Category: ideas

“A new study has found that men who are full of themselves may actually be stressed out by their own narcissism.”

“The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a ‘new atheism’ as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’s ‘aggressive’ and ‘destructive’ approach to non-belief.”

“Such democratization of information-gathering–when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements–has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories.”

“Just how potent is the metaphor ‘thinking outside the box’? To find out, researchers built a literal box out of PVC pipe and cardboard – 5′ cubed.”

“When test subjects agreed to sell out, their brains displayed common signatures of activity in regions previously linked to calculating utility. When they refused, activity was concentrated in other parts of their brains: the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is known to be involved in processing and understanding abstract rules, and the right temporoparietal junction, which has been implicated in moral judgement.”

“Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read independently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.”

“Participants in an experiment were more likely to solve “insight problems” — mind-stretchers that require an “aha moment” to crack — when quizzed during a time period when they weren’t at their peak. “Morning people” scored higher in the late afternoon, while “evening people” did better in the a.m.”

“In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people.”

“Intuition had a significant impact on what the students accepted, no matter how much they knew and regardless of their religious beliefs. Even students with a greater knowledge of evolutionary facts weren’t more likely to accept the theory unless they also had a strong gut feeling about the facts, the results showed.”

“As investors look back at the mistakes that have been made and money lost in capital intensive investments like next-gen solar, biofuels and electric cars, some investors are taking a different route and looking to make cleantech investing look a lot more like web and mobile investing — literally.”