A single dose of a popular class of psychiatric drug used to treat depression can alter the brain’s architecture within hours, even though most patients usually don’t report improvement for weeks, a new study suggests.

More than 1 in 10 adults in the U.S. use these drugs, which adjust the availability of a chemical transmitter in the brain, serotonin, by blocking the way it is reabsorbed. The so-called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs, include Prozac, Lexapro, Celexa, Paxil and Zoloft.

via Antidepressants rapidly alter brain architecture, study finds – LA Times.

What happens when you use images of sexy women to attract men’s attention? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, male consumers who are shown images of sexy women feel less connected to other people and are less likely to purchase products advertised as benefiting others or make charitable contributions.

via Do ads showing sexy women make male consumers less charitable?.

What a fantastic idea! Ideal for the first year of your baby!

Car Seat | SimpleParenting.

Bradley Manning of WikiLeaks fame is now a woman, which raises special problems for the US Military.

“The soldier has asked for hormone therapy and to be able to live as a woman.

The request was the first ever made by a transgender military inmate and set up a dilemma for the Defense Department: How to treat a soldier for a diagnosed disorder without violating long-standing military policy. Transgender people are not allowed to serve in the U.S. military and the Defense Department does not provide such treatment, but Manning can’t be discharged from the service while serving her 35-year prison sentence. […]

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month gave the Army approval to try to work out a transfer plan with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which does provide such treatment”

So it’s a breakout from military prison to go to a civil one…

Pentagon OKs Manning Transfer for Gender Treatment | Military.com.

Using a dataset of about 2.3 million images from Flickr, we demonstrate that we can reliably predict the normalized view count of images with a rank correlation of 0.81 using both image content and social cues. In this paper, we show the importance of image cues such as color, gradients, deep learning features and the set of objects present, as well as the importance of various social cues such as number of friends or number of photos uploaded that lead to high or low popularity of images.

via What makes an image popular?.

The page also has a demo tool where you can upload your photo for a score.

How to Start Parkour: A Beginner's Guide to Parkour.

Beginner Roll Tutorial (Part 1) – Parkour Ukemi – YouTube.

Using only data from an fMRI scan, researchers led by a Yale University undergraduate have accurately reconstructed images of human faces as viewed by other people.

via YaleNews | Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a viewer’s mind.

The glass brain is a Unity3D brain visualization that displays source activity and connectivity, inferred in real-time from high-density EEG using methods implemented in SIFT and BCILAB.

via Glass Brain | Projects | Neuroscape lab.

This page has loads of different workouts, apparently they change weekly. Keep you motivated and busy with clear pictures!

Free Visual Workouts.

If you want to catch someone in a lie, you’ll raise your odds in the afternoon because most people are more likely to cheat or lie then, as opposed to in the morning

The researchers also found that people who tend to cheat regularly were just as likely to do so in the morning as in the afternoon. It was the more ethical folks who suffered lapses as the day wore on

via We Are More Likely to Lie in the Afternoon: Scientific American Podcast.

Providing employees with a bonus to spend on charities or co-workers may increase job satisfaction and team sales, according to results published September 18 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Lalin Anik from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and colleagues from other institutions.Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-shifting-employee-bonuses-satisfaction-productivity.html#jCp

http://phys.org/news/2013-09-shifting-employee-bonuses-satisfaction-productivity.html

Two experiments primed college students with either sleep-related or neutral words and then assessed sleep during a 25 minute nap period. Both experiments showed that participants primed with sleep-related words reported having slept longer than did those primed with neutral words. Furthermore, both experiments showed that sleep-primed participants exhibited lower heart rate. Experiment 2 also revealed that the effect of the priming manipulation was especially strong among participants who had trouble sleeping. This suggests that priming might be a cost-effective treatment for inducing sleep among people with sleep problems.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jasp.12123/abstract

You do the priming by writing words like relax, comfy, warm, etc where you can read them from bed

Ever send a bottle of wine back at a restaurant? If you weren’t just being a pretentious snob, then it was probably because the wine seemed “corked”—had a musty odor and didn’t taste quite right. Most likely, the wine was contaminated with a molecule called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), the main cause of cork taint. But a new study by Japanese researchers concludes that you do not smell TCA directly; rather, TCA blocks up your sense of smell and distorts your ability to detect odors. The findings could help the food and beverage industry improve its products and lead to less embarrassment for both you and your waiter.

http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2013/09/corked-wine-plugs-your-nose

This study goes in depth about why people are quitting social networking sites and finds some interesting conclusions

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2012.0323

According to Gina Kolata in the New York Times, The Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, has supported 175 randomized controlled studies, like the studies used in medicine, to find out what works and doesn’t work, which are reported in the What Works Clearinghouse. Surprisingly, the choice of instructional materials — textbooks, curriculum guides, homework, quizzes — can affect achievement as much as teachers; poor materials have as much effect as a bad teacher, and good materials can offset a bad teacher’s deficiencies. One popular math textbook was superior to 3 competitors. A popular computer-assisted math program had no benefit. Most educators, including principals and superintendents, don’t know the data exists. 42% of school districts had never heard of the clearinghouse. Up to 90% of programs that seemed promising in small studies had no effect or made achievement scores worse. For example a program to increase 7th-grade math teachers’ understanding of math increased their understanding but had no effect on student achievement. Upward Bound had no effect.

http://m.slashdot.org/story/191103

Strange one, this

Synchronized virtual reality heartbeat triggers out-of-body experiences.

Nijmegen researchers can use an fMRI to replicate what letter you’re looking at.

Computer can read letters directly from the brain – Radboud University.

It turns out that not much correlates with how good a candidate will be, especially at leadership. Test scores (eg GPA’s) and brainteaser questions are especially worthless for finding out how someone will do at an interview.

In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal – NYTimes.com.

The NY Times ran a story about a new technology past 1000 + people. Some got to see itmwith civil comments, others with rude comments. The peoplemwho read the rude comments became more polarised against the new tech and also reinterpreted the article to be more negative. nyt

the reg

So how is DNA data stored? It turns out that it’s easily reverse solvable using just the web. Governments don’t have a particularly good track record when it comes down to protecting databases. Do you really want your government holding on to your DNA?

Search of DNA Sequences Reveals Full Identities – NYTimes.com.

Researchers in Canada have found a correlation between air pollution and people’s happiness. Their deep analysis, reported in the latest issue of the International Journal of Green Economics, suggests that air pollution may lead to unhappiness while the converse is also true, the unhappier the citizens of a country the more air pollution.

via Pollution makes Europeans unhappy.