Spending time alone is a virtually inevitable part of daily life that can promote or undermine well-being.
Here, we explore how the language used to describe time alone—such as “me-time” “solitude,” or “isolation”—influences how it is perceived and experienced […]
linguistic framing affected what people thought about, but not what they did, while alone […]
simple linguistic shifts may enhance subjective experiences of time alone
It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions. […]
Findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed in 2023 by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.
There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.
Paraquat is among the most toxic agricultural chemicals ever produced. It’s banned in the European Union, where the consequences of its use are still being felt, but in parts of the world it’s still being sold. This is made possible, in part, by an influence machine that works to suppress opposition to an $78 billion global industry.
A year-long investigation managed to penetrate a PR operation that casts those who raise the alarm, from pesticide critics to environmental scientists or sustainability campaigners, as an anti-science “protest industry,” and used US government money to do so.
The US-based PR firm, v-Fluence, built profiles on hundreds of scientists, campaigners and writers, whilst coordinating with government officials, to counter global resistance to pesticides. These profiles are published on a private social network, which grants privileged entry to 1,000 people. The network’s membership roster is a who’s-who of the agrochemical industry and its friends, featuring executives from some of the world’s largest pesticide companies alongside government officials from multiple countries.
These members can access profiles on more than 3,000 organisations and 500 people who have been critical of pesticides or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). They come from all over the world and include scientists, UN human right experts, environmentalists, and journalists. Many of the profiles divulge personal details about the subjects, such as their home addresses and telephone numbers, and spotlight criticisms that disparage their work. Lawyers have told us this goes against data privacy laws in several countries. […]
Our investigation reveals that the US government funded v-Fluence as part of its program to promote GMOs in Africa and Asia.
unrelated { Electric cars causing fires after Hurricane Helene flooding }
The basic rule is that the chief executive officer of a company works for the board of directors, and the directors work for the shareholders. Sometimes, though, the CEO is also the controlling shareholder, and this becomes circular: She works for the directors, who work for her. If they disagree, things get weird. If they’re unhappy with her, they can fire her, but then she can fire them.
This doesn’t come up all that often in basic job-performance situations […] It does happen, though: We talked last year about World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., whose board of directors pushed out founder-CEO Vince McMahon after sexual misconduct allegations, and then, as controlling shareholder, he pushed them out.
It comes up more often in mergers and acquisitions, and particularly in going-private transactions. […]
The directors work for all the shareholders, and they can’t just do what the controlling shareholder wants if it’s bad for the other shareholders. But the controlling shareholder gets to pick the board, and if they are too independent she can pick a new board. They can get fired for doing their job too well.
All seven independent directors of DNA-testing company 23andMe resigned Tuesday, following a protracted negotiation with founder and Chief Executive Anne Wojcicki over her plan to take the company private.
It is the latest challenge for 23andMe, which has struggled to find a profitable business model. The stock price rose a penny on Tuesday to $0.35 per share. At that price, 23andMe’s valuation is just $7 million more than the cash on its balance sheet. That represents a 99.9% decline from its $6 billion peak valuation just after going public in 2021. […]
Wojcicki controls 49% of 23andMe votes, giving her a level of control that blocked board members from shopping the company to other potential bidders. She is the only remaining board member after the resignations.
{ Matt Levine/Bloomberg | Continue reading }
The move is almost certainly the final nail in the coffin for the embattled company known for its mail-order DNA-testing kit. Since going public via merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2021, 23andMe has never turned a profit. […]
The board includes Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha as well as Neal Mohan, who took the helm as CEO of YouTube last year after Susan Wojcicki, Anne’s late sister, stepped down.
A diamond – from the Greek ἀδάμας (adámas), meaning unconquerable – is a three-dimensional cubic or hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. As its bonds are strong and its atoms packed closely together, diamond is the hardest natural material and the least compressible. Diamonds have high thermal conductivity and high electrical resistivity, but can be combined with small amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and boron and made into semiconductors. […]
In nature, it takes billions of years to form a diamond. Most of the diamonds nature produces are too impure for jewelry or high-tech industry, and extracting them is costly and dirty. […]
Diamonds grown in the lab are now cheaper than mined diamonds and have superior physical, optical, chemical, and electrical properties. Consequently, they dominate the industrial market. In the past decade, diamond manufacturing technology progressed so much that it is now possible to mass-produce jewelry-quality diamonds in the lab. These lab diamonds are cheaper and more beautiful than mined diamonds. A perfectly cut, flawless lab diamond costs a fraction of the price of a mined diamond of lesser quality.
We do not have a veridical representation of our body in our mind. For instance, tactile distances of equal measure along the medial-lateral axis of our limbs are generally perceived as larger than those running along the proximal-distal axis. This anisotropy in tactile distances reflects distortions in body-shape representation, such that the body parts are perceived as wider than they are. While the origin of such anisotropy remains unknown, it has been suggested that visual experience could partially play a role in its manifestation.
To causally test the role of visual experience on body shape representation, we investigated tactile distance perception in sighted and early blind individuals […] Overestimation of distances in the medial-lateral over proximal-distal body axes were found in both sighted and blind people, but the magnitude of the anisotropy was significantly reduced in the forearms of blind people.
We conclude that tactile distance perception is mediated by similar mechanisms in both sighted and blind people, but that visual experience can modulate the tactile distance anisotropy.
Menstrual synchrony was first demonstrated in a 1971 paper published in Nature by Martha McClintock. […]
she asked 135 college girls living in dorms to recall their period start dates at three times throughout the academic year. She found that close-friend groups had periods significantly closer together in April (later in the year) compared with October: lessening from an average of 6.4 to 4.6 days apart.
The phenomenon was dubbed “the McClintock effect” and is widely held as the first example of pheromones — unconscious chemical signals that influence behavior and physiology — among humans. […] Many subsequent researchers went on to reproduce the results from McClintock’s original experiment in people, rats, hamsters and chimpanzees.
But a cohort of studies that found no evidence for menstrual synchrony began to grow, too. […]
In 1992 H. Clyde Wilson […] re-analyzed McClintock’s first experiment, along with a few others that used a similar design. He found that all had inflated the difference between period start dates at the beginning of their studies […] their model of two pheromones — one that pulls ovulation forward and one that delays it — driving synchrony didn’t work […]
The insurmountable hurdle in all the studies is that women often have persistent cycles of different lengths. As such, they can never truly synchronize, just randomly phase in and out of synchrony over the months as their cycles diverge and converge. […]
But a team of Japanese researchers at Yokohama City University, led by Kazuyuki Shinohara, also found in a series of papers that donor women undergoing these two phases of the menstrual cycle release compounds that when inhaled by other women can significantly impact the frequency in the latter of pulses of luteinizing hormone (LH), which helps control the timing of ovulation and cycle length.
Again and again in the animal world, males have shorter lifespans than females, an effect scientists attribute in part to the deleterious effects of testosterone.
[In 2012,] researchers who looked at historical records of Korean eunuchs castrated during boyhood found that the eunuchs lived considerably longer than ordinary, testicled men. […]
testosterone, a hormone involved in testes growth, muscle development and aggression, but that also seems to have an immune system-weakening effect. […] Women do tend to live longer than men, but that could be for other reasons, including the longevity-enhancing effects of estrogen, the female sex hormone.
A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That’s the essence of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they’ve cracked the conundrum. […]
“We found that the reverse sprinkler spins in the ‘reverse’ or opposite direction when taking in water as it does when ejecting it, and the cause is subtle and surprising.” […] found that the reverse sprinkler rotates a good 50 times slower than a regular sprinkler, but it operates along similar mechanisms, which is surprising. […]
The reverse sprinkler problem is associated with Feynman because he popularized the concept, but it actually dates back to a chapter in Ernst Mach’s 1883 textbook The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargerstellt). Mach’s thought experiment languished in relative obscurity until a group of Princeton University physicists began debating the issue in the 1940s.
acrylic on canvas { David Hockney, A Lawn Being Sprinkled, 1967 }
The frequently repeated view that men are attracted to women with low waist–hip ratios (WHRs) and low body mass indices (BMI) (in well-nourished populations) because these traits indicate health and fertility does not appear to be well supported. Indeed, a low WHR and BMI are most likely to occur in young women in their late teens who have never been pregnant (nulligravidas), women who have demonstrably lower fertility and greater liability to infection than women in their 20s. […]
A nubile woman is a nulligravida who has recently completed physical growth, puberty, and sexual development. This is usually accomplished 3–4 years after menarche in the mid to late teens when female reproductive value is maximal. As noted, women in the nubile age group have the lowest WHRs and, in well-nourished populations, have lower BMIs than women in their 20s, traits strongly associated with attractiveness. […]
Using data for 1.7 million first births from 1990 U.S. natality and mortality records, we compared outcomes for women with first births (primiparas) aged 16–20 years (when first births typically occur in forager and subsistence groups) with those aged 21–25 years. The younger primiparas had a much lower risk of potentially life-threatening complications of labor and delivery and, when evolutionarily novel risk factors were controlled, fetuses which were significantly more likely to survive despite lower birth weights.
researchers have almost always taken participants’ identified age at the time of their first memory at face value. But these age estimates seem to be vulnerable to consistent errors.
As a consequence, the long-standing belief of when earliest memories begin may be wrong, and memories may be much earlier than prior research suggests. […]
Thus, if someone thinks that they remember an event that occurred when they were 3 or 4 years of age, they were probably much younger. In other words, many people can remember back to when they were 2 years of age or even younger, but do not realize it because of systematic errors in memory dating and because they only tried to recall a single memory.
{ Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition | Continue reading }
At the root of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a memory that cannot be controlled. It may intrude on everyday activity, thrusting a person into the middle of a horrifying event, or surface as night terrors or flashbacks. Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories. […]
The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories. When the same people listened to their traumatic memories — of sexual assaults, fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks — the hippocampus was not involved. […]
“traumatic memories are not experienced as memories as such,” but as “fragments of prior events, subjugating the present moment.” The traumatic memories appeared to engage a different area of the brain — the posterior cingulate cortex, or P.C.C., which is usually involved in internally directed thought, like introspection or daydreaming. The more severe the person’s PTSD symptoms were, the more activity appeared in the P.C.C. What is striking about this finding is that the P.C.C. is not known as a memory region, but one that is engaged with “processing of internal experience”
quote { Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the other (page 69), 1979 | PDF }
Unrealistic optimism or optimism bias—the tendency for individuals to overestimate the chance of favorable outcomes occurring and underestimate the chance of bad —has been found to be one of the most pervasive human traits across many domains. For instance, research has shown that individuals tend to underestimate the likelihood of developing a drinking problem or getting divorced and to overestimate their future earnings and how long they are going to live. Our established tendency toward unrealistic optimism poses an evolutionary puzzle as normative models of human judgment, like expected utility theory, suggest unbiased assessments of probabilities are advantageous. Like any other judgmental bias, optimism bias distorts the decision-making process, leading to systematic decision errors, increased rash and risky behavior and a failure to take precautionary measures. […]
There are reasons for expecting that the optimism bias may be associated with cognitive ability. Supportive empirical evidence for this framework comes from the experimental literature on cognitive ability and judgmental biases. For instance, intelligence has been found to lower one’s susceptibility to hindsight bias, overconfidence, framing, and the sunk cost fallacy. […]
we used an unbalanced panel of 36,312 respondents […]
The findings we present provide evidence that forecasting accuracy is linked to cognitive ability. Specifically, we find that higher cognitive ability is associated with a higher incidence of realism and pessimism in beliefs and a lower incidence of unrealistic optimism.
Taken together, our results lead us to conclude that the rash and risky behaviors associated with excessive optimism may be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability.
{ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin | Continue reading }
A cornerstone of cognitive science is that mental systems are limited: There is a maximum amount of information they can process or store, beyond which performance breaks down. Yet so far the study of such limits has been focused on core systems like attention and memory. Here we explore the limit of self-representation, the ability to represent someone or something as you. […]
results are consistent with the view that the mind employs a cognitive architecture that can represent at most one self at a time, and which serially switches out the items it represents. […]
The self-representational limit of one item at a time differs markedly from known limits on other systems, like attention and short-term memory. The number of items we can both track and remember in short-term memory is greater than one, and somewhat flexible depending on the nature of the stimuli and their relations. For instance, people can track more items if they are evenly spaced out on the display rather than clumped together (Alvarez & Franconeri, 2007), remember more items if they are less complex (e.g., simple colors rather than shaded cubes) (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004), and both track and remember more items if they span the visual hemifields rather than occur within a single visual hemifield (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2005; Strong & Alvarez, 2020). Self-representation appears to have a limit that is more severe and inflexible.
{ Focus. The stairs will change direction every ~10 seconds. }
As the founder of Ironic, a meteorology company based in Brooklyn, Mr. Leavitt, 33, knows how temperatures and atmospheric conditions can sometimes affect weddings. […] Mr. Leavitt, who said he has conducted weather advisory for more than 2,400 events, now works as a consultant to wedding planners and venues, with fees starting at around $2,500. […]
While we can’t predict if there will be rain that day, what we can do is look at the historical weather data. We look at a specific mile in a location around the country over the past 30 years, and analyze the information. Say it’s rained three out of seven days, five out of seven days or seven out of seven days — that tells you a lot. If you know it’s going to rain five out of seven days, it’s a good idea to find a venue with an indoor option. If it’s raining once out of seven days, you can plan for an outdoor wedding.
We’re tracking every radar possible, every reporting data possible, and creating a clear picture of what the weather will be on a specific day. […] For a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., we used marine data to look at the wave height to determine when boats should transport guests for the easiest ride with the most peaceful, calm waters. At what time will people become less seasick? We did it in Lake Como, Italy, too.
For a Florida wedding on the beach, a couple wanted to get married outside in the afternoon, but didn’t want guests to be sitting in direct sunlight or holding up parasols and blocking the view. We produced a sun study — looking at the topography of the land, trees on the property, angle of the sun, height of the house and the sun’s path — to choose the precise time to start the ceremony with the most shade.
As meteorologists, we should never ever suggest what people do with their hair. But we can give you all the information on wind, speed, humidity and temperature, so you can take that to a hair stylist. If someone has naturally frizzy hair in a humid climate, or they’re more likely to sweat that leads to oily hair, we can give them the context so they can plan.
no known drug, including caffeine, can effectively reverse sleep deprivation.
The reason has to do, in part, with the circadian rhythm of a chemical called adenosine that plays a major role in the regulation of sleep.
When you awake from a restful night of sleep, the adenosine level in your brain is at its nadir. Throughout the day, it steadily rises and gradually produces the pressure to sleep in the evening. During sleep, adenosine is cleared from the brain, which helps us wake up and stay alert.
Caffeine is a powerful antagonist at adenosine receptors in the brain, blocking the sedating effects of adenosine and making you feel stimulated and mentally sharp.
Here’s the problem. If you cut short your normal night of sleep, adenosine is not fully cleared from the brain. With chronic sleep deprivation, adenosine levels continue to rise, creating a persistent sense of fatigue and sleepiness and impairing cognitive function.
The brain adapts to this flood of adenosine by increasing the number of adenosine receptors in an attempt to get you to fall asleep, which of course only makes you feel more tired.
You will probably respond by increasing your caffeine consumption, in an attempt to block rising adenosine activity, which can only be restored by a normal night of sleep — the very thing my patient was trying to cut short.
Sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired. It impairs the brain’s ability to consolidate memory.
During sleep, your neurons are remodeled and change their firing pattern, which helps burn in the memories that are formed during the day.
Too little sleep can also exacerbate preexisting depression and anxiety disorders and make people with no previous mental health problems generally more angry and impulsive. […]
Intriguingly, while caffeine can’t eradicate sleep deprivation, it does appear to offset some of the harmful cognitive effects of sleep loss on memory. […]
Caffeine is usually metabolized within four to six hours. […] Some people are genetically slow metabolizers of caffeine and will have significant sleep-onset insomnia even from early morning coffee.
And here’s the most effective trick for falling asleep, which has been studied and shown to be as effective — if not more — than any hypnotic drug. Don’t do anything in bed except sleep or have sex — no reading, listening to music or anything else.
