I was at the park the other day throwing pinecones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pinecones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much. First, this is important because my brain is almost completely incapable of accessing the proper pop-culture comeback (in this case, Full Metal Jacket) until the middle of the night after it was needed.
At age 6, Mozart performed at the court of the Prince-elect
Maximilian II of Bavaria. At age 8, Joy Foster represented Jamaica in table
tennis at the Caribbean championships in Trinidad. What do the brains of these
two child prodigies have in common?
Fresh from ironing out the mechanical difficulties in the faster-than-light neutrino, CERN and OPERA have licensed the technology to soda giant Pepsi, which will use neutrinos instead of dissolved carbon dioxide to create the drink's iconic fizz."This truly is the choice of a new generation," says Pepsi CEO, Indra Nooyi.
“Here’s the story of the only truly awesome play I’ve ever made,” Jason Katz-Brown told me when I interviewed him for my book, Brain Trust.
After marriage your well-being dips and after divorce it rises; after childbirth, relationship satisfaction stays permanently below its pre-birth level -– so says a meta-analysis of 2,159 studies, published this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sound dire? It is. But keep reading – the reasons for these dips and rises give us married-with-children guys hope.
For my book Brain Trust, I chatted with Ian Stewart, mathematician, prolific puzzle author and very fun person to shoot the mathematical breeze with, who explains the following best card trick I’ve ever seen, invented by mathemagician Art Benjamin of Harvey Mudd College.First, Stewart says, prepare a stack of sixteen cards so that cards 1, 6, 11, and 16 are the four aces. Now deal them facedown in four rows of four. Turn up cards 3, 8, 9, and 14 to make the arrangement shown here.
Put a hand on your widow's peak. About an inch below your fingertips in your medial prefrontal cortex is the home of your sense of self. Julian Keenan, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab at Montclair State University, did a nifty trick: He used what is effectively an electric Ping-Pong paddle to zap this region in healthy subjects, overexciting every neuron within range, and thus for about a fifth of a second, knocking that one-cubic-centimeter area of the brain off the grid.And while he did this, he flashed pictures of faces. Blasted subjects retained the ability to recognize faces of loved ones or even learned strangers, but for this fifth of a second, they failed to recognize themselves.
So goes popular opinion: the lottery’s an egregious societal evil implemented and overseen by shape-shifting, blood-drinking reptilian aliens. And that may be largely true – designed to slowly and quietly bleed dry your pockets – that is, unless you learn to drive it.Assuming drawings actually are random, all the science in the world can’t help you pick the winning numbers. But some fiendishly simple stats can make the dollar you put down likely to win back that dollar and more.
I don’t multitask. Or, I do it so badly that I end up dropping everything in a massive tangle of badness with me standing baffled at its center. This frustrates my wife to no end. She can balance on a beach ball while writing things in her calendar, listening to Radio Lab, text-messaging, and juggling chainsaws (it’s a neat trick — and also kind of hot). I hold that monotasking allows me to get a string of things done right, one at a time. Kristi thinks that multitasking is a prerequisite for inclusion in post-Stone Age society and that monotaskers should be rounded up and reprogrammed at underground government facilities.
Signals can tell cells to act cancerous, surviving, growing and reproducing out of control. And signals can also tell cells with cancerous characteristics to stop growing or to die. In breast cancer, one tricky signal called TGF-beta does both – sometimes promoting tumors and sometimes suppressing them.A study recently published in the journal Oncogene details how tumors may flip the TGF-beta signalling switch, allowing doctors to delete the pathway entirely when it promotes tumors, and leave it intact when it’s still working to suppress them.
Last week I wrote a somewhat half-baked post describing simple numbers that parents can use to pick an elementary school (the first and second were solid!). This week, I called around to get experts’ take on the topic. Here’s what they said.
Lately, my wife and I have been staring slack-jawed at elementary school options, little ropes of drool hanging zombie-like from the corners of our mouths – and so we’ve decided to cede our choice to the numbers.But when you peel back the data, things like high test scores mean next to nothing about school quality – isn’t it likely that socioeconomics and not the school itself created these high test scores? My wife and I want education causation and not just correlation – a school that creates more education than should be predicted by our (reasonable) genetics and (low) income.
