Video Gamers Learn Visual-Based Task More Quickly

by Natalie Shoemaker

Video games have some great benefits beyond entertainment. Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken, has been touting their influential power for years in how engaging in a powerful, interactive story can insight change in our own behavior. A recent study has gone further, finding that gamers get cognitive bonus points in their ability to learn through visual tasks.

The study has significance within the scientific community, which one of the researchers, Yuka Sasaki, elaborated on in a press release:

"When we study perceptual learning we usually exclude people who have tons of video game playing time because they seem to have different visual processing. They are quicker and more accurate."

The researchers documented their study in the publication PLoS ONE, where they pitted nine gamers against nine non-gamers in a battle of visual task learning. In one test, participants were given a “texture” on a screen that consisted of horizontal or vertical lines, but within that texture there would be an anomaly. The participants jobs' would be to pick out the discrepancy as quickly as possible.

Previous studies on this visual test explored how people could improve, and previous researchers found that so long as they weren't distracted by training for a secondary task, they could improve on the first task. So, the question was whether video gamers could adapt to two tasks better than non-gamers.

Over the course of the two-day study, the researchers switched between using horizontal and vertical lines as the main texture in the tests.

Science Daily wrote about the study:

“The first day the subjects trained on each of the two tasks (in a randomized order). The next day they did each again (and again in a randomized order) so the researchers could assess whether they improved. To improve, a person had to reduce the milliseconds of time it took to discriminate the textures at a given level of accuracy.”

The gamers were able to improve on their performance in both tasks, while the non-gamers only improved on the second one they were trained on. Indeed, as in previous studies, learning the second task interfered with their ability to learn the first. Though, the researchers reported a slight lag in the improvement in one visual task over the other. Gamers speed and accuracy improved by about 15 percent on their second task and about 11 percent on their first. But the gap wasn't as significant as the non-gamers who improved on the second task by 15 percent and 5 percent on their first.

The researchers wrote:

"It may be possible that the vast amount of visual training frequent gamers receive over the years could help contribute to honing consolidation mechanisms in the brain, especially for visually developed skills."

Read more at Science Daily.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

An Apple a Day Does Not Keep the Doctor Away

by Natalie Shoemaker

As part of it's April Fool's edition, JAMA Internal Medicine published a recent paper debating the truth of the old adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” The short version: it doesn't, but there are upsides.

Matthew A. Davis and Ann Arbor led the study, using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2007-2008 and 2009-2010). Out of the 8,399 survey participants only 9 percent (753 people) were self-reported daily apple eaters. EurekAlert wrote some fun-facts about those apple-eaters, like that they had “higher educational attainment, were more likely to be from a racial or ethnic minority, and were less likely to smoke.”

Researchers measured the “keep the doctor away” portion of the study as no more than one visit to the physician over the course of the past year. Unfortunately, there's no difference between apple eaters and non-apple eaters when it comes to frequency of visits to the doctor's office. However, there was some margin of difference between the two when it came to prescription medicine, in that apple eaters tended to avoid getting them.Though, if Tyler Vigen has taught me anything about statistics, it's that basing things just on coincidence is a dangerous thing.

The researchers conclude:

"Our findings suggest that the promotion of apple consumption may have limited benefit in reducing national health care spending. In the age of evidence-based assertions, however, there may be merit to saying 'An apple a day keeps the pharmacist away.'”

Read more at EurekAlert!

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An apple a day may not be a bad habit to pick up--it's rich in dietary fibers and Vitamin C--and after all the key to eating healthy, according to Dr. Steven Masley, is having tasty, easy to prepare foods.

Make a Friend, Bond Over Social Anxiety

by Natalie Shoemaker

Finding friends can be tough after college, but research led by Elaine M. Boucher of Providence College has found bonding over shared social anxiety can help build a foundation of platonic companionship. So, forgo trying to break the ice by finding a common interest in Battlestar Galactica or a fondness over Revolutionary War reenactments, and talk about how comfortable or uncomfortable you feel about social interactions.

Melissa Dahl from NYMag writes on the study, published in the journal Personal Relationships , that investigated how 56 same-sex friendships took off when people were paired with similar and dissimilar levels of levels of social anxiety. The participants were paired off randomly, it was only until after four weeks had passed that Boucher determined their levels of social anxiety through a questionnaire, plus an additional survey to assess how close they felt to their new buddy.

After an additional six-weeks had passed, Boucher and her team interviewed the participants again, asking how close they felt to their friend. As suspected, those with similar levels of social anxiety (whether high or low) tended to be more closely bonded that those with dissimilar levels.

The researchers wrote:

“...friends matched on [social anxiety] experienced increased closeness and decreased uncertainty over the 6 weeks, suggesting [social anxiety] similarity may become increasingly important as friendships develop.”

It's nice to know that those of us who feel anxious about meeting people aren't doomed to become just another Forever Alone meme.

Read more at NYMag.

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One in Five College Students Suffer From 'Exploding Head Syndrome'

by Natalie Shoemaker

One in five college students will experience a disruptive sleep episode known as exploding head syndrome. It's a psychological phenomenon where a person is awakened by an abrupt, loud noise or experiences something that feels like an explosion in their head. Quite disruptive to say the least and it's said to affect 18 percent of young adults.

The lead author of a recent study on the issue, Brian Sharpless, an Assistant Professor Washington State University, took a serious look at the disorder. Sharpless and his a team of researchers interviewed 211 undergrad students with the mission to identify which of the participants showed symptoms for exploding head syndrome and/or isolated sleep paralysis. While they were able to recognize which students had experienced these symptoms, Sharpless said there's little science can do for them except let them know they aren't alone.

Exploding head syndrome comes on as someone is drifting off to sleep. Researchers suspect that the problem occurs somewhere when the auditory neurons are shutting down. Instead of drifting off in stages, they all fire at once, creating this loud bang in the brain.

Last year, Melissa Dahl from NYMag interviewed a man about his exploding head syndrome he said, "[I]t sounded to me like someone literally put a hand grenade in the wood stove that’s in my living room, and it just blew up."

Sharpless explained in a press release:

"That's why you get these crazy-loud noises that you can't explain, and they're not actual noises in your environment."

This issue is caused by the brainstem's reticular formation, which is involved in causing involved in isolated sleep paralysis. So, it's likely students who experience one will also have the other. This frightening phenomenon can cause people to get a little paranoid, Sharpless said:

"Some people have worked these scary experiences into conspiracy theories and mistakenly believe the episodes are caused by some sort of directed-energy weapon."

The bang of a sudden noise combined, sleep paralysis, and waking dreams can cause some powerful hallucinations. Some of which can cause people to see demons or believe they're bing abducted by aliens. Unfortunately, the only treatment out there seems to be spreading the word, assuring sufferers that it isn't a government conspiracy or aliens.

"There's the possibility that just being able to recognize it and not be afraid of it can make it better."

Indeed, the man that Dahl interviewed, said the biggest relief was knowing that he wasn't alone with this disease, he said to her:

“Well, once I’ve come to the conclusion, that’s supported by the latest and greatest medical evidence, that there’s nothing harmful about it, I decided I’m not going to worry about it.”

Read more at Science Daily and check out the interview at NYMag.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Early Education Plays Major Role in Developing Intelligence

by Natalie Shoemaker

What dictates a person's intelligence? Is it something in our genetic code that helps us become more brainy, or does how we were raised play a role in our intellectual fate? Tom Jacobs from Pacific Standard writes that this question has been debated by scientists for years. But two recent studies provide evidence against the idea that intelligence is static.

Kenneth Kendler of Virginia Commonwealth University led a study that looked into records of adopted Swedish siblings. He found that “adoption into improved socioeconomic circumstances is associated with a significant advantage in IQ at age 18.”

“Despite being demonstrably related to genetic endowment, cognitive ability is environmentally malleable.”

David Baker, the lead author of a similar study, looked more at the American population. He found that the “mean IQ test scores of cohorts of American adults increased by approximately 25 points over the last 90 years.” This data correlates to increasing school attendance over the years.

The studies both seem to indicate that in order for a genius to thrive, the environment needs to be suitable enough for them to grow. It's not all about natural ability.

Similar scientific studies into how we learn the basic building blocks of language echo these ideas. The wild children studies—chance opportunities where a child has been brought up without language and re-introduced into society—has shown that there's a window of time to influence the genes dedicated to learning communication. However, once that window is closed, it's difficult for the subject to grasp the finer points of communication patterns and its structure.

We are all born into this world with certain set advantages and disadvantages, but in the early stages of our lives, we have the capacity to grow our abilities beyond their original programming. It's all dependent on whether that child's environment will allow it.

Read more at Pacific Standard.

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The Importance of Personalized Workspaces

by Natalie Shoemaker

Personal decorations for your office cube are seen as “territorial markers,” writes BPS. But more than that researchers have found from a recent study that these trinkets help build relationships within a company by creating visual ice-breakers.

Researchers Kris Byron and Gregory Laurence interviewed 28 people across a number of professions in various workplaces. The study was a deep-dive into the items these people left in their workspaces from Star Wars figurines to MBA certificates, going through each piece that stood within their cubes asking about its significance.

They found that the trinkets acted as ambassadors for workers, helping workers express their personalities to others within the office.

Byron and Laurence photographed each of the participants workspaces, examining how these spaces looked from an outsider's perspective. They found that most conversational pieces were displayed where they would be noticed most. When the researchers spoke to the participants about these conversational trinkets, they expressed how important they were to building relationships within the company and yet businesses often wanted clean, sterile workspaces.

The researchers write:

"They want to have such strong relationships with customers but they’re taking away the personal elements that I think can lend towards building those types of relationships with clients."

It's an interesting thought, companies often want to present a certain image, while building good relationships between workers. However, office parties may not be the only way to do that—letting your workers add a little office flare may help in the day-to-day. As an introvert who once worked in a corporate office building, being able to personalize my workspace was an important part of meeting and bonding with the people I worked with on a personal level. Without them, I'd have been the loner in my office.

The researchers note that "organizations would be unwise to put excessive limits on employees’ personalization of their workspaces."

To read more about the study, check out BPS.

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Comebacks: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and the City of Detroit

by Bob Duggan

Few American cultural institutions stared as deep into the yawning, austerity-driven abyss of large-scale deaccessioning as The Detroit Institute of Arts. When the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, vulturous creditors circled the DIA’s collection, estimated worth (depending on the estimator) of $400 million to over $800 million. Some experts see signs of a Detroit comeback, however, but one very visible sign is the new DIA exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit , a showcase of the city’s ties to Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well as a tribute to Kahlo’s and Rivera’s own artistic comebacks. Few exhibitions truly capture the spirit of a city at a critical moment in its history, but Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit is a show of comebacks that will have you coming back for more.

The road to Detroit for Diego and Frida actually begins in San Francisco, where then-DIA director Wilhelm Valentiner approached Rivera in April 1931 about painting murals at the DIA. At the time, Rivera was the most famous (and controversial) muralist in the world thanks to his socialist politics and willingness to express those politics in his art. His diminutive wife, Frida, also painted, but few took notice at the time. Works by Frida, such as Frieda and Diego Rivera (from 1931; detail shown above), painted the same month Valentiner met with Diego, drew attention based almost solely on Diego’s notoriety. The banner flying over Frida’s head announces who she and her husband are and the name of Albert Bender, the San Francisco friend and collector for whom the painting was made. The dual portrait later appeared at a San Francisco “women artists” exhibition, marking the first time the public could see (if not take notice of) Frida’s art.

Whereas San Francisco offered some of the Latino culture of their native Mexico for the Riveras, Detroit came as a culture shock. While Diego kept busy drawing preliminary sketches for the murals in the then state-of-the-art Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant, pregnant Frida struggled to find her place in the Motor City. Kahlo’s 1932 painting Self-portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States captures vividly how torn the artist felt between the two worlds as well as how clearly she preferred her native country to what she came to call “Gringolandia.” The loss of her pregnancy during her time in Detroit inseparably associated her life-long physical and emotional agony as shown in the painting Henry Ford Hospital . Frida paints her nude body broken and bleeding on a hospital bed clearly marked “Henry Ford Hospital” as Henry Ford’s factories line up across the horizon and assorted objects (her damaged pelvis, the dead fetus, a machine of unknown purpose) hover around her body like balloons attached by thin red strings.

Kahlo frequently left Detroit to go to San Francisco or Mexico during their time there, her presence not nearly as vital as that of Diego’s. Looking back at this time from a modern perspective, it’s difficult to comprehend her obscurity beside Diego’s mammoth fame, as if he dwarfed her artistically as well as physically. But in many ways the “Frida” of “Fridamania” created after Hayden Herrera’s landmark 1983 biography begins in Detroit, where Kahlo suffered the most but also began to channel that suffering into her art. Kahlo’s comeback as a force for feminism and modern art would take decades to happen, but that comeback begins in Detroit.

Unfairly, as Frida’s star rose, Diego’s star sunk. In recent decades, thanks in no small part to the 2002 film Frida , in which Salma Hayek plays the long-suffering, almost angelic title character to Alfred Molina’s philandering Diego. Diego was certainly no saint, but many still conflate his poor character with his talent. However, even before casting him as a cad, critics slapped Diego with a Communist label, most strenuously during the “Red Scare” heyday of 1950s American McCarthyism. Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals (which you can virtually “tour” here and here) reflect a short period in American history when socialism found a fair hearing in the wake of the rampant capitalism that led to the Great Depression. Rivera murals combine realistic details of cutting edge assembly line technology along with sympathetic portrayals of the people working those assembly lines. Such a critique of American capitalism not only in the heart of a manufacturing hub, but also cooperated with and even partially financed (by Henry Ford’s son, Edsel) seems like a fantasy today. The feeling of those years that allowed Rivera’s murals to stand also elected Franklin D. Roosevelt president and welcomed the hope of the “New Deal” that critics also saw as dangerously “socialist.”

To their credit, even in the darkest McCarthyite years, the DIA never destroyed Rivera’s murals, although they did hang a “disclaimer” during the 1950s calling “Rivera's politics and his publicity seeking… detestable,” but also praising how “Rivera saw and painted the significance of Detroit as a world city.” The disclaimer ended with the suggestion that, “If we are proud of this city's achievements, we should be proud of these paintings and not lose our heads over what Rivera is doing in Mexico today.” After completing the Detroit Industry murals, Rivera traveled to New York City to paint the Man at the Crossroads mural for Rockefeller Center in New York City at the request of Nelson Rockefeller, who wanted the best muralist money could buy, if not the politics that came with him. When Rivera refused to remove the portrait of Vladimir Lenin from the mural, Rockefeller ordered him to stop painting and destroyed the mural altogether. It is a small miracle that the Detroit Industry murals survive today.

The comeback of the city of Detroit itself would be much more than a small miracle. But thanks to the resilient spirit of the natives as well as DIA’s dogged efforts to cling to the city’s heritage and identity, I’m willing to bet on their success. The exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit beautifully embodies that comeback spirit on many levels—as the place Fridamania’s birth pains made her posthumous comeback possible, as the home of Diego’s murals that bear witness once more to his genius, but also as a place where art itself can represent the best that a city once was and can be again.

[Image: Frieda and Diego Rivera (detail), Frida Kahlo, 1931, oil on canvas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, Gift of Albert M. Bender © 2014 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

[Many thanks to The Detroit Institute of Arts for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to the exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit , which runs through July 12, 2015.]

[Please follow me on Twitter (@BobDPictureThis) and Facebook (Art Blog By Bob) for more art news and views.]

Online Learning Hasn't Fully Democratized Education, Yet

by Natalie Shoemaker

Online learning sites, like Khan Academy, Duolingo, Udemy, and Coursea, have helped provide anyone with access to an internet connection to a college-level education. Anything that you would ever want to achieve or learn is at your fingertips—regardless of your race, gender, or socio-economic status.

Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, believes that in order to benefit from online learning, people need to take ownership of their education in order to make an impact. Not just passively listening to a video, assuming you'll learn something through osmosis, but by engaging in the content that's being lectured.

This idea is all well and good, but Marc Sollinger from PRI argues that there are still quite a few barriers that prevent Khan's vision of democratized education from becoming reality. Sollinger interviewed Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California Irvine, to get her take on whether e-learning is the revolution everyone is making it our to be.

She explained:

“Often, when we think of the open Internet and resources being freely available, we assume it has a democratizing function. That anybody can access this stuff, it’s free and open, so therefore it must be more equitable. The sad fact is that we know historically, that when you provide fancier technology, it actually increases inequity.”

She cites one barrier being access to new technology: the haves and the have nots, if you will. But even if we lived in an ideal world where everyone had a laptop, iPad, and smartphone, she says it doesn't make a difference if the people most in need do not have context for using this technology. A great example of this is the difference between girls and boys growing up in the computer age during the 1990s. By the time both of these groups got to the classroom, most boys already had context for how this technology functioned.

Online learning still has a long way to go before it's an equal playing field, but Ito says that educators are determined to help it get there:

“The sector around around educational technology is very progressive and quite aware of these issues, and is grappling with them in a serious way.”

Read more at PRI.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Procrastination May Have Ties to Heart Disease

by Natalie Shoemaker

Procrastinators should watch themselves, putting off today what you could do tomorrow may have ties to heart disease. Melissa Dahl from NYMag writes on the latest research that claims there's a link between the two.

The study, published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine , doesn't go into the whys of the link, just that one may exist. Fuschia M. Sirois of Bishop's University in Quebec led the research group. Participants were made up of two groups of people, those with hypertension and cardiovascular disease, and those in good health.

The two groups were given the same questionnaire to measure their tendency to put things off till later. The results showed that those with heart disease were more likely to agree with statements, like "I am continually saying I'll do it tomorrow," than the healthy folks.

While there's no conclusive evidence in this study to indicate why this link exists, as a procrastinator I feel I can provide some personal insight. It's stressful to put off work or chores--almost like there's a weight on your chest. But on the days when I do manage to wake up at 5am and get my work done before noon, I feel like a better person. Dahl provides her own suggestions, writing:

“People who are habitual procrastinators may be likely to put off dreary chores like exercising or eating healthily, and the avoidance of these can of course lead to chronic health issues, like heart disease.”

Procrastinators get into the habit of beating themselves up for not going to the gym and spending an hours on Facebook instead. Buy Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, says you shouldn't do that to yourself. As a man who has studied how habits form, he knows we need to put off work sometimes. In his DSN interview, he describes willpower and focus as a muscle—one that we should exercise. So, schedule in that five minute break for Facebook ever hour. After a few weeks or a month of this, he says you eventually won't need that Facebook break:

Read more at NYMag

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Targeting Physical Education in Budget Cuts is Shortsighted

You are the Essence of Learning, not a School or University

by DSN Editors

If you're learning, you're being taught, no matter who is doing the teaching or where the lesson is taking place (and conversely, if you're not learning, you're not being taught). That message reflects the mission of the Khan Academy, an online learning platform that offers free lessons to anyone, anywhere, in subjects ranging from algebra to art history.

Created by Salman Khan after tutoring his cousins by telephone, the Khan Academy not only teaches academic subjects, it develops skills like grit and determination that are needed to take ownership of information. And this, says Khan, is what the essence of education is all about:

"There's this illusion that is created in our classical education system and even at university that someone is teaching it to you. Really they're creating a context in which you need to pull information and own it yourself. ... And when you think online, that becomes that much more important."

Online learning platforms have long promised to disrupt current models of education but rather than compete outright with traditional institutions like colleges and universities, they are more likely to be folded into standard curricula. While schools like Harvard and Stanford offer free online classes, an increasing number of institutions will look for ways to economize their teaching structure.

American universities are already facing a time of unprecedented change, when standard cost-cutting measures combined with tuition hikes are not longer sufficient to control costs. In 2014, the consulting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) issued a white paper on the state of higher education. Here is what PwC said:

"Higher education institutions are entering a time of significant change. In order to meet the demands of students, parents, and the federal government, marginal cost reductions may not be enough to support decreasing tuition. For-profit online institutions and free online colleges have shown that there may be lower-cost alternatives to the traditional educational models. The question now being asked is, are college and university presidents, boards, and faculties ready to seriously consider and implement non-traditional educational delivery alternatives to truly make education affordable and competitive?"

(As part of its "Aspire to Lead" initiative, PwC recently partnered with DSN to curate a series of videos and articles on developing the next generation of women.)

Reusable-Bag Users May Reward Themselves with More Junk Food

by Natalie Shoemaker

We like to reward ourselves for good behavior. We go for a walk outside and reward ourselves with a soda. Even when we bring our own reusable grocery bags, a recent study has shown people tend to reward themselves with some extra junk food.

Uma R. Karmarkar told Harvard Business Review in an interview there's a precedent for this kind of thing:

"Similar research has also been done on health decisions. I get a Diet Coke; I treat myself to a hamburger. In this case bringing a bag makes you think you’re environmentally friendly, so you get some ice cream. You feel you’ve earned it."

Karmarkar and colleague Bryan Bollinger retrieved mounds of data from customer loyalty cards from one location of a California grocery-store chain. After analyzing close to one million transactions, the researchers zeroed in on shoppers who brought their own bags (signified by a discount subtracted from the bill). The researchers cut out any transactions that weren't, what they considered, part of a weekly shopping trip.

They found that those who used reusable bags tended to continue their do-gooder trends. People who brought reusable bags were 0.25 percent more likely to buy organic. However, for every good deed there should be a reward, right? So, those who also brought reusable bags were also 1.25 percent more likely to add chips and candy to their shopping cart.

The researchers admit that these numbers aren't terribly high, but it's a good example of what consumer psychologists like to call “licensing.” You do something good, so now you can do something bad. It's interesting, however, as “the licensing elements of these results are highly dependent on that motivation arising from the shoppers making a choice for themselves, rather than being directed into it by others,” which grocery stores have been known to do. Food manufacturers often manipulate the shape of containers to make it more appealing to pick up and buy. But this choice is without coercion on any company's part.

Read more about the study at the Harvard Business Review .

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

As Medical Advancements Grow, People Feel Less Healthy

by Natalie Shoemaker

After 25 years of medical expansion, we've come a long way. Advancements through research have helped doctors put a stop to diseases and create devices to help aid in early detection. After all that you'd think people would have an optimistic outlook on health care, but it's not so.

Hui Zheng, an Assistant Professor of sociology at Ohio State, examined several large, multinational datasets that asked people to rate their health between 1981 and 2007. Zheng then compared that data to the medical innovations that took place across 28 countries in that time. What he saw was the growth of medical technology and services, and the decline of people's confidence in health care.

Zheng explained the results in a press release:

"Access to more medicine and medical care doesn't really improve our subjective health. For example, in the United States, the percentage of Americans reporting very good health decreased from 39 percent to 28 percent from 1982 to 2006."

He admits the idea “seems counterintuitive, but that's what the evidence shows. More medicine doesn't lead to citizens feeling better about their health--it actually hurts.”

Even when taking education and socio-economic status into account, Zheng reported that “the improvements we might expect to see in subjective health as economies grow and citizens become richer seem to be offset by medical expansion."

With better doctors and detection, people begin to feel that there are more “new” diseases cropping up when that just isn't the case. The science is better, giving people a name to what disease X or Y is now, and to the masses, this information may lead to a skewed perception—there's more to be afraid of. Perhaps there is a certain burden of truth that comes with these advancements, as well as the dawn of sites like WebMD—a place where every self-diagnosed ailment yields at least one result relating to cancer.

All the aggressive screenings and an over-diagnosis of patients, he says, only furthers to contribute to this altered mentality of health. Zheng thinks that some people may be overly optimistic when it comes to expectations.

“Consumers begin demanding more medical treatment because of the declines in subjective health and the increasing expectations of good health, and medical expansion continues. It is a cycle.”

Read more at Science Daily.

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With Fewer Electronics, People Follow a Natural Sleep Cycle

by Natalie Shoemaker

The brain uses certain cues to know when to wake up, eating gets our metabolic systems going and light suppresses the sleep chemical melatonin. But researchers have stated again and again how artificial light from iPads and smartphones—blue light—is messing with our sleep patterns. Developers have the task of finding ways to suppress this spectrum of light that's keeping users awake at night.

Gregory Ferenstein from Pacific Standard writes on several recent studies that look at how people in cities with fewer electronics sleep. One study found that the people in the rural town of Baependi, Brazil take more of their cues from the sun.

Malcolm von Schantz from the University of Surrey, who led the study, explained:

"The people of Baependi, particularly those in the countryside, maintain a much stronger link with the solar rhythm, largely because many of them work outdoors. Midnight really represents the middle of the dark phase, and yet many of us in the industrialized world are not even in bed by then.”

The town sleeps at sundown (around 9:30pm) and wakes with the rising sun (around 6:30am), whereas people in London wake around 8:30am and go to bed around 11:15pm. With fewer devices to compete for their attention, they're able to detach themselves. But it's also about the kind of light these devices emit. The blue spectrum light, the same as the rising sun, which is supposed to set our bodies in motion, but instead plays tricks on our sleep/wake cycle.

After all this research, tech giants have a new niche to market if they can figure out how to shade this blue glow. One start-up founder, Michael Herf, already has. His f.lux software fixes this problem “it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.”

While some consumers are aware of the risks, it's time for developers to consider how they can create night-friendly tablet devices.

Read more at Pacific Standard

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

No Political Society Can Deliver Us From Humanity's Innate Fear

Underground Tubes on the Moon Hold Possibilities For a Lunar Colony

by Natalie Shoemaker

You may not know it, but the moon wouldn't be the most hospitable place to settle down. Temperatures can reach as high as 250 degrees, not to mention there's a constant threat of space debris crashing into the satellite sphere, oh, and there's also the cosmic rays to worry about—you know, radiation and all that. However, a team at Purdue University thinks there's still hope for a colony on the moon in its underground tunnels.

It's just a theory, but the team has some evidence that there could be underground lava tubes snaking beneath the moon's dusty exterior. Big enough to hold entire cities. These tubes would be similar to those on Earth, they are thought to form as a result of lava pushing to the surface, which leaves behind an empty cavern where the molten lava used to be. However, it's not certain these lunar tubes exist. But images of the satellite appear to show opening to these tunnels, according to Jay Melosh, a professor assisting in the research.

"There has been some discussion of whether lava tubes might exist on the moon. Some evidence, like the sinuous rilles observed on the surface, suggest that if lunar lava tubes exist they might be really big."

The next question here is are these tube really able to sustain a lunar colony? The team seems to think so. David Blair, a graduate student who led the study, says the tunnels wouldn't be at risk of collapse:

"This wouldn't be possible on Earth, but gravity is much lower on the moon and lunar rock doesn't have to withstand the same weathering and erosion. In theory, huge lava tubes—big enough to easily house a city—could be structurally sound on the moon.”

The caverns would be a more manageable temperature--the tubes sitting at a brisk -4 to -22 degrees Fahrenheit--and the lava walls would help to protect moon citizens from flying debris. But until someone decides to take a dive below the moon, we won't really know if they exist. Anyone wanna go spelunking?

Read more at Purdue University News.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Why Do We Feign Knowledge?

by Natalie Shoemaker

Claiming knowledge of things we have no knowledge of is something everyone has done at one point or another, whether intentionally or unintentionally. This kind of overconfidence has a science behind, and Cornell professor David Dunning is one of the men who studies it. Mary Dooe from PRI writes that it's a bit of a psychological phenomenon--people who claim expertise in a subject they know nothing about.

Dunning has put this claimed intelligence to the test, asking participants to answer questions on various fake subjects from political figures to cities. Yet, despite their non-existence people still have an opinion about them. He explains:

"What we find is that people are quite ready to start talking about things they can't possibly know anything about because we made that thing up in our office just the week before."

He says that there's a rational reason for this rather silly behavior, saying that we assume anything anyone is asking us has some basis of truth. So, why bog-down a conversation with questions? Instead, he says, "people don't necessarily exactly know what they know versus what they don't know; they infer what they know versus what they don't know from, let's say, pre-existing notions they have about themselves."

It all depends on how you see yourself. If you consider yourself a geek, of course you're going to know about that comic book or tech product that may not exist. Perhaps, you consider yourself a political news junkie—ever hear of this candidate that doesn't exist? Sure.

As for what causes this overconfidence is unclear. Dunning says:

"There is a reason to believe that at times we are going to make mistakes and claim knowledge of things we have no knowledge of. We're inveterate storytellers, we're inveterate explainers, we're inveterate theory inventors. We see something out there in the world and we try to explain why it's happening."

The anti-vaxxer movement is a clear result of that. Parents want to know why their child has Autism, and a narrative begins to form with questionable science between rising vaccination rates correlating to rising rates of Autism.

Read and listen to more at PRI.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

What's the Perfect Amount of Homework?

by Natalie Shoemaker

Homework, like in all things in life, has a happy medium. The issue among scientists and educators is finding and agreeing on that middle ground. Melissa Dahl from NYMag reports that new research published in the Journal of Educational Psychology has found that any amount of homework that surpasses 70 minutes is too much.

Researchers from the University of Oviedo, Spain had a group of 7,000 teenage students participate in their study. They asked students to answer a 24-question test that gaged their homework habits (provided they answered honestly). The researchers then had the teens participate in taking two 24-question math and science tests.

The results indicated that teens who reported doing about and hour of homework a night attained the highest scores. Those who reported spending anywhere from 90 to 100 minutes on homework each night didn't do quite as well—more isn't always better. But those who were not in the habit of doing homework at all faired worse than both groups.

The researchers write:

“The data suggest that spending 60 min per day doing homework is a reasonable and effective time. Furthermore, the results indicate that both the quantity of homework and the frequency of assignment are related to academic results.”

Educators shouldn't do away with homework, nor should they seek to overwhelm students with hours of it. It “remains a vital tool for comprehensive education of adolescents.

”The researchers suggest that the content of the homework should not be repetitious, but a challenge to the principles they've been taught, though, not so much as to frustrate or discourage students from doing it. Homework should also be given with regularity in order to teach habits and self-learning techniques.

In his DSN interview, Andreas Schleicher, talks about what steps parents and educators can do to ensure a quality education over time. He suggest implementing a kind of measurement framework is an important step in order to begin this process.

To read more about the study and disputes over homework, check out the article on NYMag.

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Death at the Museum: Tunisia, ISIS, Civilization, and Survival

by Bob Duggan

The attack at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, Tunisia, on March 18, 2015, was an attack on civilization itself. Not just Tunisian civilization or Western civilization or Islamic civilization or Christian civilization—ALL civilization. ISIS may not have been directly involved in the Tunisian attack, but its iconoclastic, but its “year zero” philosophy certainly was present. The fact that these attackers targeted tourists seeking out ancient civilizations rather than the artifacts of those ancient civilizations makes this latest tragedy even more chilling. The Bardo National Museum attacks may one day emerge as the first battle in the ultimate fight for civilization’s survival.

When terrorists struck the Bardo National Museum this week, they left 19 dead: 2 locals from Tunisia, 5 from Japan, 4 from Italy, 2 from Colombia, 2 from Spain, and 1 each from Australia, Poland, and France. (One victim’s nationality was not disclosed.) The nationalities of the 44 injured also spread across the globe. Such an attack on tourism at one of Tunisia’s main tourist attractions marks a focused attack on the Tunisian economy itself, which is based heavily on tourism. The attacks may have been motivated by the recent death in battle of Ahmed Al-Rouissi, a Tunisian ISIS leader in Libya, and/or by major confiscations of weapons from Tunisian jihadi groups by the Tunisian government. Tunisia and other countries fighting ISIS and similar groups have seen and even come to expect retaliatory attacks, but the Bardo attacks represent a wholly different approach from terrorists, who usually choose more clearly political or military targets.

Tunisia itself stands as a testament to the possibility of peaceful change in the Islamic world. Tunisia’s 2011 “Jasmine Revolution,” part of the wider “Arab Spring,” began with the ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (who bloodlessly, but unelectedly replaced his ill predecessor in 1987 in a “medical coup”) and concluded with the democratization of the Tunisia with free, democratic elections of center-left and left-leaning parties committed to the modernization and tolerance.

One powerful symbol of the Tunisian revolution’s effects is the Bardo National Museum itself. Originally a 19th-century bey’s palace, the Bardo National Museum was called before the 2011 revolution Museum Alaoui, after the then-reigning bey (the Turkish title for a chieftain). The name was new, but the art inside remained the same. Decades of excavations of the North African country that once was classical Carthage, the BCE power that vied for power with the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome (but eventually lost), unearthed riches for the modern imagination to wonder at. The conquering and often colonizing winners left behind treasures and influences that you can see easily throughout the Bardo National Museum, including in the “Carthage Room” (shown above). Tunisia’s one of those many amazing sites in Northern Africa and the Middle East where ancient cultures clashed and cross-pollenated in interesting ways.

Such interaction makes the intolerance behind the attacks even sadder. “Today’s murderous assault targeted not only tourists and Tunisians but also the tolerant and rights-respecting society that Tunisians have been struggling to build,” Human Rights Watch’s Eric Goldstein remarked. But this attack falls in line with the larger iconoclasm of ISIS. The Guardian’s Ian Black neatly outlined the religious reasons behind ISIS’ attack on cultural sites within their control. “Destroying some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures is something that flows from a fanatically purist interpretation of Sunni Islam as first laid down in 7th-century Arabia and revived more than a millennium later,” Black explains. That misinterpretation thus puts not just Western cultural sites on the hit list but also “90% of Islamic monuments, holy places, tombs and mausoleums in the Arabian peninsula… on the grounds that they were ‘polytheistic,’” including, amazingly, the grave of the prophet Muhammad’s wife and his descendants, including his daughter, Fatimah. This isn’t just iconoclasm—it’s large-scale erasure with the goal of turning back the clock to some mythic, pure starting point, a true “year zero” in the sense not only of beginnings, but also of emptiness. In addition to sculpture and other visual art, ISIS burns musical instruments and torches libraries with the same eradicating end in mind.

But as troubling as targeting the objects of civilization feels, I find the targeting of those who appreciate those objects even more threatening. Yes, on a purely “let’s hurt them where they live” level, the Bardo National Museum attack involved economic elements, but on the larger scope of ISIS-style terrorism, striking fear into the hearts of those who consume and patronize culture helps progress the “year zero” scheme. Civilization exists in objects, of course, but it endures in the minds, hearts, and imaginations of those who study them. Cutting off that curiosity, especially in those motivated to travel to places such as Tunisia, burns bridges to the past as powerfully as burning any museum or library. Thousands of Tunisians took to the streets the day after the attacks both to protest the violence and to affirm their commitment to democracy and the continuation of civilization. Considering how many different countries had citizens involved in the bloodshed, it will be interesting to see how many other nations do the same. Je suis Bardo?

Of all the treasures of the Bardo National Museum, perhaps the finest is their world-class collection of Roman mosaics, the beautiful images composed of tiny colored stones called tesserae . Just as you need to need to step back from these mosaics to allow those tiny tesserae to form a larger picture, we all need to step back from the individual attacks on Tunisia and ISIS-controlled lands to see the bigger picture of an all-out attack on civilization. Some will want to paint this conflict as Western versus Islamic civilization, with all the religious overtones that involves, but, as pointed out above, this struggle is literally ISIS versus the world—the entire world outside their narrow definition of Islam, which includes at least 90% of Islamic cultural sites and who knows what percentage of Islamic faithful. Innocent people gave their lives yesterday because they wanted to experience a part of our shared, global heritage. If civilization will survive ISIS’ “year zero” plan, maybe we should all start seeing civilization and its cultural manifestations not as a luxury, but as a matter of life and death.

[Image: Carthage Room, Bardo National Museum, Tunis, Tunisia. Photo by Bernard Gagnon. Image source: Wikipedia.]

[Please follow me on Twitter (@BobDPictureThis) and Facebook (Art Blog By Bob) for more art news and views.]

Teens Report Doing Homework, Changing Clothes While Behind the Wheel

by Natalie Shoemaker

Texting and driving isn't the only distraction that can lead teens, or anyone for that matter, to disaster. Campaigns dedicated to raising awareness about the dangers of texting and driving have helped make a dent, according to a study published in the Journal of Transportation Safety and Security . But what about all the other distractions? Researchers have found that there are plenty of other things teens can occupy themselves with that don't include keeping their eyes on the road.

David Hurwitz, an Assistant Professor of transportation engineering at Oregon State University, led the study where he and his team conducted a survey to find out what teens are doing behind the wheel (provided they answered honestly). What his team found was 27 percent admitted to changing clothes while driving, as well as some cases of participants admitting to putting on makeup and doing homework.

In an interview with NPR, Hurwitz talked about his team's reaction to some of the findings:

"We were pretty surprised at the changing clothes bit. Teens are busy, I guess."

The good news is, the campaigns to stop teens from texting and driving have made an impact, according to the surveys. Hurwitz reported that only 40 percent of teens admitted to texting behind the wheel, which is still a lot, but far fewer than what had been reported in earlier studies.

"But there are all sorts of other distractions and teens have no awareness of the risks."

Something as simple as adjusting the radio or GPS, or talking on the phone can be just as distracting. It only takes a moment. So, as part of their research, Hurwitz asked the teen participants from the survey to take an interactive course to show them how dangerous distracted driving can be. In one scenario, the researchers asked the teens to try and write down a series of numbers while talking on the phone. The multi-tasking exercise proved quite difficult.

"This was just a scenario to demonstrate that having a distraction can really prevent you from doing basic tasks."

This study raises awareness that texting and driving shouldn't be the only focus of these ad campaigns, but distracted driving as a whole.

Read more at NPR.

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Find Happiness in Keeping a One-Sentence Journal

by Natalie Shoemaker

Most people (myself included) have started and stopped a journal or a diary quite a few times over the course of their lives. The idea of a personal log sounds romantic, but in our hectic lives, it's hard to sit down and etch out your day in so many words. But what about just one sentence a day?

The suggestion comes via Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project. In her latest podcast on happiness, she suggest people write one sentence a day—think of it as a personal tweet or cliff-notes encompassing the last 24 hours. For those of you that think one sentence a day may be too little to help manage a day full of things, Rubin claims it's just enough. Take it from her, she has been keeping a one day journal for over a decade.

“When I look back on it, you know, years later, like that one sentence really does keep memories vivid.”

Melissa Dahl from NYMag confirms this idea in a recent article. She wrote about how her grandmother keeps a daily journal with just a few lines of text, and she's amazed at how she can flip to a page and remember things with such clarity. Dahl writes:

“Often, when the family is together, she’ll dig out one of her old journals and tell us what she and various other family members were doing on a random day, in, say, 1994. I've always been amazed at how interesting these little moments are in retrospect.”

Rubin believes that reliving these daily moments can help make us happier people, and keeping a one-sentence journal is an accessible way to do that. What's more, it'll make you happier.

“Research suggests writing narratives of your experiences can make you happier.”

Listen to more on Gretchen Rubin's website.

Photo Credit: Rory MacLeod/Flickr

NASA, Mars One, or SpaceX: Who Has the Best Chance of Getting to Mars?

by Natalie Shoemaker

NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce wants to give people a dose of reality when it comes to the Mars mission. There finalists in the Mars One pool have been whittled down to 100 colonist hopefuls, but Mary Lynne Dittmar, an aerospace consultant, says:

"The distances that are involved and the complexities that are involved in going and staying there are really enormous."

In Dittmar's interview with NPR, she lists all the cards stacked against the Mars mission, like supplying enough oxygen and food, landing on a planet with such a thin atmosphere, coping with the cancerous radiation and dust, and so on. But Bas Lansdorp, Mars One's CEO, isn't planning for launch tomorrow. The group's mission date falls on the year 2025, just five years ahead of NASA's own stated goal to get a colony on Mars.

When it comes to most likely to succeed, Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who heads the Mars Society, isn't placing his bets on NASA or Mars One, but SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, shows the most promise.

"He developed spacecraft for one-tenth the cost and one-third the time that NASA and the aerospace major companies have done."

So far, Musk has the proof, where Mars One has only marketing, and the funds, where NASA has been prone to government budget cuts. He's said he expects SpaceX to be Mars-ready in 10 to 20 years—a timeline that seems to mirror NASA's own expectations of when we'll get to the Red Planet. Only time will tell.

For Neil deGrasse Tyson, there's a lot of delusional thinking when it comes to commercial space flight. Using history to draw his conclusions, Tyson doesn't see a privatized flight being first--there's too much risk and no reward.

Read more about the race to Mars at NPR.

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What Your Face Says About Your Personality, Health

by Natalie Shoemaker

Cicero wasn't far-off in his assessment when he said, “"The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions."

Contrary to our mother's instructions “don't judge a book by it's cover,” we do so anyway, and a recent article on the David Robinson from the BBC gives cause for doing so. Our face can say a lot about our personality, fitness, and intelligence.

Carmen Lefevre at Northumbria University explained to Robinson:

“The idea is that our biology, like genes and hormone levels, influences our growth, and the same mechanisms will also shape our character.”

For instance, Lefevre states that higher levels of testosterone tend to produce a person with a wider face and bigger cheek-bones, and their personality is more dominate—taking on an aggressive nature. Previous studies have shown that these traits also appear in capuchin monkeys—with wider-faced primates holding higher ranks within their respective groups.

Snap judgments based on the level of fat in your face can also be a predictor for fitness. Thinner faces, indicating some regular exercise, tend to fight off diseases better than fuller-cheeked counterparts, as well as have lower rates of depression and anxiety. As

As for intelligence, one study has shown we tend to be able to predict if someone is smart or not with “modest accuracy,” however, it's not clear what visual cues give this away (not glasses).

Read more on how our faces say what they do about our personalities, intelligence, and fitness on the BBC.

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Following TV Recipies Could Contribute to a Growing Gut

by Natalie Shoemaker

Cooking shows offer some delicious recipes for home wannabe chefs as well as some relaxing entertainment for people who like to wind down at the end of the day with an episode of Restaurant Impossible or The Pioneer Woman. But a recent study has found evidence that these programs are influencing some people's waistlines.

Lizzy Pope from the University of Vermont led the study that was just published online in the journal Appetite . The study comprised of 501 women ranging from age 20 to 35. Pope obtained information about where they went to get recipes to cook new foods, how frequently they crafted home-cooked meals, and their BMI (obtained through height and weight).

There was a correlation between women who frequently cooked meals from scratch and watched food programs—they tended to have a higher BMI than women who got their recipes from other sources (friends and relatives, newspapers, or cooking classes). Also, those who watched food TV purely for entertainment, but didn't do a lot of home-cooking tended to not have higher BMIs.

Brian Wansink, a co-author on the study from Cornell, pins some of the blame on the contents of the meals on these cooking shows. They "are not the healthiest and allow you to feel like it's OK to prepare and indulge in either less nutritious food or bigger portions.”

This study does conflict some with previous research that has found people who eat home-cooked meals have lower BMIs. To this point, Pope said, "It definitely can result in healthier food than eating out all the time, but only if you're cooking healthy recipes and healthy food."

Read more at EurekAlert!

Photo Credit: lenngrayes/Flickr

We are a Culture Obsessed with Optimization

by Natalie Shoemaker

Virginia Heffernan from the New York Times writes that the age of the gut is dead. It's the time of optimization. Wearables and big data have killed it. We are a society obsessed with optimization, she writes:

“In the last few years, The Huffington Post has doled out advice on how to 'optimize' your three-day weekend, your taxes, your Twitter profile, your year-end ritual, your sex drive, your website, your wallet, your joy, your workouts, your Social Security benefits, your testosterone, your investor pitch, your news release, your to-do list and the world itself.”

It's a notion that's completely alien to some cultures. As Judy Wajcman found when she suggested a more efficient way to Papua New Guineans could optimize production of the coconut milk in a local village, saving time on what they residents expected to be an all-day affair. Their response to her suggestion:

“There was no hurry, they said. Today I see my interest in saving time and increasing productivity as a peculiar and interesting cultural eccentricity.”

Optimization has turned people into thinking like machines, tracking how much they work and how little they can eat in a day. Heffernan wonders if the Apple Watch will continue to drive us further toward optimization, helping relieve us of distraction, only bothering to notify us when productivity is down.

To read more on Virginia Heffernan's views on optimization, check out her article on the NYTimes.

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Good News: Different Mental Abilities Peak at Different Ages

by Natalie Shoemaker

It's widely thought that there's an age when you're at your mental prime, and then begin the decline. Many aspiring novelists though for a time that they had to crank out a great work before they hit 30, but recent research dispelled those notions. Most great authors were in their 40s and 50s when they penned their breakthrough book. For mental prowess as a whole, however, researchers are finding certain abilities get stronger or weaker at different ages.

Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine were able to create a sample pool of tens of thousands of people through the online websites gameswithwords.org and testmybrain.org—quite a large set of data. These sites allowed researchers to test people's abilities to perceive emotions from photos, vocabulary skills, and short-term memory. Try the tests out for yourself, some of them are quite difficult (depending on your age).

Provided that the participants gave an accurate age, the results indicate that mental abilities vary by age. Hartshorne said to MIT News:

"At any given age, you’re getting better at some things, you’re getting worse at some other things, and you’re at a plateau at some other things. There’s probably not one age at which you’re peak on most things, much less all of them."

For instance, the ability to identify emotions peaks between 40 and 60, vocabulary peaks around 60 or 70 years of age, and visual working memory peaked at 25, while working memory for number peaked around the mid-30s.

"The complexities described in this article provide a rich, challenging set of phenomena for theories of development, maturation and ageing."

Read the full research paper at Psychological Science or read the cliff-notes at BPS.

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Why Do We Feel Lonely?

by Natalie Shoemaker

Why do we feel lonely? When asked, people usually shrug and say, “Because we're social creatures.” Well, ok, but what causes loneliness to make us feel depressed to the point were we become sick. Loneliness brings on some serious, life-threatening symptoms. One study has even found links to social isolation causing increased risks to cardiovascular health. Turns out these bodily reactions may be nature's way of motivating us to find a social group.

Taryn Hillin from Fusion writes on a recent study that seeks to explain the origins of these physiological and psychological reactions we experience when we become lonely. The findings, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science , point to evolution:

“... loneliness is viewed as an aversive signal that indicates that important social connections are at risk or absent and acts as a motivating force to reconnect with others. As such, loneliness has played an important role in the evolution of the human species, given that reconnecting with others increases one’s chances of survival and opportunities to pass on one’s genes to the next generation.”

The researchers support their findings with genetic data taken from several studies involving twins, relatives, and adopted children to see if the trait was, indeed, a part of our genetic makeup. They found that loneliness can be passed down from parent to child with an inheritance rate of just below 50 percent, which the researchers considered “significant.”

Loneliness isn't all nature, nurture plays a role as well. These genes also have an environmental component that influences their development—much in the same way scientists found feral children had difficulties learning a language after being isolated for so long. The researchers wrote that people who “experience a low level of social support clearly feel more lonely than do carriers of that same allele who experience a high level of social support.”

As a result some of us have a higher tolerance for being lonely, which influences the way our bodies react to social inaction. But the ability to feel loneliness is in most of us, and it's meant to drive us to seek human interaction in order to survive.

Read more about the origins of loneliness at Fusion

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Early Risers Tend to Be More Punctual than Night Owls

by Natalie Shoemaker

When you tend to naturally wake up may have some bearing on your personality. A recent study shows that “larks” (early risers) and “owls” (those who thrive in the evening) are quite different when it comes to punctuality.

BPS reported on the study published in Current Psychology that examined 267 students in an experiment to see how punctual the two groups were for an 8:15 AM class. It may not seem surprising to some, but the larks tended to be more punctual than the owls. The researchers wrote:

“Morning oriented and conscientious students scored higher on punctuality.”

Though, it seems a little unfair to test both of these groups with an early morning class—it gives the larks a bit of an advantage over the later-rising participants. But BPS writes that there have been other studies measuring the relationship between sleep tendencies and personality, which shows early risers are more proactive than night owls.

The researchers also took note of how the students were getting to their morning class. Once eliminating the larks versus owl, researchers found that students arriving by foot or by bike tended to be more tardy than those taking public transport or car. With these factors taken into account, the researchers write:

“These findings suggest that morningness might be an important predictor of lateness in addition to situational factors.”

Read more at BPS

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Limit Eating Hours to Help Boost Heart Health

by Natalie Shoemaker

Restricting when you eat may help improve sleep patterns, heart health, and weight loss, according to researchers. Researchers at San Diego State University and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found that limiting the feeding time of fruit flies helped prevent their hearts from aging. While fruit flies aren't humans, they have long been used as models for identifying the genetic basis for human diseases.

Shubhroz Gill, lead author of the study, talked about the experiments in a press release:

"In very early experiments, when we compared 5-week-old flies that were fed for either 24 hours or 12 hours, the hearts of the latter were in such good shape that we thought perhaps we had mistaken some young 3-week-old fruit flies for the older group. We had to repeat the experiments several times to become convinced that this improvement was truly due to the time-restricted feeding."

What's more, the researchers started putting older flies on time-restricted diets and found their hearts became healthier as well. So, the damage done earlier in life has a chance to be reversed.

In the next portion of their experiments, the researchers looked at how the genes changed in the time-restricted flies to try and find a pattern. Three types of genetic pathways were affected—ones that deal with protein folding, mitochondrial electron transport chain complexes, and circadian rhythms. This last point falls in-line with previous studies that found midnight snackers would suffer damage to memory and learning areas of the brain as a result of disrupted sleep patterns.

The researchers acknowledge that there are some hurdles to clear before this research makes its way to human testing, Gill said:

"Humans don't consume the same food every day. And our lifestyle is a major determinant of when we can and cannot eat. But at the very minimum, our studies offer some context in which we should be pursuing such questions in humans."

Bottom line: try to cutting-out the late-night snacking.

Read more at Science Daily

Photo Credit: Pink Sherbet Photography/Flickr

Men Find Female War Heroes Less Desireable

by Natalie Shoemaker

As a society, our primate brains still dictate some of our perceptions, namely in sexual selection. Taryn Hillin from Fusion writes on an intriguing study about how attractive war-hero women are viewed by men—in short, not at all.

The study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior , set out to find if acts of bravery made men and women more attractive to the opposite sex. The data comprised of historical and experimental evidence to support the researchers results.

In their research, they found that male World War II heroes produced more offspring than WWII veterans. What's more, in their experiments, women showed an increasing attraction to men, particularly war heroes—more so than any other group of men. The more decorated they were, the more attractive the women found them. Joost M. Leunissen, a psychologist and co-author on the study, attributes this attraction to evolution.

“For women, reproduction is a huge investment (heavy toll on the body), and you need others to provide you with food and protection. Women are thus evolved to look for a mate who can provide resources and commitment to help her raise offspring. War heroes can show these signals.”

In one of the experiments, consisting of 181 men and151 women, the researchers asked participants to read a story about a war hero or a hero that had been in a crisis situation. The stories were the same for each of the groups—save for the gender of the characters. The men read about a female hero and visa versa. After the reading, the participants where then asked to answer a series of questions about the hero:“To what extent do you think [soldier’s name] is generally attractive?” or “Would you want to go on a date with [soldier’s name]?”

No surprise, the women responded positively towards the male hero they'd read about, finding the war hero the most attractive. However, men displayed no such attraction to the female hero they read about—in either situation--leading the authors to suggest, “Bravery in combat may not be a suitable domain for them to show their mate qualities.”

In order to explain this difference in attraction between male and female war heroes, Leunissen falls back on sexual selection theory, explaining to Fusion:

“Men look particularly for cues like youth and fertility (e.g. breasts) in women, whereas women pay more attention to cues of physical strength, resource power, and emotional commitment in men.”

Read more about the study at Fusion

Photo Credit: DVIDSHUB/Flickr

Reduce Chocolate Cravings with a 15-Minute Walk

by Natalie Shoemaker

When the stress of work has become unbearable, you may feel triggered to reach for the snack drawer and grab a treat. However, a research group out of the University of Innsbruck in Austria has found that a short, 15-minute walk has the power to stave-off those unhealthy food cravings.

Tom Jacobs from Pacific Standard writes that in their study, which consisted of 47 overweight people, a walk was enough to reduce participants' desires for a sugary snack in people who were stressed and had easy-access to sweets. The researchers wrote:

"When snacking has become habitual and poorly regulated by overweight people, the promotion of short bouts of physical activity could be valuable for reducing the urge to consume at times when the person may be particularly vulnerable."

Prior to the experiment, participants were asked to refrain from consuming sweets for three days. The 47 participants were then split into two groups: one was asked to walk briskly on a treadmill for 15-minutes, while the other was asked to sit in place for the same amount of time. Next, both groups were asked to sit for five minutes, after which time they took a test intended to induce stress (known as the Stroop Test).

"Then the participants were offered a selection of high caloric sugary snacks. They were asked to unwrap one sugary snack of their choice and handle it for about 30 seconds, without eating it."

All the while, the researchers measured their heart rate and blood pressure. The Stroop test did it's job and the candy only increased their stress levels, as well as their craving for the sweets. But researchers noted these levels were much lower in the walking group, compared to the sitting group. The researchers concluded:

"The findings of this study support the idea that a single bout of exercise can reduce cue- or stress-related cravings.”

These findings fall in-line with something I watched from the Art of Manliness the other day. Brett McKay illustrated a point about how to manage and change habits. His video was influenced by the book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, which he describes three points to be aware of when trying to switch a bad habit out for a good one. The most important part, he says, is to recognize the trigger and change the routine in oder to find the right reward you're body may be seeking.

Read more about the study at Pacific Standard

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Desire to Conform Starts By Age Two

by Natalie Shoemaker

As early as two-years-old, kids start on their road to conformity, trying to fit in to society. Bret Stetka from Scientific American writes on the recent find that came from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

They write that human toddlers learn early on that no one likes a show-off. So, even if they may have formulated a better way to go about doing something, they tend to copy peer behavior--no matter how wrong it may be. However, the same behavior was not seen in chimpanzees and orangutans.

The researchers setup the same test for a group of two-year-olds and apes. Each were given a box, divided into three section. By dropping a ball into one of the sections, a reward was consistently released. Once the toddlers and the apes figured out the correct section, they were put on the sidelines to watch their untrained peers try to figure out the system, but a reward wouldn't be released, even if they put the ball in the right part of the box. Then the roles were flipped. However, more than half the time, the toddlers would place the ball in the section they new to yield a reward, mimicking their peers instead. On the other hand, the apes stuck with dropping the ball in the section that yielded rewards—unfazed by their onlooking novice peers.

It wasn't that the toddlers forgot how to get the reward. When researchers removed their peers, the toddlers would resume placing the ball in the right section. This result has been interpreted by researchers as an instinct to conform to the majority—to hide something different—or it could just be they want more of the reward for themselves.

Stetka writes:

“The results suggest that the human desire to conform is inborn or at least develops at a very young age. This urge to conform probably evolved to be stronger than that of our ape cousins because group harmony was extremely important in growing hominin communities dependent on the exchange of cultural information, according to the authors.”

Read more at Scientific American

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