Kindness

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common...?

Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there. People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.

The Fermi Paradox

We're rare, we're first, or we're fucked.

Just read it. It's compelling. And my money is on rare and fucked. Accidents happen, doesn't mean they turn out well.

Creativity/Intelligence/Mental Disorder

While my workshop study answered some questions, it raised others. Why does creativity run in families? What is it that gets transmitted? How much is due to nature and how much to nurture? Are writers especially prone to mood disorders because writing is an inherently lonely and introspective activity? What would I find if I studied a group of scientists instead?

These questions percolated in my mind in the weeks, months, and eventually years after the study. As I focused my research on the neurobiology of severe mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and mood disorders, studying the nature of creativity—important as the topic was and is—seemed less pressing than searching for ways to alleviate the suffering of patients stricken with these dreadful and potentially lethal brain disorders. During the 1980s, new neuroimaging techniques gave researchers the ability to study patients’ brains directly, an approach I began using to answer questions about how and why the structure and functional activity of the brain is disrupted in some people with serious mental illnesses.

As I spent more time with neuroimaging technology, I couldn’t help but wonder what we would find if we used it to look inside the heads of highly creative people. Would we see a little genie that doesn’t exist inside other people’s heads?

Really long but interesting article about what links the creative brain to personality/mood disorders. Too small a study to count as entirely applicable across a broad spectrum, but a good start nonetheless.

Flu Pandemic of 1918 Explained

“Ever since the great flu pandemic of 1918 it has been a mystery where that virus came from and why it was so severe,” says Professor Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona. Between 50 and 100 million people died from the outbreak dubbed “the Spanish flu”, several times more than World War I, yet history books generally relegate it to a footnote.

While most of those who die from normal flu outbreaks are the very young or the elderly the 1918 outbreak was different – the heaviest death toll was among young adults, including those that had been in good health beforehand...

However, Worobey also turns the idea on its head by proposing exposure to a very different version of the flu virus primed the immune system to misread epidemic version. The finger of suspicion is pointed at an H3N8 virus common between 1889 and 1900. Tens of millions of people would have been exposed to this virus in childhood and recovered, but Worobey said, “A person with an antibody arsenal directed against the H3 protein would not have fared well when faced with flu viruses studded with H1 protein. And we believe that that mismatch may have resulted in the heightened mortality in the age group that happened to be in their late 20s during the 1918 pandemic."

Altering how we taste our food

What can you taste when you swirl a mouthful of malt whisky around your mouth? Peaty flavours, honey, sea salt? Talk to any whisky drinker and they'll be happy to discuss at length.

But it turns out that not all you are getting is down to your taste buds - or even your nose.

If you drink a glass of single malt in a room carpeted with real grass, accompanied by the sound of a lawnmower and birds chirping, and all bathed in green light, the whisky tastes "grassier".

Replace that with red lighting, curved and bulbous edges and tinkling bells and the drink tastes sweeter.

These studies are intriguing. On one hand, I am expecting the large food companies like Nestle to start just advertising the pizza on the box with only a shake of the cheapest chemicals possible inside. On the other, it pretty much is like brain synesthesia for your mouth without your knowledge. Sit back and just let it happen.

King of Gore!

A newly-discovered dinosaur, which has been christened "King of gore" by the scientists who have studied it, is the oldest known member of the dinosaur group that gave rise to the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex.

The 80m-year-old fossil of Lythronax argestes was found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in the desert of southern Utah. The two-legged carnivorous beast was eight metres long and weighed around 2.5 tonnes. It had a head full of sharp teeth and lived during the Late Cretaceous period, between 95m and 65m years ago.

What Averaged Face Photographs Reveal About Human Beauty

As per the finding that 32 faces are seen as more attractive; I used this as the threshold for the amount of faces to average. The selection of images to use was based on my own criteria: facing forward, eyes looking into the camera, limited facial expression, decent size and decent colouration.

For each ‘category’ (Male and female, attractive and unattractive) I aligned and resized the images, until the internal features of the face (eyes, nose, lips and chin) were as aligned as feasibly possible. Then they were averaged....

What’s interesting is that attractive male and female faces seem to have similar structures and similarities. When aligning the images in Photoshop; I could see that faces which appeared completely different actually have similar basic proportions. You can see this in the averages and in relation to conformity with the Marquardt mask.

The most interesting aspect, to me, is the incoherence seen in the ‘unattractive’ averages. Attractive faces seem to conform to a basic attractive structure, with little variance of internal features. Unattractive faces have more varying features – this would explain why the unattractive averages are less coherent.

How to Talk to Your Child

According to the New York Times and other American news outlets, the "Providence Talks" programme will be based on research carried out by two psychologists from the University of Kansas, Betty Hart (who died last year) and Todd R Risley, who in 1995 published their findings in a book called Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. The results of these studies were striking. After six years of data collection and analysis, they established that while "professional class" children hear on average 2,153 words per hour from their parents, children whose parents were on welfare – the "Precariat", as the BBC might have described them – hear just 616 (television didn't count; it was found to have an adverse effect).

Thus, while the wealthier child will be treated to a near-constant stream of cooing commentary, poorer parents tend to limit their interactions with their babies to commands such as "Put away your toy!" and "Don't eat that!" This meant that by his third birthday, the poorest child will have heard around 30 million fewer words than his middle class counterpart.

Coming from a background where talking and reading was a vital part of each day as a child, I find the idea intriguing. However, I think "If everyone talked to their young children the same amount, "there would be no racial or socioeconomic gap at all"." is just naïve.

Knitting Burns More Calories than Sex

That’s according to a new study released by the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which debunked popular myths about sex as a major calorie burner. The study concluded that the perception of sex as a fat-burning athletic activity was based around sexcapades lasting an hour or more, but that’s not the reality of most American sex lives. Brace yourselves for the truth, people: Americans have sex for “an average time span of six minutes per sexual encounter.”

That’s pretty depressing, and it only gets worse. Those six minutes only burn 21 calories. To put that in perspective: you burn twenty-five calories in ten minutes just by standing up. Your grandma burns fifty-five calories by knitting for half an hour, and most of those calories are from yelling at her grandkids to find her dentures.

So, the moral of the story here is have longer sex. And all my knitting totally excuses the sitting on my butt for hours at a time while watching The West Wing. At least I am being productive.

Pointless but Fantastic

2000 ping pong balls in zero gravity.

I absolutely love that they didn't warn anyone.

Best Inventions of the Year 2012

Personally, I don't think they should have added the Curiosity rover to this list. Yeah, it proved to be a fantastic tool, but I'd think it should have been on the list last year upon it's debut before launch. Otherwise, it seems to be a pretty decent list of accomplishments.

Exercise Will Change Your Life

In surveys, a consistent 30 to 35 percent of people report moderate to vigorous levels of physical activity. But in the past few years, researchers have begun to outfit study participants with devices that record movement, and the truth has come out: Fewer than 5 percent of adults are doing the recommended level of activity.

...

The moral of the story is, you can choose to get old before your time.

Infiltrate

Six Daleks are en route to NASA’s Stennis Space Center disguised as "space shuttle engines"
NASA says they're "Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne engines" from space shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis... but we think they look an awful lot like incognito Dalek shipping containers.
The agency says the "engines" are being shipped from Florida's Kennedy Space Center to Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where they will be repurposed for use on NASA's next generation heavy lift rocket: the Space Launch System (SLS). When it's completed, NASA says the SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever built, and capable of taking us deeper into space than ever before.

Tell me a powerful, deep-space rocket isn't the perfect hiding place for a Dalek sextet.

..via io9

Paul Zak: Trust, morality -- and oxytocin

So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love. I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great. But here's your prescription from Dr. Love:
Eight hugs a day. We have found that people that release more oxytocin are happier. And they're happier because thwey have better relationships of all types. Dr. Love says eight hugs a day. Eight hugs a day and you'll be happier and the world will be a better place.

Great lecture on what controls our morality, and how simple it is to help regulate.

Jump on a Ginger

Jump on Ginger from jump on a ginger on Vimeo.


Man....if only I planned on procreating. The idea, however, is still fun without bettering my kind.

Flying Over the Earth

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, El Salvador, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line), a satellite (55sec) and the stars of our galaxy.

Food Variety

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct. More up-to-date studies are needed.

Stereotypes

Hunch has released an infographic that shows some basic stereotypes based on data input by the site's users. Interesting stuff.

Brainy Articles

How to Spot a Psychopath:
"They give you a psychopath test," said Tony. "The Robert Hare Checklist. They assess you for 20 personality traits. Superficial charm. Proneness to boredom. Lack of empathy. Lack of remorse. Grandiose sense of self-worth. That sort of thing. For each one they score you a 0, 1 or 2. If your total score is 30 or more out of 40, you're a psychopath. That's it. You're doomed. You're labelled a psychopath for life. They say you can't change. You can't be treated. You're a danger to society. And then you're stuck somewhere like this."

The Cognitive Cost of Doing Things:
There's no such thing as a free lunch, and that goes for your brain, too. Every time you amass the willpower to do anything, it has mental costs. Writer and strategist Sebastian Marshall identifies a few of those cognitive costs to understand how to get more done while conserving as much of your mental reserve as possible.

You're Living in a Computer Simulation:
The whole "reality is an illusion" idea has been kicked around by everyone from Siddhartha to the existentialists. It is Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom who is most often associated with the idea that we are living in a computer simulation

Balance

My brother-in-law finds my deafness hilarious. Really, he finds that my entire family is rather freakishly hilarious. Last weekend he amused himself with an app that plays out sound at different frequencies from the bottom to the top of the spectrum. Off and on he would turn the program on to watch my (or occasionally his wife) drop whatever we had in hand to hold our ears and yell at him to turn the app off.

Over the years, I've gone deaf. Kind of. Last time I had my hearing checked, the doctor told me that due to my attention to detail, diction and enunciation, I was above the threshold of needing a hearing aid, however, I have around a 20% loss in normal levels of sound.

However, I can hear dog whistles. Growing up, my sisters and I would scream and throw tantrums when our mother would take us to Sears or the Post Office, as she seemed to think we just had an aversion to those very specific places of business rather than to the reason behind our complaints. In reality, both locations had computer equipment that sent out a high pitched noise that drove us nuts. It was like a pre-Mosquito alarm system.

So today, I read an article that says hearing loss may be an early indicator of dementia. Then I read another that alcohol may deter dementia.

What I am understanding from all of this is simple. If I drink, my likelihood of dementia goes down; however, being in the normal loud places that decreases ability to sound/increases deafness increases the likelihood.

If I just equal the two, I should be safe, right?