Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan. The idea that the same experiments always get the same results, no matter who performs them, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to objective truth. If a systematic campaign of replication does not lead to the same results, then either the original research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of the original researchers… Read More...

German Groom Forgets Bride at Gas Station. 9-year-old sneaks onto flight without boarding pass, flies to Vegas alone. Google wants a patent on splitting the restaurant bill. Canadian researchers have worked out how to send text messages using chemical spray. I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. […] Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. Cory Doctorow | Thanks Tim] By 1790, the new republic was in arrears… Read More...

When a healthy person watches a smoothly moving object (say, an airplane crossing the sky), she tracks the plane with a smooth, continuous eye movement to match its displacement. This action is called smooth pursuit. But smooth pursuit isn’t smooth for most patients with schizophrenia. Their eyes often fall behind and they make a series of quick, tiny jerks to catch up or even dart ahead of their target. For the better part of a century, this movement pattern would remain a mystery. But in recent decades, scientific discoveries have lead to a better understanding of smooth pursuit eye movements. [Garden of the Mind] Neuroscientists have identified the location in the brain's visual cortex responsible for generating a common perceptual illusion: Seeing shapes and surfaces that don't really exist when viewing a fragmented background. Madness and hallucination in The Shining. Demon… Read More...

Placenta prints, live tweeting labor: Pregnancy trends gone too far? Walk-in vagina installed in Johannesburg women's prison. In 2005, Harry Frankfurt wrote a monograph entitled On Bullshit and this work received a flurry of attention. At its core, Frankfurt argues that while lying is a misrepresentation of the truth, bullshit is a misrepresentation of the self, and an indifference to truth, which in his mind is worse than lying. […] Bullshit is more dangerous to democracy than lying. Unlike a lie, bullshit is destructive of even concern for the truth. Thus, in politics, it creates conditions where it is easier to present a lie as truth, and indifference to truth in public discourse renders public discourse impotent or worse. Even more destructively, it infects thinking. The corruption of language is bad enough, but even worse is the corruption of thinking.… Read More...

Woman swallows toothbrush while talking on the phone. Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Man with brewer's yeast in his gut gets drunk from beer he generates. Researchers analyzed how the body language of the potential customer helps bartenders to identify who would like to place an order and who does not. Swedish court: Public masturbation not a crime. A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that exposure to pornography was related to and increased sexist attitudes, but only among a subgroup of users. Germany is the first European country to recognize a third gender. From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information. But scientists are discovering that […] it’s… Read More...

You cannot fix the bad boy. He’ll just break your heart and you’ll resent him forever. [Fearne Cotton] Researchers want to 3-D print pizza for astronauts. London skyscraper melts cars, fries eggs. Women selling positive pregnancy tests on Craigslist. Drones are slow and noisy; they fly at a low altitude; and they require time to hover over a potential target before being used. The only real way for the United States to use them would be to first destroy Syrian planes and anti-aircraft batteries. New Smartphone Tech To Alert Pedestrians: 'You Are About To Be Hit By a Car'. And there's another phone app in development to help you avoid gunfire. “Gun guys” have clean records allowing them to obtain Illinois firearm owner’s identification cards. With FOID cards, they can legally buy guns at stores in the suburbs. Then they… Read More...

A day on the planet Venus is longer than a year on the planet Venus. It has been conjectured that individuals may be left-brain dominant or right-brain dominant based on personality and cognitive style, but neuroimaging data has not provided clear evidence whether such phenotypic differences in the strength of left-dominant or right-dominant networks exist. [Thoughts on Thoughts] New surgery trend creates perma-smiles for South Korean women Woman arrested after restaurant guests covered in soy sauce. Singapore is inequality on steroids, as you might expect from a high human capital, high information tech, growing financial center. Seventeen percent of the population are millionaires, and that is not counting real estate wealth, which is substantial. The H&M in the shopping district is closing, because the rent was doubled and it is being replaced by luxury retailers. [Marginal Revolution | Part 2]… Read More...

The world’s first bullet-proof couch. An Intriguing Correlation between the Distribution of Star Multiples and Human Adults in Household. Scientists Investigate Whether the City Mouse Is Smarter Than The Country Mouse. The evidence for a flat earth is derived from many different facets of science and philosophy. The simplest is by relying on ones own senses to discern the true nature of the world around us. The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world. […] People have been into space. How have they not discovered that the earth is flat? The most commonly accepted explanation of this is that the space agencies of the world are involved in a conspiracy faking space travel and… Read More...

The more you multitask, the worse you get at it. Related: Media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability. [PDF] At this very moment, your eyes and brain are performing an astounding series of coordinated operations. Light rays from the screen are hitting your retina, the sheet of light-sensitive cells that lines the back wall of each of your eyes. Those cells, in turn, are converting light into electrical pulses that can be decoded by your brain. The electrical messages travel down the optic nerve to your thalamus, a relay center for sensory information in the middle of the brain, and from the thalamus to the visual cortex at the back of your head. In the visual cortex, the message jumps from one layer of tissue to the next, allowing you to determine the shape and color and… Read More...

Possession Trance Disorder Caused by Door-to-Door Sales. Builders of Spanish Skyscraper Forgot the Elevator. A man's plan to have sex with a woman on a giant pile of cash goes awry after thieves steal the money. Massive drop in razor sales attributed to hairy hipsters, increased stubble in the workplace. Since the size, density, and even shape of a person’s skull is somewhat unique, its resonance will vary across individuals. Our current research was designed to explore whether this uniqueness in skull resonance might have a direct influence on the kinds of music a person prefers. […] this research suggests that the skull [shape and size] might influence the music that a person dislikes rather than the music a person likes. [Acoustical Society of America/Improbable] In the middle of the 20th century, experimental psychologists began to notice a strange interaction… Read More...

62% of women check their phones during sex, new study finds. Kickstarter Project Canceled After Dude Spends All the Money. No Menstrual Hygiene For Indian Women Holds Economy Back. Dentist who used copyright to silence her patients is on the run. He threatened patients who wrote bad Yelp reviews with lawsuits. Scientists Develop Urine Grown Teeth, Claiming Urine Is Less Controversial Source Of Stem Cells Than Embryos. The odds: 1 in 2,000,000 - drowning. 1 in 11,500,000 - being bitten by shark. 1 in 264,000,000 - dying from a shark bite. Miracle Village, Florida, where half the population are sex offenders. Coldhearted Psychopaths Feel Empathy Too. Man acquitted in romantic bear-spray squabble. Where Do Drugs For Lethal Injections Come From? Nobody Knows. A banana may be healthier than a burger, but how it’s brought to you is not all that… Read More...

Scientists claim to power phone with urine. The sense of smell is one of our most powerful connections to the physical world. Our noses contain hundreds of different scent receptors that allow us to distinguish between odours. When you smell a rose or a pot of beef stew, the brain is responding to scent molecules that have wafted into your nose and locked on to these receptors. Only certain molecules fit specific receptors, and when they slot together, like a key in a lock, this triggers changes in cells. In the case of scent receptors, specialised neurons send messages to the brain so we know what we have sniffed. […] In the last ten years, however, reports have trickled in from bemused biologists that these receptors, as well as similar ones usually found on taste buds, crop up all over… Read More...

Porn Producers Say Unprotected Sex Is Free Speech Right. Nude swimmer distracts home burglary victim. High-resolution mapping of the epigenome has discovered unique patterns that emerge during the generation of brain circuitry in childhood. While the 'genome' can be thought of as the instruction manual that contains the blueprints (genes) for all of the components of our cells and our body, the 'epigenome' can be thought of as an additional layer of information on top of our genes that change the way they are used. […]The frontal cortex is made up of distinct types of cells, such as neurons and glia, which each perform very different functions. However, we know that these distinct types of cells in the brain all contain the same genome sequence; the A, C, G and T 'letters' of the DNA code that provides the instructions… Read More...

Northern California roller coaster taken offline because riders were screaming too loudly. Mouse cloned from drop of blood. If I could give one piece of advice as a relationships researcher, it would be this: Relationships take work. […] People who held high destiny beliefs were more likely to disengage from their relationships when they experienced relationship stressors and problems, perhaps because they take these as a sign that the relationship is not meant to be. [Psych Your Mind] When a Small Thing Means so Much: Nonverbal Cues as Turning Points in Relationships. How Older Couples Handle Conflict: Just Avoid It. The Division of Frozen Embryos at the Time of Divorce . [via Bookforum] In August 2009, scientists in Israel raised serious doubts concerning the use of DNA by law enforcement as the ultimate method of identification. In a paper published… Read More...

A coffee chain in Taiwan offers a latte printer that creates portraits on top of caffeinated beverages. Liar-for-hire Tim Green will tell anyone anything -- for a fee. As the founder of Paladin Deception Services, he will say what clients want him to say to anyone calling on his dedicated phone lines. He provides cover for cheating husbands, fake references for job-seekers and even "doctors" to confirm that someone needs a sick day. Italian press finds gay hookup site for priests – in Rome. “Monica Lewinsky items are very, very rare,” said auction manager Laura Yntema. “We were interested in this lot because they were all investigated by Kenneth Starr.” Sperm cells have been created from a female human embryo in a remarkable breakthrough that suggests it may be possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological children. [Telegraph]… Read More...

Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. [Sianne Ngai/Cabinet] Why do humans menstruate, when most animals don’t? When you shake the tree of life, you find that only a handful of mammals aside from us – primates, a small number of bat species, and the elephant shrew – have opted for the monthly bleed. Evolution is often viewed in terms of a cost-benefit ledger: if something is costly, it must have some benefit. Women lose over half a standard glass of wine’s worth in iron-rich blood and tissue – about 90 millilitres – each time they menstruate, so the process does seem quite costly. And in the predator-filled environs of our early ancestors, leaving a trail of blood was presumably not advantageous. So how did menstruation arise? Over recent decades, evolutionary biologists have come up with three key theories to… Read More...