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Step back to move forward: Setting new priorities in the new year
Happy New Year! As you recover from the festivities and get ready to turn toward your work for 2019 and beyond, this is a great time to take a step back from the day-to-day and check in with yourself to make sure you are actually on the path that’s right for you. In the first Letter to Young Scientists, we encouraged you to focus on studying the questions and topics you find meaningful (acknowledging that those might evolve over time). But in science—and other areas of life—we often get pulled in multiple directions that lead us off our desired paths.
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Jazmine Barnes Case Shows How Trauma Can Affect Memory
Imagine being held up at gunpoint. Do you trust you could remember the perpetrator’s face? The gun? Or would you have a better recollection of how loud the birds were chirping at that moment? “The memory does not operate like a videotape machine faithfully recording every single detail,” said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Remembering Trauma.” “The thing that is happening is that you’re focusing on the most dangerous thing,” he said.
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Uncommon knowledge: Goal post thrills, speaking fees
Negotiating, family style In a series of experiments, pairs of individuals ate snack food and then played business strategy games. When the food was eaten from a shared container compared to separate containers, pairs cooperated more and achieved better results. This was true both when they were strangers and when they were friends. When asked what would happen in such situations, people did predict greater cooperation, but nevertheless, most said they still would’ve preferred to eat from separate containers.
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The Science Behind Making Your Child Smarter
What parents wouldn’t want to give their children the ability to get good grades and excel at work? Those benefits are linked in research to a high IQ. Dozens of recent studies shed new light on the extent to which parents can—and cannot—help their children score higher on that popular and widely used measure of intelligence. The history of brain-training programs for small children is littered with failures. Remember marketers’ claims in the 1990s, later discredited, that playing Baby Einstein videos for infants in their cribs would make them smarter?
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The 5 Years That Changed Dating
On the 20th anniversary of The New York Times’ popular Vows column, a weekly feature on notable weddings and engagements launched in 1992, its longtime editor wrote that Vows was meant to be more than just a news notice about society events. It aimed to give readers the backstory on marrying couples and, in the meantime, to explore how romance was changing with the times. “Twenty years ago, as now, most couples told us they’d met through their friends or family, or in college,” wrote the editor, Bob Woletz, in 2012.
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If You Feel Thankful, Write It Down. It’s Good For Your Health
Over this past year, lifestyle blogger Aileen Xu has kept a monthly gratitude list. Sometimes it was the big stuff: "I'm grateful that my family is so understanding. I'm grateful so many people care." And sometimes it was life's little blessings: "July 2018: I'm grateful for good hair after I shower." Xu started making such lists when she was in college, "at a point when I was just not in a very good place in my life." Now, the 28-year-old lifestyle blogger and YouTuber recommends the practice to her nearly 750,000 subscribers. It wasn't a hard sell.
