Why Saints Sin and Sinners Get Saintly

The study suggests that people with ample moral self-worth in one aspect of their lives can slip into immorality or opposite behavior in other areas -- their abundant self-esteem somehow pushing them to balance out all that goodness.

Conversely, the study shows, people who engage in immoral behavior cleanse themselves with good work.

Other studies have shown the moral-cleansing effect, but this new Northwestern model shows that the cleansing also has to do with restoring an ideal level of moral self-worth. In other words, when people operate above or below a certain level of moral self-worth, they instinctively push back in the opposite direction to reach an internally regulated set point of goodness.

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Via: PhysOrg

Are human beings impossible to ape?

Chimpanzees share 98.4 per cent of our DNA, but the differences between us and them are still profound, as a new book argues.

Taylor agrees that chimpanzees "show many fundamentally human skills – to a degree that they have the ability to do maths, think abstractly, demonstrate altruism, make tools and imitate each other. There is nothing humans can do that apes can't do, however simplistically."

But, he adds, "we are talking about the difference between using a twig as a tool and using the internet. It is humans that have speech and language, humans that have culture, art, music, science and technology, humans who remember the past, plan for the future, fear death and pay taxes.

"Sometimes, amid all this scientific talk of genetic and cognitive similarity, we can lose sight of the most important facts."

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Via: The Telegraph

The 10 Most Important Technologies of Modern World History

Technology, for the most part, exists to make life easier. By that definition, we’ve got it pretty good thanks to the hard work of our fellow humans. In weighing the world’s most important technologies, we ruled out the nitty gritty that led to some of the creations below — transistors, electricity and the combustion engine, to name a few — and focused on products that changed the world forever. Here are the 10 technologies, in our mind, that have shaped the world in a way we could never go back.

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Via: Gadget Crave

The 16 Members of the U.S. Intelligence Community

With 16 agencies and organizations working both independently and together to collect, analyze, and disseminate information in the interest of protecting U.S. national security, it’s difficult to keep track of who exactly does what among the 16 members of the Intelligence Community. Just ask President Barack Obama. During his recent trip to the burger joint Five Guys, C-SPAN cameras caught Obama asking a man who works at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to explain what the NGA does. Here’s the answer to that question and a rundown of the 15 other members’ main responsibilities.

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Via: Mental Floss

Why Is Sumo Wrestling Such a Big Deal?

Quick, name a Japanese sport! Well, you probably said “sumo” because you’ve already read the headline of this article. But when it comes to the martial arts, sumo is inextricably associated with Japan. But how did it get started, and why is it still so popular? Read on for those answers and more.

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Via: Mental Floss

A few extra pounds can add years to your life: study

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Carrying a little extra weight may actually be good for you, according to a Canadian study that showed a few pounds appear to protect people from an early death.

Researchers found that while underweight and extremely obese people die earlier than people of a normal weight, people who are slightly overweight actually live longer than those of a normal weight.


"But overweight individuals were 17 percent less likely to die. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight."

A Z Lynch Comments:
Could this be because overweight and obese individuals are forced to pay closer attention to their overall health?

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Via: Reuters

10,500-year-old well found, along with skeleton

NICOSIA, Cyprus - Archaeologists have discovered a water well in Cyprus that was built as long as 10,500 years ago, and the skeleton of a young woman at the bottom of it, an official said Wednesday.

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Via: MSNBC

Doctors Baffled, Intrigued by Girl Who Doesn't Age

Brooke Greenberg is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler.

She turned 16 in January.

More Photos"Why doesn't she age?" Howard Greenberg, 52, asked of his daughter. "Is she the fountain of youth?"

Such questions are why scientists are fascinated by Brooke. Among the many documented instances of children who fail to grow or develop in some way, Brooke's case may be unique, according to her doctor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine pediatrician Lawrence Pakula, in Baltimore

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Via: ABC News

Top 10 Misconceptions About Neanderthals

Once depicted as brutal, grunting, slouching sub-humans, Neanderthals are now known to have had brains as large as ours and their own distinct culture. They buried their dead, tended their sick and co-existed with our own ancestors in Europe for thousands of years before becoming extinct just as modern humans flourished and began to spread throughout the continent. This list looks at ten of the most persistent myths about Homo neanderthalensis.

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Via: Listverse

Great whites 'plan' attacks

Great white sharks do not aimlessly wander the ocean waiting to stumble upon their next meal.

Instead, the biggest sharks identify a location from which to strike, and then search the surrounding killing zone for their next victim.

That suggests that the sharks use a premeditated hunting strategy akin to that used by some human serial killers.

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Via: BBC News

5 Familiar Numbers and the Logic Behind Them

Given how digital the world has become, we are hardly bothered by having to deal with one string of numbers after the next: credit card numbers, social security numbers, IP addresses and so on. Do these numbers hold any meaning, or are they just random sequences in a database? Read on to find out.

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Via: Mental Floss

The Incredible Phenomenon of Ball Lightning

Until a short while ago, ball lightning was banished as fantasy by many in the scientific community, notwithstanding the pains to which some researchers have gone to try and recreate the stuff in the lab. Laboratory experiments using high voltages have produced effects that look similar to ball lightning as it is portrayed in reports – like luminous plasma balls hovering over water – but it is unclear whether they are in fact related to a naturally occurring phenomenon.

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Via: Environmental Graffiti

Giant Dinosaurs Get Downsized

Some dinosaurs were the largest creatures ever to walk on land, including the classic long-necked, whip-tailed Diplodicus, but a new study suggests it and its many extinct brethren weighed as little as half as much as previously thought.

A new equation for calculating dinosaur mass based on skeletons found that scientists have been overestimating the girth of many dinosaurs. In some cases, the new calculations show that certain dinosaurs probably weighed about half what they were thought to weigh.

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Via: Live Science

The 7 Greatest Robots of the Pre-Modern World

It's a fact that one day the robots are going to kill and/or enslave us all. It's even in the Bible somewhere, trust me. This notion of creations turning against their masters has been a staple of fiction for centuries; from the Jewish folk tale of the Golem to Frankenstein to Battlestar Galactica. However, these cautionary tales still haven't swayed those with the means of construction from playing god and building blasphemous, soulless machines that will one day eat our kittens and take away our cable. People have been writing about and even designing robots since BCE, but the real robot renaissance began during the Age of Enlightenment and carried throughout the 18th century. The unveiling of new robots would pack theater halls and museums from London to New York City and even royalty couldn't resist the draw of these eerily real creations. Some merely played instruments and some simulated defecation, but no matter how innocent the action, they're all permanently written in the blueprint of our destruction.

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Via: Topless Robot

Humans related to orangutans, not chimps

New evidence underscores the theory of human origin that suggests humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science. Reporting in the June 18 edition of the Journal of Biogeography, the researchers reject as "problematic" the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence.

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Via: PhysOrg

Evolution can occur in less than 10 years

How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside's Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology.

"This shows that adaptive change can improve survival rates after fewer than ten years in a new environment," Gordon said. "It shows, too, that evolution might sometimes influence population dynamics in the face of environmental change."

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Via: PhysOrg.com

What causes lightning?

As summer thunderstorms loom across the U.S., MNN sheds some light on lightning -- one of the deadliest and least-understood weather events on Earth.

Lightning is the weapon of choice for discerning deities. Whether you're Zeus, Thor or Tlaloc, there's no better way to assert your authority than smiting humans with thunderbolts.

For thousands of years, many people saw lightning this way, like a shock collar from the gods. The idea still comes up when someone offers "may God strike me dead" to bolster a claim, and although we've learned a lot about weather and electricity in the past few millennia, lightning and other types of atmospheric electricity remain shrouded in mystery. Uncle Sam's scientists are hard at work, though, and they've pieced together a rough idea of how it all goes down.

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Via: Mother Nature Network

Mistaken Identities and Executions: 6 Murderers Who Didn’t Do It

What do you do when you’ve just hanged someone for murder, and then their “victim” pops up alive and healthy a few towns away?

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Via: Mental Floss

How Alcohol Changes the Brain ... Quickly

In the name of science, eight men and seven women drank alcohol through a straw while lying in an MRI scanner, presumably not all together, to see what would happen.

It went to their heads. Quickly, the researchers say.

Only 6 minutes after consuming an amount of alcohol equivalent to three beers — leading to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.06 percent, which impairs driving ability — changes had already taken place in the brain cells.

For one thing, the brain begins to run on the sugar in alcohol instead of using glucose, the normal brain food.

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Via: Live Science

Have a Purpose in Life? You Might Live Longer

If you have a purpose in life — lofty or not — you’ll live longer, a new study shows.

It doesn’t seem to matter much what the purpose is, or whether the purpose involves a goal that’s ambitious or modest.

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Via: Health News

Prototype Nokia phone recharges without wires

Pardon the cliche, but it's one of the holiest of Holy Grails of technology: Wireless power. And while early lab experiments have been able to "beam" electricity a few feet to power a light bulb, the day when our laptops and cell phones can charge without having to plug them in to a wall socket still seems decades in the future.

Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power. Enough, at least, to keep a cell phone from running out of juice.

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Via: Yahoo Tech

The cephalopods can hear you

The discovery resolves a century-long debate over whether cephalopods, the group of sea creatures that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses, can hear sounds underwater.

Compared to fish, octopus and squid do not appear to hear particularly well.

But the fact they can hear raises the possibility that these intelligent animals may use sound to catch prey, communicate with one another or listen out for predators.

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Via: BBK News

Boxing: A Manly History of the Sweet Science of Bruising

“Boxing is the sport to which all other sports aspire.” -George Foreman

All sports have the potential of becoming about much more than athletics, transforming into symbols of a culture’s and country’s mood, insecurities, conflicts, and hopes. But perhaps no sport lends itself to this kind of transposition more than boxing. For the purity of boxing gives it the nature of a blank canvas; there is no playing field or special equipment; the rules are few and easy to understand. There is but two men, facing off with nowhere to go, with only their fists and their determination to decide their fate. Thus boxing easily becomes a metaphor for debates over our values: good vs. evil, immigrant vs. nativist, bravado vs. humility, intellect vs brute strength.

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Via: Art of Manliness

Teen Outsmarts Doctors In Science Class

When doctors didn't give a Washington state high school student the answers she wanted, she took matters into her own hands.

Eighteen-year-old Jessica Terry, brought slides of her own intestinal tissue into her AP science class and correctly diagnosed herself with Crohn's disease.

"It's weird I had to solve my own medical problem," Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO. "There were just no answers anywhere ... I was always sick."

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Via: Bay Area NBC

A red-wine, polyphenol, demonstrates significant health benefits

The benefits of alcohol are all about moderation. Low to moderate drinking - especially of red wine - appears to reduce all causes of mortality, while too much drinking causes multiple organ damage. A mini-review of recent findings on red wine's polyphenols, particularly one called resveratrol, will be published in the September issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research; the review is also available at Early View.

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Via: PhysOrg

Seven things that don't make sense about gravity

It's the force we all know about and think we understand. It keeps our feet firmly on the ground and our world circling the sun.

Yet look a little closer, and the certainties start to float away, revealing gravity as the most puzzling and least understood of the four fundamental forces of nature.

Michael Brooks investigates its mysterious ways

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Via: New Scientist

Quick Study: Pirates!

Even before sacking the U.S.-flagged Maersk, high-seas thieves had been plenty busy hijacking loaded ships in sparsely patrolled waters. Here, the Reader's Digest Version of why this centuries-old scourge is back—and its human and financial toll.

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Via: Readers Digest

What really prompts the dog's "guilty look"

What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the “guilty look” in dogs in the recently published “Canine Behaviour and Cognition” Special Issue of Elsevier’s Behavioural Processes.

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Via: PhysOrg

10 scientific objects that changed the world

To mark its centenary, the Science Museum in London had its curators select the ten objects in its collection that made the biggest mark on history. Explore them in this gallery, and cast your vote in the public poll to decide the most significant of all.

LINK (Slide show)

Via: New Scientist

How the Nose Can Control Human Sexuality

In the late 19th century, one of Sigmund Freud’s nuttier friends, Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, classified the nose as the body’s most potent sex organ. According to his nasal reflux neurosis theory, “genital spots” inside the nose could excite the male libido and kick-start ovulation in women. His colleagues, however, scoffed at the idea, and Fliess died in obscurity.

But history may judge Fliess more favorably. While sex researchers have abandoned the more lurid aspects of nasal reflux theory, they agree that the nose’s sensory detectors can affect—if not flatly determine—human sexuality. There’s now reason to think that, as the nose goes, so goes sex.

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Via: Mental Floss

Why Men Prefer Direct Pick-Up Lines

Men and women's attitudes to relationships have become remarkably similar -- when dating women are now much more likely to make the first move.

It will come as no surprise that research finds men prefer this first move to be direct. But do men and women agree on what a direct approach is and why such directness is necessary in the first place?

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Via: PsyBlog

'Lost city of the Incas' was not a true city

Machu Picchu, the "lost city of the Incas," was not a true city but rather a pilgrimage center symbolically connected to the Andean vision of the cosmos, an Italian study has concluded.

According to Giulio Magli, professor of archaeoastronomy at Milan's Polytechnic University, Machu Picchu was the ideal counterpart of the Island of Sun, a rocky islet in the southern part of Lake Titicaca.


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Via: MSNBC

7 Civil War Stories You Didn’t Learn in High School

For many American historians, the Civil War is the climax in the story of how the United States came to be what it is today. But you knew that. For mental_floss readers, it’s also a source of some bizarre and surprisingly cool trivia.

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Via: Mental Floss

Problems are solved by sleeping

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers.

The study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.

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Via: BBC News

The Times Top 200 Artists of the 20th Century to Now

Sixteen weeks after we invited you to have your say, the votes are in — all 1.4 million of them. Here, we reveal the results of our poll, in conjunction with the Saatchi, to discover who you think are the greatest artists working since 1900

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Via: Times Online

12 of the worlds most fascinating tunnel networks

This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network.

Networks of secret passages and tunnels have been built on a giant scale, from components of the Maginot line to the Viet Cong Cu Chi Network. Others perform a peacetime function, such as the half mile tunnel network H.G. Dyar built under his Washington home, as a hobby, the passageways under Disney’s Magic Kingdom or the unbelievable 5000 year old Lizard People tunnel network under Los Angeles that the L.A. Times published a diagram of during the depression.

Here is a collection of our favorite tunnel network diagrams, drawings or models.

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Via: Oobject

Intricate Rainforest Sculptures of Olinda

Hidden deep within a lush Australian rainforest are a set of mystical Aborigine sculptures seemingly merged into the natural surroundings. Moss covered torsos of men, women and children protrude from tree trunks and boulders. Some reach heavenward with widespread wings, others envelop each other protectively – all are symbols of the relationship the indigenous Australian Aborigines have with nature.

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Via: Environmental Graffiti

9,000-year-old brew hitting the shelves this summer

This summer, how would you like to lean back in your lawn chair and toss back a brew made from what may be the world’s oldest recipe for beer? Called Chateau Jiahu, this blend of rice, honey and fruit was intoxicating Chinese villagers 9,000 years ago—long before grape wine had its start in Mesopotamia.

University of Pennsylvania molecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern first described the beverage in 2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences based on chemical traces from pottery in the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Northern China. Soon after, McGovern called on Sam Calagione at the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Del., to do the ancient recipe justice. Later this month, you can give it a try when a new batch hits shelves across the country. The Beer Babe blog was impressed, writing that it is “very smooth,” and “not overly sweet.”

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Via: Scientific American

Why Things Become Unpopular

"Why is everybody suddenly wearing those new sandals and listening to that new band? It's so trendy!" A recent study has investigated this sentiment in order to understand why some cultural products and styles die out faster than others. According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.


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Via: PhysOrg.com

7 Ways to Better Recall Your Dreams

Simple techniques for easier dream recollection.
By Michael J. Weiss

What can you do to recall your dreams more often and interpret them more clearly? The experts offer these tips:

1. Incubate an idea. Before you go to sleep, consciously think about a topic or a person you'd like to dream about. Pose a question that's troubling you and see how your dream responds to it.

2. Keep track. Next to your bed, place a pad and pen, or a tape recorder or laptop, to record your dreams as soon as you wake up.

3. Try to awaken naturally, without the help of an alarm clock or barking dog that can disrupt your dream cycle. If your schedule doesn't allow you to sleep in during the week, begin your dream journal on a weekend or during a vacation.

4. Wake up slowly. For the first moment after you awaken, lie still and keep your eyes closed, because your dream may be connected to your body position while you slept. Try to recollect the dream and then store it in your memory by giving it a name like "Late for an Exam" or "My Date with Ashley Judd." When you rise, immediately write down as many images, feelings and impressions as you can.

5. Connect the dots. To better interpret your dreams, try to make connections between your recalled dreams and recent events. Do you recognize people from the present or past? Can you detect any themes from the dream? Look for patterns over several dreams that might help explain an individual dream.

6. Change the outcome. If you have recurring nightmares that make it difficult to sleep, try to change the endings. Once you awaken from a bad dream, visualize a change in the action to create a more positive outcome. If you are trapped, try to fly. In your dream, you can do what you want!

7. Be patient. It may take days or weeks before you're able to recall your dreams in detail, but the experts advise to keep practicing. Dream memories are fragile, and trying to recall all the plot twists and turns on consecutive nights seems to have a cumulative effect.

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Via: Readers Digest

Men 'live longer' if they marry a younger woman

A man's chances of dying early are cut by a fifth if their bride is between 15 and 17 years their junior.

The risk of premature death is reduced by 11 per cent if they marry a woman seven to nine years younger

The study at Germany's Max Planck Institute also found that men marrying older women are more likely to die early.

The results suggest that women do not experience the same benefits of marrying a toy boy or a sugar daddy.

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Via: The Telegraph

Blind Man Uses "Human Sonar" to See

Blind since infancy, Kish makes loud clicks with his tongue, listens for the echo, and uses it to map his environment. The skill, which he calls “human sonar,” enables him to ride bicycles, climb trees, and detect downward slopes (from the way sound waves angle away from him). “The readiness with which people learn sonar suggests to me it may be an inbuilt skill,” Kish writes. And in 2001, he started a nonprofit that helps other visually impaired people “step away from the idea that their perception of the environment need be limited to the length of a stick, or to someone else’s eyes.”

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Via: VSL Science

Scholar unconvinced new lie-detection methods better than old ones

When a crime has been committed, the usual modus operandi for police detectives and their fictional counterparts has been to dust the scene for fingerprints. And once they have a suspect in custody, out comes the polygraph, or lie detector.

But in today's forensically sophisticated, "CSI"-influenced world, polygraphy - which bases its results on functions of the autonomic nervous system - is increasingly dismissed as dated and unreliable. Rapidly replacing older truth-seeking technologies are new brain-based techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and the electroencephalography(EEG)-based technology known as Brain Fingerprinting®.

Because they are "brain-based," both methods have been promoted in the media as being more precise, accurate and trustworthy.

"Functional magnetic resonance imaging and Brain Fingerprinting® have been hailed as the next, best technologies for lie detection in America, particularly in the context of post-9/11 anxiety," University of Illinois professor Melissa Littlefield says in an article published in the May issue of the journal Science, Technology & Human Values.

"Far from describing the brain and its functions, fMRI and Brain Fingerprinting® produce models of the brain that reinforce social notions of deception, truth and deviance," she concludes in the paper's abstract.

In other words, Littlefield is unconvinced that the new technologies are necessarily superior to the old ones. In fact, the professor of English and of kinesiology and community health believes polygraphy may have more in common with the new technologies than many scientists - particularly neuroscientists - would suggest.

10 Common Phenomena Explained

This list has ten explanations of common, every-day things that you probably did not understand. And if you did understand them you’re far cooler than us. Using this knowledge you can impress your friends, family, or romantic interests, because nothing is more attractive to the other sex than knowing how random things work.

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Via: Super Tight Stuff

Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid

Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole.

To attend to these facts, for some people, is to plead for vegetarianism or for a raw-food diet. We should forage and eat the way our long-ago ancestors surely did. For Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and the author of “Catching Fire,” however, these facts and others demonstrate something quite different. They help prove that we are, as he vividly puts it, “the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”

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Via: The New York Times