Crowdsourced Animation Through Facebook With dozens of animators pitching in through a specially built Facebook application, the slick clip from the crowdsourcing specialists at Mass Animation is a rare "art by committee" success story.

Wired 11/20/09

email this story | Posted 11/20/09@08:14AM

How Will Religion Evolve? Maybe Into 'The Church Of Green' John Tierney: "Does religion have a future? Who looks more like an evolutionary dead end: the religious American or the agnostic European? Or will both give way to some sort of compromise? … One possibility that occurs to me is a version of environmentalism, but with better music and with rituals that are more elegant than sorting garbage."

New York Times 11/19/09

email this story | Posted 11/19/09@10:22PM

Better-Looking Athletes More Likely To Win "Elite athletes distinguish themselves through hard work, grit and, most importantly, raw talent. However new research, along with a study conducted by New Scientist, points to another trait of the most accomplished jocks: a handsome face." It seems that "the same genetic variations could influence both traits."

New Scientist 11/19/09

email this story | Posted 11/19/09@10:16PM

Umberto Eco Considers The Nature Of Lists The author sees lists as falling into two (very Eco-ist) categories: "those that evidence the 'poetics of 'everything included'' and those that express the 'poetics of the 'etcetera'." The former covers a finite number of items (as with a phone book) and aims for completeness; the latter (as with a medieval writer's list of devils) "is limited only by the imagination's disinclination to invent more."

Bookforum Dec/Jan 2010

email this story | Posted 11/18/09@10:03PM

In Brains, Is Bigger Really Better? Consider The Insect World Bees and ants, to name two, have famously complex behaviors and social structures governed by their tiny cerebella. "Instead of contributing intelligence, big brains might just help support bigger bodies, which have larger muscles to coordinate and more sensory information coming in. Like computers, … size might add storage capacity but [not] necessarily speed or usefulness."

Discovery News 11/16/09

email this story | Posted 11/18/09@09:45PM

Maybe Perception Is Reality: How Illusions Are Important "For all the fun we have with them, illusions do serious work in illuminating how our brains work, and in particular how perception works. They may also help us understand how consciousness developed, and tell us about our 'neuro-archaeology'."

New Scientist 11/12/09

email this story | Posted 11/17/09@10:13PM

Who Are Nature's Best Chameleons? (Hint: Not Chameleons) "We might call a fickle, changeable acquaintance a chameleon, but the true champions of camouflage turn out to be cephalopods - octopuses, cuttlefish and squid. Unlike a chameleon, an octopus can duplicate the colour and texture of almost anything."

New Scientist 11/12/09

email this story | Posted 11/17/09@10:04PM

For Alzheimer's, Stroke, Autism, Music Can Help "[B]eyond the entertainment value, there's growing evidence that listening to music can also help stimulate seemingly lost memories and even help restore some cognitive function." As neuroscientists begin to understand how that happens, "they are starting to work hand in hand with music therapists to develop new therapeutic programs."

Wall Street Journal 11/16/09

email this story | Posted 11/17/09@05:10AM

The Power Of Reputation (Can It Be Used For Good?) "Public goods situations crop up all over the place, including decisions on maintaining roads, funding the police and whether or not to shirk at work. This leads us to an important question: is it possible to make people care enough about such problems to do their bit?"

New Scientist 11/13/09

email this story | Posted 11/15/09@09:31AM

English: Is The Globe's Common Linguistic Currency Being Debased? "We have seen much hand-wringing over the fact that dominant languages like English seem to invade smaller countries and displace their languages - and languages are indeed dying out faster under the pressures of globalism. But nobody seems to ask, What harm is this doing to English?"

The Nation 11/03/09

email this story | Posted 11/15/09@08:54AM

Study: New Brain Cells Dislodge Old Memories "A new rodent study shows that newborn neurons destabilize established connections among existing brain cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. Clearing old memories from the hippocampus makes way for new learning, researchers from Japan suggest."

Wired 11/13/09

email this story | Posted 11/13/09@05:39AM

Study: Musicians Can Pick Out Background Talk Better "Researchers asked 16 lifelong musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to speech in a quiet or noisy environment while they were wearing scalp electrodes to monitor their brain activity. Background noise delayed the brain's response, but this delay was much shorter in the musicians. What's more, in the noisy environment, the musicians' brainwaves were more similar to the sound waves of the speech than in non-musicians."

New Scientist 11/12/09

email this story | Posted 11/13/09@04:33AM

A Thoroughly Modern Tongue: Electronic Media Are Changing Japanese "Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. … So what do these changes mean for a language long defined by indirect locutions and long, leisurely sentences that drift from the top of the page? Is Japanese getting simpler, easier or just worse?"

New York Times Book Review 11/08/09

email this story | Posted 11/11/09@09:43PM

The First Bank Of Anti-Matter Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, the founder of the bank, is issuing anti-money backed by anti-matter, which he defines as "the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets." He adds, "Like all banks, The First Bank of Antimatter will issue more currency than we have assets."

New Scientist 11/11/09

email this story | Posted 11/11/09@09:31PM

Religious Sacrifice Among Adolescents "Religious sacrifice, the giving up of temporary gratification in return (perhaps) for future blessings, has existed in rituals since before the dawn of history. And while the notion of human sacrifice has faded, modern sacrifices can still be incredibly profound." And they are "most visibly demonstrated among the devoutly religious - especially in youth."

Miller-McCune 11/09/09

email this story | Posted 11/10/09@10:02PM

A Fine Swine: New Horizons In Porcine Intelligence Domestic pigs have shown that they understand mirrors and can use them to find hidden food. They "are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest." Not to mention that they can roll out rugs, herd sheep (Babe was not an anomaly), and play videogames with joysticks.

New York Times 11/10/09

email this story | Posted 11/10/09@09:52PM

Are Dreams Merely Exercise For The Brain? A new paper "argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking."

The New York Times 11/10/09

email this story | Posted 11/09/09@08:13PM

Artist Tools Go Virtual Could touch screens and moldable clay interfaces replace traditional artist tools?

New Scientist 11/09/09

email this story | Posted 11/09/09@05:58AM

Waaah (Eng), Ouain (Fr), Wäh (Ger): Even Babies' Cries Have Accents In an analysis of the cries of 60 newborns, half from German-speaking families and half from francophones, researchers found that "cry melodies were distinctive and different. The French newborns tended to cry with a rising melody contour, while the German tots wailed with a 'falling' tone, a signature feature in each language."

Discovery 11/06/09

email this story | Posted 11/08/09@11:04PM

How People Get Addicted To Virtual Reality Games "Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem to behave similarly when someone is thinking about their virtual self as when they think about their real one."

New Scientist 11/06/09

email this story | Posted 11/08/09@08:51AM

When God Was Dead: A Look Back Remember that notorious 1966 issue of Time magazine whose cover read simply, "Is God Dead?" The article covered "what may be the last theological craze in history," an intellectual movement "to turn Nietzsche's proclamation of the deity's demise from frightful blasphemy into the basis of a new kind of faith."

Obit Mag 11/05/09

email this story | Posted 11/05/09@10:14PM

The Brainwave Sofa (We're Not Kidding) "The couch's lumpy, bumpy shape is a three-dimensional version of a brain scan, specifically a three-second recording of designer Lucas Maassen's alpha brain waves as he closed his eyes and thought of the word 'comfort'."

Wired 11/04/09

email this story | Posted 11/05/09@10:01PM

Office Gossip Is Being Studied By Ethnographers "One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests."

New York Times 11/03/09

email this story | Posted 11/04/09@10:19PM

Think You're So Smart Because You Have A High IQ? "IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, … including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity - how much information you can hold in mind. But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgments in real-life situations."

New Scientist 11/02/09

email this story | Posted 11/04/09@10:00PM

Curiosity, The Antidote To (And Flip Side Of) Anxiety Psychologist Todd Kashdan points out that the two mechanisms evolved together and complement each other. "Anxiety is in fact one-half of a quite useful yin-yang process. Rather than resist it, he argues, we should acknowledge its existence and turn up the volume on the other side of the equation: the impulse that pulls us toward challenge and exploration."

Miller-McCune 10/30/09

email this story | Posted 11/03/09@10:23PM

Yet Another Contagious Condition: Blaming Other People "Observing someone blame another for their lack of success 'increased the likelihood that people would make subsequent blame attributions for their own, unrelated failures,' according to a paper just published … Deflecting responsibility, in other words, is infectious - but there appears to be an effective inoculation."

Miller-McCune 11/02/09

email this story | Posted 11/03/09@10:14PM

Our Common Offense: Living While Distracted "Good intentions and police action may be no match for the encroachments of gadgetry and wirelessness. Life is and always has been full of distractions, yes; it may be that life itself is a distraction--from death. But our attention flits and wanders as never before. The consequences, outside the cockpit and the driver's seat, are as yet unclear."

The New Yorker 11/09/09

email this story | Posted 11/02/09@08:21PM

Study: Culture Can Affect EvolutionToo "The researchers found that most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood."

Discovery 10/28/09

email this story | Posted 11/01/09@08:00AM

What We Get Wrong About Grief "The idea that grief is work that we must do began with Freud. … [But grief] is not work, and it doesn't occur in stages. It can be short-lived for some people and never-ending for others. Like breathing and consciousness and almost everything else about us, grief fluctuates."

Double X 10/29/09

email this story | Posted 10/29/09@10:06PM

Understanding Despair (Or, Listening To Kierkegaard) "If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair."

New York Times 10/28/09

email this story | Posted 10/29/09@10:04PM

Bad Driving May Be Genetic (See, Mom? It's Not My Fault!) According to a study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, people "with a gene variant limiting the availability of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it."

Miller-McCune 10/29/09

email this story | Posted 10/29/09@09:54PM

Has The Mind-Reading Machine Arrived? "What are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind."

New Scientist 10/28/09

email this story | Posted 10/28/09@10:00PM

What Makes A Cult A Cult And Not A Religion? If France can fine the Church of Scientology for "cult abuses," how does the government there distinguish between cults and legitimate religions? Well, the French, being French, have a taxonomy …

Slate 10/28/09

email this story | Posted 10/28/09@09:31PM

Might We Be Happier In Another Language? "[D]o some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose -- in a subtle way -- their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?"

The New York Times 10/27/09

email this story | Posted 10/28/09@05:04AM

Hey, Kids! Crowdsource Your Trick-Or-Treating! "The folks at Zillow.com have created their first Trick or Treat Housing Index, which draws on the site's real estate data to determine the top-five neighborhoods in Seattle and Los Angeles to maximize candy intake this Saturday."

Wall Street Journal 10/27/09

email this story | Posted 10/27/09@09:57PM

Did Moliere Suspect? Study Links Miserliness, Testosterone "'Our broad conclusion is that testosterone causes men essentially to be stingy,' says Karen Redwine, a neuro-economist at Whittier College in California, who presented the work at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago last week."

New Scientist 10/26/09

email this story | Posted 10/27/09@06:43AM

The World's Shrinking Languages "The world has perhaps 5000 living languages - though estimates vary - so by the end of this century there will be only half this number. In North America alone, there were between 600 and 700 languages when Columbus landed in 1492. This number had fallen to 213 by 1962, of which only 89 languages had speakers ranging from children to the elderly."

New Scientist 10/25/09

email this story | Posted 10/26/09@08:38AM

Remember Everything. Really? "Total recall may be beneficial for businesses and courts, clinics and insurance agencies, even possibly in settling occasional disputes with significant others, but rarely would it be deeply rewarding for the humble self."

New Scientist 10/24/09

email this story | Posted 10/25/09@07:49PM

Music - What's It All Mean? "What is it about music that is capable of swaying human emotions? To answer that question, you have to start by asking another one: What does music mean? We know what a pop song or an opera aria means because the words tell us--but how do we know what a symphony means?"

The Wall Street Journal 10/17/09

email this story | Posted 10/25/09@09:06AM

Do Our Brains Create The Illusion Of Time Passing? You know how sometimes you watch a wheel spin and parts of it appear to rotate backwards? And how frightening events can seem to happen in slow motion? It turns out that humans don't perceive things continuously, but rather in a series (or several concurrent series) of snapshots, as happens with movies.

New Scientist 10/21/09

email this story | Posted 10/22/09@10:07PM