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Can’t go anywhere without your sat-nav? You might be wiping out your memory
The Daily Mail: They are supposed to make getting around easier. But over-reliance on sat-navs could leave us completely lost, a study has suggested. Scientists think our memory for places is like a mental map which we have learnt from looking at a real map of where we live. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany tested 26 residents of a town, all of whom had lived there for at least two years. Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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Math Gender Gap Not Result of Girls’ Low Self-Esteem, Researchers Say
The Huffington Post: Are girls bad at math? From a talking Barbie doll saying "Math class is tough" to Larry Summers, the ex-President of Harvard University, speaking on the "different availability of aptitude," it's an issue that's seen plenty of controversy. As one of the most sensitive topics in education today, there's plenty of research on it, and even a body of research on the research. A study to be published in Review of General Psychology, falls into the latter category.
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Study: Powerful think they’re taller than they are
USA Today: Powerful people truly do stand tall, at least in their own minds. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Cornell University found through a series of three experiments that powerful people feel taller than they really are. Results are published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Le pouvoir leur a monté à la taille!
Slate France: L’histoire ne manque pas d’exemples de personnages de petite taille (au sens propre) ayant exercé de grands pouvoirs. Lénine mesurait 1m65 comme Charlot, Louis XIV 1m62 (*) comme Beethoven, Mozart et Benoit XVI, Voltaire 1m60, Balzac 1m57, Jean-Paul Sartre 1m52, Jeanne d’Arc 1m50, Edith Piaf 1m42… Ces tailles, listées sur des sites comme Astrotheme, sont très souvent contestées. C’est le cas de celle de Nicolas Sarkozy. Donnée à 1m62 sur certains sites, elle est estimée à 1m68 par Astrotheme et à 1m65 dans un article du magazine Science du 12 janvier 2012 qui fait référence à une étude parue par la revue Psychological Science. Métaphore du pouvoir Michelle M.
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Made with love actually tastes better: study
New Zealand Herald: Convinced nothing can beat your mum's Sunday roast or grandmother's apple pie? You're probably right. Food that we believe has been prepared with tender loving care always tastes better, according to scientists. So if your friends and family constantly impress you with their culinary delights, it probably says as much about your relationship with them as it does about their prowess in the kitchen. Researchers looking into human experience found that our experience of a physical sensation, such as taste, is affected by how we perceive the person administering it.
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Sat-navs leave us in dark
Daily Express: We instinctively remember maps and end up with a north-facing “compass” in our heads. But over-reliance on GPS devices could erase the maps from our brains, scientists say. They ran virtual-reality tests on 26 residents of a town all had lived in for at least two years. Subjects were made “sightless” by artificial fog – and when facing north they could point to where locations would be in real life. Scientists Julia Frankenstein and Tobias Meilinge say the subjects did so well because they had all “seen, and internalised”, a map of their town, Tubingen in Germany. But the researchers warn that relying too much on GPS devices will eventually wipe out our memorised maps.
