We present participants with coherent and incoherent narratives
When presented to coherent narratives participants remember plots
When presented to incoherent narratives participants remember facts
Plot formation modulate activity in the Default Mode Network of the brain
New research finds that sarcasm is far more nuanced, and actually offers some important, overlooked psychological and organizational benefits.
“To create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking” […]
“Those in the sarcasm conditions subsequently performed better on creativity tasks than those in the sincere conditions or the control condition. This suggests that sarcasm has the potential to catalyze creativity in everyone. That being said, although not the focus of our research, it is possible that naturally creative people are also more likely to use sarcasm, making it an outcome instead of [a] cause in this relationship.” […]
“While most previous research seems to suggest that sarcasm is detrimental to effective communication because it is perceived to be more contemptuous than sincerity, we found that, unlike sarcasm between parties who distrust each other, sarcasm between individuals who share a trusting relationship does not generate more contempt than sincerity”
art { Broomberg & Chanarin }
Two options for dealing with climate change — reducing greenhouse gas emissions through a global agreement, and geoengineering proposals such as injecting sulfur into the stratosphere — tend to dominate current thinking. But there is a “third way” that is almost entirely neglected in political negotiations and public debate. It involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it or using it to create things we need.
Why Britain has secret “ghost trains”?
We don’t look like we think we look, study
How rudeness spreads like a contagion
Why does “schizophrenia” persist?
Semen has controlling power over female genes and behaviour
Fat should be considered the sixth taste, study
Sleep not just protects memories against forgetting, it also makes them more accessible
Thousands of Apps Secretly Run Ads That Users Can’t See Advertisers lose $895 million per year to invisible fraud within mobile apps
Gmail messages can now self-destruct
Russia’s lost punks [via Nils Runeberg]
A night in Japan’s robot hotel
Meet a man who has been dating a crowdsourced Internet girlfriend for the last three months
The “hygiene hypothesis” […] suggests that people in developed countries are growing up way too clean because of a variety of trends, including the use of hand sanitizers and detergents, and spending too little time around animals.
As a result, children don’t tend to be exposed to as many bacteria and other microorganisms, and maybe that deprives their immune system of the chance to be trained to recognize microbial friend from foe.
That may make the immune system more likely to misfire and overreact in a way that leads to allergies, eczema and asthma, Hesselmar says. […]
In their latest research, the researchers took a look at how people wash their dishes. […] In families who said they mostly wash dishes by hand, significantly fewer children had eczema, and somewhat fewer had either asthma or hay fever, compared to kids from families who let machines wash their dishes.
Restaurant food not much healthier than fast food
The Four Types of Drunks, According to Science.
Effect of climate and seasonality on depressed mood among twitter users
Eyelashes divert airflow to protect the eye and the ideal eyelash length is about one third the width of an eye. And that goes for 22 different animals, not just humans
Passionate kissing is not a human universal
Getting to know her before asking her out could make you seem more attractive, suggests research
The sex life of the American teenager is apparently far less busy than it was in generations past
The case of man left with 90 minute memory and feeling that it is the same day every day
A password cracker that steals bitcoins from your brain
CrossFit mascot is a homicidal-looking shirtless monstrosity called Pukie the Clown. Thirty days in a gay CrossFit cult
Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
By definition, exponential growth means the thing that comes next will be equal in importance to everything that came before. […]
this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present.
Dr. Jack Berdy has just introduced “Pokertox,” a program of Botox and facial fillers designed to enhance a player’s “poker face,” their ability to hide any sign of facial emotion that might tip off other card players on whether they have a good or bad hand.
{ Huffington Post | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
photo { Broomberg & Chanarin }
{ Women Who Dye Their (Armpit) Hair | NY Times | Photo by Ruth Fremson }
In 1908, an asteroid measuring perhaps 90-190 meters across struck Siberia, damaging over 2,000 square kilometers of Russian forest – an area that measures larger than New York’s five boroughs. Scientists estimate that the energy of that explosion was about 1,000 times that of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
This is far from the only close call that humans have had with asteroids. In 2004, an asteroid big enough to have its own small moon narrowly missed the planet. In 2013, an asteroid struck the Russia countryside with many times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, and was widely captured on video.
And of course, it was an asteroid, smashing into the Earth with the force of more than billion Hiroshima bombs, which nixed the dinosaurs and allowed humans to take over the Earth in the first place. [Previously: The event appears to have hit all continents at the same time | more] […]
The probability that you’ll die from an asteroid may be surprisingly large – about the same probability as dying from a plane crash, according to research.
New York Wants Google Maps to Discourage Left Turns
Left Turns Cause A Quarter Of All Pedestrian Crashes In U.S.
Substance abuse reduces brain volume in women but not men
Facial Features: What Women Perceive as Attractive and What Men Consider Attractive
Cross-cultural study finds wide gap in what men and women want in a romantic partner
Is your fear of radiation irrational?
How to Sue Richard Prince and Win
Population density in NYC at day and night
“Water fountains have been disappearing from public spaces throughout the country over the last few decades,” lamented Nancy Stoner, an administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency’s water office. […]
By 1930, Chapelle says, bottled water had become “low class,” used only in offices and factories that couldn’t afford plumbing.
Attitudes began to shift in the 1970s, when Europe’s Perrier set its sights on the American market. In 1977, the company spent $5 million on an advertising campaign in New York, selling itself as a chic, upscale product. Yuppies lapped it up. “It was a lifestyle-defining product,” Chapelle says. By 1982, U.S. bottled-water consumption had doubled to 3.4 gallons per person per year. […]
U.S. consumption of bottled water quadrupled between 1993 and 2012 (reaching 9.67 billion gallons annually). […]
Today, 77 percent of Americans are concerned about pollution in their drinking water, according to Gallup, even though tap water and bottled water are treated the same way, and studies show that tap is as safe as bottled.
art { Roy Lichtenstein, Girl in Water, 1965 }
After the near‐collapse of the world’s financial system has shown that we economists really do not know how the world works, I am much too embarrassed to teach economics anymore, which I have done for many years. I will teach Modern Korean Drama instead.
Although I have never been to Korea, I have watched Korean drama on a daily basis for over six years now. Therefore I can justly consider myself an expert in that subject.
{ Uwe E. Reinhardt, Princeton University | PDF | via Chris Blattman }
photo { Ji Yeo | plastic surgery in South Korea }
A Researcher Made an Organic Computer Using Four Wired-Together Rat Brains
Scientists have discovered that living near trees is good for your health Related: Green and blue spaces promoted feelings of renewal, restoration, and spiritual connectedness
How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines
What It’s Like to Be Profoundly Face-Blind
Scientists showed domestic dogs avoid people they have seen behave unhelpfully to their owners
Swimming under the surface is faster than swimming on the surface. And the fish kick may be the fastest subsurface form yet.
Where does water go when it doesn’t flow?
Why do puddles stop spreading?
Global sea levels have risen six meters in the last three decades
Chinese Zoo Animals Monitored For Earthquake Prediction
It is forbidden to die in the Arctic town of Longyearbyen
Canadian lifted into sky in lawn chair by 100+ balloons, arrested upon landing
Smile at a party and people are more likely to remember seeing your face there
Key element of human language discovered in bird babble
New method reveals exact time of death after 10 days
This Is How Uber Takes Over a City
How Ads Follow You from Phone to Desktop to Tablet
Secrets of catching attention revealed. 1,072 ‘context words’ disclosed.
What happens to sardine prices when fishermen get mobile phones ?
Healthy people who were given the serotonin-boosting antidepressant citalopram were willing to pay twice as much to prevent harm to themselves or others, compared to those given a placebo. By contrast, those who were given a dose of the dopamine-enhancing Parkinson’s drug levodopa made more selfish decisions, overcoming an existing tendency to prefer harming themselves over others.
Research has shown that humans consciously use alcohol to encourage sexual activity. […]
In the current study, we examined if males exposed without their knowledge to pheromones emitted by fertile females would increase their alcohol consumption, presumably via neurobehavioral information pathways that link alcohol to sex and mating. We found that men who smelled a T-shirt worn by a fertile female drank significantly more (nonalcoholic) beer, and exhibited significantly greater approach behavior toward female cues, than those who smelled a T-shirt worn by a nonfertile female.
{ Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology | Continue reading }
photo { Miss August, 1957 }
In a patent dispute between two pharmaceutical giants arguing over who owns the royalty rights to a lucrative wound-dressing solution, […] three judges coined a new legal definition of “one”. […]
The ConvaTec patent covered any salt solution “between 1 per cent and 25 per cent of the total volume of treatment”. However, Smith & Nephew devised a competing product that used 0.77 per cent concentration, bypassing, or so it believed, the ConvaTec patent. […]
Their lordships concluded that “one” includes anything greater or equal to 0.5 and less than 1.5 – much to the chagrin of Smith & Nephew.
[B]oth men and women show roughly the same neural activity during orgasm. […] “What we see is an overall activation of the brain; basically it’s like all systems go.”
This may explain why orgasms are so all-consuming – if the whole forest is blazing, it’s difficult to discriminate between the different campfires that were there at the start. “At orgasm, if everything gets activated simultaneously, this can obliterate the fine discrimination between activities,” Komisaruk adds. It is maybe why you can’t think about anything else. […]
The penis has just one route for carrying sensations to the brain, the female genital tract has three or four. […]
After orgasm, however, some important differences do emerge, which might begin to explain why men and women react so differently after climax. Komisaruk, with Kachina Allen, has found preliminary evidence that specific regions of the male brain become unresponsive to further sensory stimulation of the genitals in the immediate aftermath of orgasm, whereas women’s brains continue to be activated: this may be why some women experience multiple orgasms, and men do not.
photos { Scott Tolmie | William Eggleston }
