LarsonsWorld -- just another persons /dev/null

How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect - Wired

The reason we're such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We're social animals, and our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.

Read on ...

Worried about skin cancer? Try coffee -- CNET

Studies have already shown that drinking caffeinated beverages can help lower one's chances of developing UV-associated skin cancer, and researchers now think they know why.

Grab a cup of coffee and Read on ...

Chew on This: More Mastication Cuts Calorie Intake by 12 Percent -- Scientific America

About a century ago, a new craze gripped the country's health conscious: mastication. Chewing each bite of food precisely 32 times would help people control how much food they consumed -- turning them from gluttons to epicureans -- according to the early 20th-century dietician Horace Fletcher.

... But a recent study out of China provides a new look at the role that chewing might have in helping our bodies regulate the amount of food we take in -- without having to consult calorie labels.

Read on ...

Lego likenesses of the Roman god Jupiter, his sister Juno and the Italian astronomer Galileo will accompany the Juno space probe. Photo: The Lego Group via Wired

GeekDad Exclusive: Lego Minifigs Soon Headed for Deep Space -- Wired

This Friday, NASA will launch an Atlas V rocket that will be contain a very special payload. Not only will the rocket be carrying Juno, a space probe that is being sent to Jupiter to study the fifth planet from the Sun, but there will be a few unique stowaways. Thanks to a joint mission between NASA and Lego, there will be three very special Lego minifigs affixed to the spacecraft.

Read on and view more images ...

Damn, Legos get to go to space! When do I get to go to space? (Although, I'll pass on that mission. Juno will end its mission 'crashing' into Jupiter. Uh, no thanks.)

Did the Earth's lost moon create the Lunar Highlands? -- Ars Technica

The Moon's far side, although not lacking for light, remained dark in the sense of hidden or obscured until the space race between the US and USSR took aim at the Moon. The Soviets' Luna 3 probe returned the first images of the far side in 1959, and the results were a bit of a surprise. The near side is covered with large, dark, basaltic flows that are called maria; these are rare on the far side, which is dominated by the rugged lunar highlands. A number of explanations have been offered for this difference, but today's issue of Nature contains what is certainly the most dramatic one yet: it suggests that the highlands are the remains of the Earth's missing moon, plastered across the far side of the one remaining Moon.

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Are Smart People Getting Smarter? -- Wired

The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence -- such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland -- have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:

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Antarctic ice and future sea level rise: big questions -- Ars Technica

There has been considerable angst and uncertainty about projections of the sea level rise that accompanies rising global temperatures. In fact, the last IPCC assessment settled on pretty conservative numbers due to that uncertainty. There are a lot of unknowns that make this one of the tougher variables to predict; Antarctica, in particular, has proven difficult to get a handle on.

Read on ...

Through the mists of time: how we discovered the age of the Earth -- Arc Technica

"Where did we come from?" It's a central human question that drives us to wonder about origins -- of humans, life, the Earth, the Universe. The age of the Earth is central to that question, and it has been taken on by human cultures for millennia. But only in the last couple centuries have we obtained the means to unequivocally determine that age from actual evidence. The road was a long one.

In the late 1700s, geology was in its infancy. Rock layers (of any type) were only starting to be recognized as something other than deposits from a catastrophic, world-wide flood. James Hutton, a Scottish scientist, became enthralled with the fantastic histories he saw recorded in the rocks of his homeland. At a now-famous seaside outcrop on the eastern coast of Scotland, he saw nearly horizontal layers of red sandstone on top of completely vertical layers of a much different, gray sedimentary rock. He was the first to grasp the significance of that spatial relationship.

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Drinking Coffee to Stave Off Alzheimer’s -- Scientific America

Is it really as simple at that? I got a tweet from a reader yesterday pointing me to an article in the LA Times. The article was covering a study from the University of South Florida on whether caffeine, and more specifically, coffee, can stave off Alzheimer’s disease. The reader was skeptical, and so am I, seems a bit too good to be true, with all this talk of “unidentified ingredients” in the coffee, etc, etc. Sure, it’s coffee, and I DO love me some coffee. And any excuse to drink it is going to be just fine with me. But I’m not sure we want to put out feelings of faith and hope in the great brown bean prematurely.
So let’s go on through this paper, and through a little bit on Alzheimer’s disease, and we’ll see what comes out the other end.

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What Caricatures Can Teach Us About Facial Recognition -- Wired

Our brains are incredibly agile machines, and it's hard to think of anything they do more efficiently than recognize faces. Just hours after birth, the eyes of newborns are drawn to facelike patterns. An adult brain knows it’s seeing a face within 100 milliseconds, and it takes just over a second to realize that two different pictures of a face, even if they’re lit or rotated in very different ways, belong to the same person.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of our gift for recognition is the magic of caricature -- the fact that the sparest cartoon of a familiar face, even a single line dashed off in two seconds, can be identified by our brains in an instant. It’s often said that a good caricature looks more like a person than the person himself. As it happens, this notion, counterintuitive though it may sound, is actually supported by research. In the field of vision science, there’s even a term for this seeming paradox -- the caricature effect -- a phrase that hints at how our brains misperceive faces as much as perceive them.

Read on ...

I found this a very interesting read. It's amazing how our brain is able to do, what we feel, is the most basic thing, but figuring out how to program a computer to do it is infinitely hard.