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For Athletes, There’s No Place Like Home
Research on sports and athletic competition suggests that there is scientific support for the idea of a “home field advantage.”
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Body’s Response to Disease Has a Smell
Discovery News: Humans may be able to smell sickness, or at least detect a distinct odor in the sweat of people with highly active immune systems who are responding to infection, a new study from Sweden suggests. In the study, eight healthy people were injected with either lipopolysaccharide, a bacterial toxin that produces a strong immune response, or with salt water (which wasn't expected to have any effect). Four hours later, the researchers collected the participants' T-shirts (in which they had been sweating), cut out the armpits and put this fabric into bottles.
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Me Versus the Scale
The New York Times: The scale and I have reached détente. That is: I leave it alone, and it affords me the same courtesy. I rarely step on it, and we’re both better off. I have earned the right of refusal. As someone who weighed herself almost daily between the ages of 10 and 25, who spent six years at fat camps and traveled around the Middle East with a scale buried in the pit of her backpack (I know, I know…), I’ve done my time. I won’t even weigh myself at the doctor’s office. Nothing good can come from the knowledge that I’m three pounds lighter, or two pounds heavier.
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Building Your Brand’s Warmth and Competence
The Entrepreneur: If you want more customers, you need to get warmer. It turns out customers stereotype companies the way they stereotype people. We want a combination of warmth and competence from our brands, just like we do from the people around us. Stereotyping exists in relationships, whether we like it or not. A review of the book, The Human Brand, on the website for the Association for Psychological Science, lays out how we are inclinded to view individuals, but also groups. ... So it is with companies or product brands.
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Extraordinary Altruism: Who Gives a Kidney to a Stranger?
The Huffington Post: I have a colleague who would not be alive today if it were not for a complete stranger, who volunteered to give her a kidney. Her kidneys were failing, and she would not have survived for long. Now she is healthy, and has been for some years. So I understand in a personal way that living kidney donation is an extraordinary gift, a far-too-rare act of pure altruism. Yet I have not offered to make the same gift of my kidney. I have a friend who did, who donated one of her kidneys to a stranger, just out of the goodness of her heart. I admired her, but it made me nervous when she did it, for the same reason that it makes me nervous now. What if something goes wrong?
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The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness
The Guardian: Nick Brown does not look like your average student. He's 53 for a start and at 6ft 4in with a bushy moustache and an expression that jackknifes between sceptical and alarmed, he is reminiscent of a mid-period John Cleese. He can even sound a bit like the great comedian when he embarks on an extended sardonic riff, which he is prone to do if the subject rouses his intellectual suspicion. A couple of years ago that suspicion began to grow while he sat in a lecture at the University of East London, where he was taking a postgraduate course in applied positive psychology.
