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Most, Least Honest Cities: Where Are People Most Likely to Return a Lost Wallet?
ABC's Good Morning America: Don't drop your wallet in Lisbon: That's one finding from an experiment designed by Reader's Digest to test the honesty of people in 16 major cities worldwide. Of a dozen wallets dropped in Lisbon, only one was returned. Go ahead, though, and lose your wallet in Helsinki: There 11 of out 12 lost wallets were returned. In the experiment, Digest reporters deliberately dropped a total of 192 wallets in 16 cities in Europe, Asia and North and South America. Each one contained a cell phone number, a family photo, business cards and $50 U.S. (or the local equivalent).
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Science Asks: Who’s More Pig-Headed, Dems or Republicans?
TIME: Forget the ancient Greeks’ advice. In this political climate, it’s more like “nothing in moderation, everything in excess.” Frank Bruni’s column in Monday’s New York Times highlights some of the cable-TV hyperbole that seems to plague our political discussions these days by asking whether all the Nazi metaphors and lynching references have in fact pulled the right and the left further apart, making compromise impossible. “When nuance and perspective exit the language, do they exit the conversation as well?” he wrote. ”When you speak in ludicrous extremes, do you think that way, too? According to science, yes. ...
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New Research on Genetics and Intelligence
Read about the latest research on genetics and intelligence: Literacy and Numeracy Are More Heritable Than Intelligence in Primary School Yulia Kovas, Ivan Voronin, Andrey Kaydalov, Sergey B. Malykh, Philip S. Dale, and Robert Plomin Are literacy and numeracy less heritable than general cognitive ability? Monozygotic and dizygotic twins were assessed for literacy, numeracy, and general cognitive ability at ages 7, 9, and 12. Literacy and numeracy were found to be more heritable than general cognitive ability at ages 7 and 9 but not at age 12.
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Blindsight in Children With Cerebral Lesions
Congenital or acquired damage to the visual processing areas of the brain is often associated with a loss of vision. Despite sustaining damage to these brain areas, some people retain an unconscious ability to respond to visual stimuli — and ability termed blindsight. Although these people are not consciously aware of visual stimuli, they are in many instances able to direct their eyes towards target items and to discriminate the orientation and direction of movement presented in their area of blindness. Studies examining blindsight have found that those who acquire damage early in life retain more visual ability than those who acquire brain damage in adolescence or adulthood.
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Shutdown Science: Furloughed Workers Feel the Burden of Boredom
LiveScience: Jennifer Wade is bored. A program director for the National Science Foundation, Wade normally spends her workdays managing grant proposals and wrangling the reviewers who will decide what research gets federal funding. But with the federal government shutdown pending a Congressional budget agreement, Wade is stuck at home — and she's not enjoying it. "I think nine days is the length of time it takes for anxiety to dissipate, anger to move to a background steady state, and boredom to just take over," Wade told LiveScience. "I literally paced, a little bit ago, to keep myself from lying on the couch. Now I'm walking to get a coffee just to give myself something to do." ...
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‘Belief superiority’: A reason for the political impasse?
The Washington Post: As we enter the second week of the government shutdown with legislators unwilling to reach across the aisle to find a compromise, it seems appropriate that a study on extreme political views and “belief superiority” has been published in a scholarly journal. The results are no surprise: People holding the most extreme views are the ones who are the most convinced they’re not only correct, but that the rest of the world is wrong. That holds true for both liberals and conservatives on the far ends of the political spectrum.
