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Problems Too Disgusting to Solve
The New Yorker: Early last month, Bill Gates released a video of one of the latest ventures funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: the Omniprocessor, a Seattle-based processing plant that burns sewage to make clean drinking water. In the video, Gates raises a glass of water to his lips. Just five minutes ago, the caption explains, that water was human waste. Gates takes a sip. “It’s water,” he says. “Having studied the engineering behind it,” he writes, on the foundation’s blog, “I would happily drink it every day.
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What Children Think of the Internet (and Why It Matters)
The New York Times: On a recent late afternoon, my 5-year-old son requested pizza for dinner, as he does pretty much every day. I wasn’t sure if we had one in the freezer. “Let’s ask the Internet,” he suggested. A few days later, he proposed consulting Google to find out what time his father would be home from work. Online information sources have become so ubiquitous in our children’s lives that these suggestions, while amusing, aren’t that surprising. But they raise a question: What do children, especially young children who are just starting to make sense of the world, think about the Internet — what it’s for, where the information comes from, how reliable it is?
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Could Virtual-Reality Headsets Like the Oculus Rift Reduce Neck Pain?
New York Magazine: Pain is tricky. At its most basic level, it's our body's way of alerting us to possible danger to our well-being, but all sorts of sensory and psychological cues can make pain feel more or less intense. It's a prime example of how complicated the mind-body connection can be, and people who suffer from chronic pain — that is, folks for whom the pain is not providing any useful information — are constantly searching for ways to relieve it. In a new paper in Psychological Science, researchers took advantage of some of this mind-body weirdness to point to a surprising potential way to reduce chronic pain.
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Want to get conservatives to save energy? Stop the environmentalist preaching
The Washington Post: In San Diego, the solar rooftop market is booming. And no wonder: Electricity is expensive, but sunshine is plentiful – and it doesn’t hurt that California has shined its policy radiance on the solar industry. The city boasts more than 44,000 residential solar installations – and most strikingly, they’re not all owned by liberal do-gooders. ...
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Want to Grab Drivers’ Attention? Use Road Signs Showing More Action
On average, car crashes kill an American pedestrian every 2 hours and injure one every 7 minutes, according to statistics from the CDC. A new study suggests changing road signs to depict more motion—a pedestrian running instead of walking—may be one simple way to help prevent potentially dangerous accidents. Across five studies, University of Michigan psychological scientist Luca Cian—along with co-authors Aradhna Krishna and Ryan Elder—found that signs that depicted motion resulted in faster reaction times and increased vigilance among would-be drivers, which could ultimately lead to faster stopping times.
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How movies influence perceptions of brain disorders
The Globe and Mail: Regardless of whether Julianne Moore wins an Academy Award on Sunday for her starring role in Still Alice, the film gets an “A” for accuracy in Mary Spiers’s books. Spiers, a clinical neuropsychologist and associate psychology professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, critiques the way movies depict brain disorders on her website, NeuroPsyFi.com. The site dispels common “neuromyths” perpetuated by Hollywood (think of it as a scientist’s version of the film-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes). Read the whole story: The Globe and Mail
