Adjusted Humans Into Society
MasterCard and Visa didn’t make, or even look, for profits for decades. MasterCard started as a not-for-profit membership association, in 1966, and Visa did the same, in 1971. Both associations managed their brands and ran the clearing and settlement systems for banks that issued cards or helped merchants accept cards. These card networks were allowed to charge their members just enough to cover cost and provide working capital. […]
Then the banks decided to turn the associations into for-profit companies, IPO them, and cash out. MasterCard IPO’d in 2006, and Visa followed two years later. Now they are very focused on making money. […]
Many other multisided platforms haven’t made the leap to making money. […] Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) are multisided platforms that help members reach agreements over a standard (For example, mobile carriers, handset makers, chip providers and many others have to agree on a common standard — like 4G — for what they do to work together.) The SSO usually publishes a standard and disseminates it at low cost or even for free. That standard may then become a platform for many firms that produce complementary products and their customers.
Hackers Modify Water Treatment Parameters by Accident
Maserati Recalls 28,000 Cars For Stuck Accelerators
No more washing: Nano-enhanced textiles clean themselves with light
Male preference for female pubic hair: an evolutionary view
Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong
How does genetics explain non-identical identical twins?
The psychology of shoppers and return policies: More leniency on time limits is associated with a reduction — not an increase — in returns. [Washington Post]
Banned From Amazon for Returning 37 Things
Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups.
Some security experts say that you should block online ads just to stay safe
Researchers uncover the origins of fairy tales through evolutionary biology’s methods
How Gender Neutral Is Guys, Really?
AI-written novel passes literary prize screening
Skateboarding is, among other things, a marriage of chaos and discernment. Tricks—whether a Slappy, No Comply, or Caballerial, a backside Smith grind, switch Tre flip, Madonna, Indy Nosebone, or McTwist—are exactly defined, and there’s a shared world of aesthetics, but tastes vary widely, and it’s understood that the most interesting skaters will always find ways to undo expectations.
Madonna busted for posting fake signs to hoard NYC parking spaces
Drone Gives 360 Degree View of Rainbow [Thanks Tim]
Percentage of scientific paper titles containing “observations” or “data” in the past century
Consuming alcohol, for example, really can make everyone else appear more physically attractive. […]
Also, playing hard-to-get almost never works. […]
Despite what many people think, opposites very rarely attract. In fact, decades of research has shown that attraction is most likely to be sparked when two people perceive themselves as being very similar to each other.
264 right-handed, 246 mixed-handed and 360 left-handed students were requested to indicate on five maps of cinema halls what place they would choose. All three handedness groups showed a preference for the right and a corresponding directional bias towards the left space. However, they differed significantly from each other on the magnitude of this bias which was most pronounced in right and less in left handers. […]
It is hypothesized that right, mixed and left handers differ in a large number of behavioral choices and strategies, modeled by cerebrally lateralized mechanisms and that the cinema seating preference is only one of them.
still { Jean-Luc Godard, Nouvelle vague, 1990 }
Many situations in our lives require us to make relatively quick decisions as whether to approach or avoid a person or object, buy or pass on a product, or accept or reject an offer. These decisions are particularly difficult when there are both positive and negative aspects to the object. How do people go about navigating this conflict to come to a summary judgment? […]
We demonstrate […] that when positivity and negativity conflict, the valence that is based more on emotion is more likely to dominate.
{ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin | Continue reading }
First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. “The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy” the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.
But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed. […]
“More intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”
Piper Jaffray analyst Stan Meyers said animated films generally cost about $100 million to make, as well as an additional $150 million to promote.
An executive producer who wants to drastically cut costs traditionally has two choices: water and hair. Those are the most expensive things to replicate accurately via animation. It’s no mistake that the characters in Minions, the most profitable movie ever made by Universal, are virtually bald and don’t seem to spend much time in the ocean.
This study aims to investigate the frequency and amount of female DNA transferred to the penis and underwear of males following staged nonintimate social contact with females and to compare the findings with the amount of female DNA transferred to the penis and subsequently to the underwear of a male who had engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse with a female. […]
It was possible to demonstrate that DNA can occasionally transfer to the waistband and outside front of underwear worn by a male following staged nonintimate social contact.
Baltimore woman sues after being ‘literally covered in feces’ by toilet explosion
We feel more authentic when we’re with other people and behave as they expect us to
People who weigh more than others see distances as farther away
How often does psychotherapy make people feel worse?
Linguist analyzes Trump attack haiku
The academic publishing market that Elsevier leads has an annual revenue of $25.2 billion. According to its 2013 financials Elsevier had a higher percentage of profit than Apple, Inc.
The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower, Twice
Are You Orgasming Without Even Knowing It? I was, until I masturbated for science.
