A study [PDF] based on observations from 36,000 subreddit communities has found that online dust-ups can be predicted, and the people most likely to cause them can be identified. “Our analysis revealed a number of important trends related to conflict on Reddit, with general implications for intercommunity conflict on the web.” Among the takeaways were […]

We eat a lot of ultra-processed food, and these foods tend to be sugary and not so great for us. But the problem isn’t necessarily the fact that they’re ultra-processed. This is a weird and arguably unfair way to categorize foods, so let’s take a look at what “ultra-processed” really means. This terminology comes from […]

Yet the fallacy of meritocracy persists. Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. And when biases creep in, it results in people who look like those making the decisions. That’s not likely to […]

New research into ancient DNA extracted from the skeleton has helped scientists to build a portrait of Cheddar Man and his life in Mesolithic Britain.The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that some of the earliest modern human inhabitants of Britain may not have looked the way you might expect.Dr Tom Booth is a postdoctoral researcher working […]

Intelligence makes for better leaders—from undergraduates to executives to presidents—according to multiple studies. It certainly makes sense that handling a market shift or legislative logjam requires cognitive oomph. But new research on leadership suggests that, at a certain point, having a higher IQ stops helping and starts hurting. […] The researchers looked at 379 male […]

One widely used criminal risk assessment tool, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS; Northpointe, which rebranded itself to “equivant” in January 2017), has been used to assess more than 1 million offenders since it was developed in 1998. The recidivism prediction component of COMPAS—the recidivism risk scale—has been in use since 2000. This […]

Exploring over 30 million feelings towards 3,000+ topics. Source: 10 Things Everyone Hates About You

an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other Source: The Evolution of Trust Very clear and well illustrated

During deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories, a team reports in the journal Neuron. To find out, Walker and a team of scientists had 20 young adults learn 120 pairs of words. “Then we put electrodes on their head and we had them […]

The Alisons, husband and wife, have done something no scholars of interrogation have been able to do before. Working in close cooperation with the police, who allowed them access to more than 1,000 hours of tapes, they have observed and analysed hundreds of real-world interviews with terrorists suspected of serious crimes. No researcher in the […]

There are three types of lies: omission, where someone holds out on the facts; commission, where someone states facts that are untrue; and paltering, where someone uses true facts to mislead you. It’s not always easy to detect, but there are a few telltale signs. A recent study, published in the Journal of Personality and […]

Emoticons are getting more popular as the new communication channel to express feelings in online communication. Although familiarity to emoticons depends on cultures, how exposure matters in emotion recognition from emoticon is still open. To address this issue, we conducted a cross-cultural experimental study among Cameroon and Tanzania (hunter-gatherers, swidden farmers, pastoralists, and city dwellers) […]

The alcohol hangover develops when blood alcohol concentration (BAC) returns to zero and is characterized by a feeling of general misery that may last more than 24 h. It comprises a variety of symptoms including drowsiness, concentration problems, dry mouth, dizziness, gastro-intestinal complaints, sweating, nausea, hyper-excitability, and anxiety. The alcohol hangover is an intriguing issue […]

Did you know that most of the different languages we speak today can actually be placed in only a couple of groups by their origin? This is what illustrator Minna Sundberg has captured in an elegant infographic of a linguistic tree which reveals some fascinating links between different tongues. Source: This Amazing Tree That Shows […]

In an eyetracking experiment comparing different clickability clues, weak and flat signifiers required more user effort than strong ones. […] We conducted a quantitative experiment using eyetracking equipment and a desktop computer. We recruited 71 general web-users to participate in the experiment. Each participant was presented with one version of the 9 sites and given […]

The 2017 Open Source Survey was hosted on GitHub, which “collected responses from 5,500 randomly sampled respondents sourced from over 3,800 open source repositories” and then added “over 500 responses from a non-random sample of communities that work on other platforms.” The questionnaire was also made available in Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian. Interestingly, […]

According to a research paper published earlier this month, the supercapacitor is made up by a device called a “harvester” that operates by using the body’s heat and movements to extract electrical charges from ions found in human body fluids, such as blood, serum, or urine. As electrodes, the harvester uses a carbon nanomaterial called […]

“It’s well known that people can improve their aerobic endurance through training,” says senior author Ronald Evans, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and holder of Salk’s March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology. “The question for us was: how does endurance work? And if we really understand the science, can we replace training […]

Heart experts have been criticised for claiming it is “plain wrong” to believe that saturated fat clogs up arteries. Three specialists argued that eating “real food”, taking exercise and reducing stress are better ways to stave off heart disease than cutting out dietary saturated fat. Writing in a respected journal, they maintained that inflammation is […]

Even if you aren’t elderly, your body is home to agents of senility—frail and damaged cells that age us and promote disease. Now, researchers have developed a molecule that selectively destroys these so-called senescent cells. The compound makes old mice act and appear more youthful, providing hope that it may do the same for us. […]

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of […]

“We found that broad smiles lead people to be perceived as warmer but less competent,” said Jessica Li, a KU assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business. “We ask how that can influence consumer behavior and in what situations might marketers want to smile more broadly.” […] Li said broader smiles that tend […]

For employers, this research bolsters the idea that pay and benefits—while important—are only one factor when it comes to keeping employees engaged over the long term. As pay rises, compensation and benefits become less important as drivers of employee satisfaction. Instead, other workplace factors play a more important role. Regardless of income level, we find […]

In three studies, we explored the relationship between profanity and honesty. We examined profanity and honesty first with profanity behavior and lying on a scale in the lab (Study 1; N = 276), then with a linguistic analysis of real-life social interactions on Facebook (Study 2; N = 73,789), and finally with profanity and integrity […]