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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
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Lessons From the Dress
Slate: The brain lives in a bony shell. The completely light-tight nature of the skull renders this home a place of complete darkness. So the brain relies on the eyes to supply an image of the outside world, but there are many processing steps between the translation of light energy into electrical impulses that happens in the eye and the neural activity that corresponds to a conscious perception of the outside world. In other words, the brain is playing a game of telephone and—contrary to popular belief—our perception corresponds to the brain’s best guess of what is going on in the outside world, not necessarily to the way things actually are.
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Researchers Study Awe and Find It Is Good for Relationships
The Wall Street Journal: Polett Villalta says her first deep scuba dive was one of the best experiences of her life. As she descended to 110 feet, a sunken ship slowly became visible in the green-grey water. A turtle swam by. She and her dive buddies entered the darkness of the ship with a flashlight, and the wreck “came alive,” she says. Colorful coral grew over the submerged steel; parrotfish and angelfish darted in and out of shadows. She dropped to the sand and touched the bottom of the ocean. ... People report having three awe experiences a week on average, says Dacher Keltner, director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr.
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People Who Volunteer Are Happier With Their Work-Life Balance
New York Magazine: If you feel that your job is eating up your life, then you probably also feel like you can't take on any additional commitments — even though you know you probably should be volunteering at your kid's school or a soup kitchen or something. Who has the time? Actually, you do, or you'll feel like you do once you start volunteering, suggests a new study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Its authors found that people who volunteer are happier with their work-life balance than those who don't volunteer, even when total actual free time is controlled for. ...
