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Would Motorcyclists Be Safer If There Were More of Them?
There’s no question that motorcycles pose a particularly potent hazard on the roadways. Bikers are up to 30 times more likely to experience a deadly accident on the road than drivers of passenger cars, according to US government statistics. And more than half of motorcyclist deaths involve at least one other vehicle. One of the primary reasons that motorcyclists are so vulnerable to traffic accidents may be their paucity, according to a recently published study. Psychological scientist Vanessa Beanland of Australian National University and her colleagues found evidence that car-and-truck drivers don’t notice bikes because they encounter relatively few of them on the road.
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What’s Going On In There? How Babies’ Brains Practice Speech
NPR: A baby's first words may seem spur of the moment, but really, the little ones have practiced their "Mamas" and "Dadas" for months in their minds. Using what looks like a hair dryer from Mars, researchers from the University of Washington have taken the most precise peeks yet into the fireworks display of neural activity that occurs when infants listen to people speak. They found that the motor area of the brain, which we use to produce speech, is very active in babies 7 to 12 months old when they listen to speech components.
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If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his gaze
Salon: I’m no songwriter, but I think most would agree it’s sexier to say that love is “in his kiss” as opposed to “in his automatic gaze patterns.” But, unfortunately for soul singer Betty Everett and lovers of “The Shoop Shoop Song,” the latter phrasing is actually more accurate when it comes to telling the difference between love and lust. According to the authors of a new study from the University of Chicago, where a person looks first at a romantic interest — the face, the body — provides a clear indication of that person’s immediate romantic judgements.
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The Best Way to Make Up After Any Argument
The Wall Street Journal: You had an argument with someone you love. Now what? There is a definite wrong way to make up and go forward after a fight, therapists and psychologists say: Apologize quickly and move on. Instead, it is crucial when repairing a personal rift to address the underlying issue. Fail to reach a resolution on the argument itself—not just the hurt feelings it caused—and you will end up fighting again in the future about the same thing. Even worse: You'll likely end up arguing about the argument. ... In contrast, women "find it more difficult to isolate themselves from the relational context while having sex," says Gurit E.
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Knowledgeable Consumers Are More Likely to Buy When Given Fewer Options
The degree to which consumers perceive themselves to be knowledgeable about a product influences the likelihood that they will buy a particular product, researchers find in a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Together, our findings suggest that subjective knowledge may play an important role in determining ideal size for choice sets,” explains researcher Liat Hadar of the Arison School of Business at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel.
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The Handiest Tool in the World
Long before we had inches and centimeters, we had hands. The breadth of a man’s hand was the metric of choice at least as far back as ancient Egypt, and the bodily ruler is still used in a few countries, primarily to measure the height of horses. This makes sense. As tools go, this one is, well, handy. You’re not going to misplace it, and it’s familiar enough that everyone knows what hand-sized means, at least roughly. And it’s easier to use than, say, a foot. But that’s not enough to explain why the hand became such an enduring and popular ruler. For the hand to be reliable as a metric, our perception of it must be constant.
