“A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine to go down, but wine worked even better for the ancient Egyptians, who used to doctor their alcoholic beverages with medicinal herbs and other ingredients, according to a new study.”
Category: ideas
Proletarian Revolution Among The Insects
“Some ant species raid colonies of smaller species, killing the queen, scaring away worker ants and stealing larvae. Kidnapped larvae grow up as slaves … [Researchers] saw enslaved worker ants destroy two-thirds of newly hatched queens and female workers of their captors.”
Empathy For Emotional Pain Is Slow And Strenuous
“When we see someone with a broken leg, we feel his pain instantly. But it takes a bit longer to feel compassion for a broken heart, say researchers from the University of Southern California. … And the USC team found that the brain had to work a lot harder to react to another person’s psychological pain than to physical pain.”
The Downsides Of Genius
“High cognitive ability is very often a mixed blessing… Too wide a deviation from the mean IQ of 100 brings with it an inherent isolation. If you have an IQ of 160 or higher, you’re probably able to connect well with less than 1 per cent of the population.”
The Success Gurus – Is It All Poppycock?
“At their most ambitious, these books purport to elevate the study of excellence to a science, its nuggets culled from exhaustive research and refined by painstaking analysis. Jim Collins, coauthor of Built to Last and author of Good to Great, likens what he does to physics. Readers of his books, he writes, have their eyes opened to the ‘immutable laws of organized human performance.’ But a few consultants and business school professors have begun to argue that much of this literature is, in fact, useless.”
How Office Configurations Reflect How We Think About Work
“Since the dawn of the white-collar age, office designs have cycled through competing demands: openness versus privacy, interaction versus autonomy. Here’s a brief history of how seating arrangements have reflected our changing attitudes toward work.”
Why Mars Needs Women
“What similarities will alien life forms have to living things here on Earth? We won’t know until we find some, but now there is evidence that at least the basic building blocks will be the same.”
Was St. Paul The Ancient World’s Best Marketer?
“If you view Paul not just as a preacher but as an entrepreneur, … the doctrines that now form the most-inspiring parts of the Christian message are, in a sense, business tools. They are tools that let him use the information technology of his day, the epistle, to extend his brand, the Jesus brand, across the vast, open, multinational platform offered by the Roman Empire.”
Hey, It Worked With Leeches And Maggots
Researchers at medical device companies have been poring over old scientific journals, looking for grisly-but-effective early surgical treatments which can be updated with the less toxic materials and less brutal techniques available today.
Listening To The Music Of The Sphere
“[It’s] probably the most ambitious seismological project ever conducted. Its name is USArray and its aim is to run what amounts to an ultrasound scan over the 48 contiguous states of the US. Through the seismic shudders and murmurs that rack Earth’s innards, it will build up an unprecedented 3D picture of what lies beneath North America.”