Open plan offices don’t deliver their promised benefits of more face-to-face collaboration and instead make us misanthropic recluses and more likely to use electronic communications tools. So says a new article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, by Harvard academics Ethan S. Bernstein, Stephen Turban. The pair studied two Fortune 500 companies Read more about Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle[…]

A new study by a team of international researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Nanyang Technological University suggests that electrically stimulating the prefrontal cortex can reduce the desire to carry out violent antisocial acts by over 50 percent. The research, while undeniably compelling, raises a whole host of confronting ethical questions, not just over Read more about Could electrically stimulating criminals’ brains prevent crime?[…]

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 Read more about Stanford brainiacs say they can predict Reddit raids[…]

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 Read more about What Is Ultra-Processed Food?[…]

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 Read more about Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results[…]

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 Read more about Cheddar Man: Britains’ first men were black. And so were Europes’.[…]

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 Read more about Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders[…]

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 Read more about Computer program that tries to determine if you reoffend is racist, wrong and been in use since 2000.[…]

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 Read more about Older Adults’ Forgetfulness Tied To non syncing Brain Rhythms In Sleep[…]

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 Read more about Empirical evidence on how to interrogate: build rapport, not conflict[…]

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 Read more about Paltering: lying by using the truth[…]

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) Read more about Cross-Cultural Study on Recognition of Emoticon’s shows that different cultures see emojis differently[…]

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 Read more about alcohol hangover–a puzzling phenomenon[…]

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 Read more about A Literal Tree Illustration Shows How Languages Are Connected[…]

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 Read more about Flat UI Elements Attract Less Attention and Cause Uncertainty[…]

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, Read more about The open source community is nasty and that’s just the docs[…]

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 Read more about New Vampire Battery Technology Draws Energy Directly From Human Body[…]

“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 Read more about Endurance in a pill[…]

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 Read more about Popular belief that saturated fat clogs up arteries is a myth, experts say – let the wars begin: others disagree![…]

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. Read more about Molecule kills elderly cells, reduces signs of aging in mice[…]