Category: ideas

Researchers “say that having a winning NFL football team increases the incomes of the people who live and work in its hometown by as much as $120 a year. And while the study doesn’t identify exactly what causes the boost, the authors point to psychological literature suggesting that winning fans are at once harder workers and bigger spenders. In short, buoyed by the team’s success, we work longer hours, take bigger risks, and shop more avidly, all of which helps the local economy.”

Wordle translates the political speeches into word clouds…

“It’s no longer enough just to keep students on campus. Now, university planners are strategizing about ways to offer big-city pleasures wrapped up in welcoming, occasionally daring architecture… If you build, they will come – or so the current planning dictate goes.”

Harmonious bird songs may sound pleasant to people, but a new study has found that at least some birds fight by singing, using melodic tweets to defend their relationships and territories.

The researcher “subjected 40 men and women to the sounds of a Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari, then measured the amount of testosterone in their saliva. He found everyone had higher levels of the stuff — a measure of their arousal — after hearing the revving exotics, but the amount the women had was off the charts. The econobox, however, left everyone colder than a January day in Nome.”

Nuclear scientists in France have unveiled a 21st century tool for unmasking counterfeit vintage wines, by zapping them with ion beams from a particle accelerator.

“Although there are many anecdotal stories of breakthroughs resulting from daydreams – Einstein, for instance, was notorious for his wandering mind – daydreaming itself is usually cast in a negative light. In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They’ve demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind – so fundamental, in fact, that it’s often referred to as our ‘default’ mode of thought.”

“This is a stunning moment in economic history: At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn’t have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel).”

“By watching how genetically altered mice tried to learn and memorise the location of a hiding hole without the help of new brain cells, a team led by Ryoichiro Kageyama of Kyoto University in Japan has shown that new brain cells are essential for learning and memory.”