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What Are Animals Thinking?
PBS: We humans have long wondered how animals see the world—and us. Does your dog really feel shame when it gives you that famous "guilty look?" What is behind the "swarm intelligence" of slime mold or a honeybee hive? How can pigeons possibly find their way home across hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain? In this episode of NOVA scienceNOW, David Pogue meets—and competes—with a menagerie of smart critters that challenge preconceived notions about what makes "us" different from "them," expanding our understanding of how animals really think. Read the whole story: PBS
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Dating sites – for all ages – focus on keeping it real
USA Today: The latest trend in online dating? Going offline as fast as you can. Most dating websites used to focus on helping singles get acquainted with extended online communication before meeting face-to-face. But now the order is reversed: a growing number of sites are geared to helping users plan offline activities to size each other up and decide if they've got chemistry. And everybody's getting into the act — even the AARP.
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Discarding Ideas (Literally)
The Wall Street Journal: Plagued by unwanted thoughts? Try writing them down and throwing the paper away. A new study finds that this trick works. First, students were asked to write down positive or negative thoughts about their bodies, and half were told to tear up and discard the paper. Then the students were asked to rate their attitudes about their bodies. Those who had kept the paper were influenced by what they wrote, but among those who had tossed the page, the written comments had no impact at all.
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The Brain: Forgetting So We Remember, Avoiding Overload
ABC: We accumulate so many memories that it's a wonder our brains don't clog, strangling us on the trivia of our daily lives. How do we recall the memories that are important to us without flooding our brains with the details of every insignificant event? How do we separate the memories we need from the mountains of garbage? According to ongoing research, we separate the wheat from the chaff by shutting down some memories, at least temporarily, to allow that one chosen treasure to resurface. In short, we forget, so we can remember.
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The Science Behind Gifting
The Wall Street Journal: To be a really successful giver of gifts, a person usually needs to get inside the head of the intended recipient. Unfortunately, psychological studies reveal that givers and receivers have a hard time understanding each other's mind-sets, which can make for a tricky holiday experience. Take regifting. That Crock-Pot your well-meaning aunt gave you last year that you are shamefully contemplating wrapping up for your dear neighbor this year? Research shows you can go right ahead and regift it, shame intact. Your aunt probably won't mind.
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Victory Or Defeat? Emotions Aren’t All In The Face
NPR: Photos of athletes in their moment of victory or defeat usually show faces contorted with intense emotion. But a new study suggests that people actually don't use those kinds of extreme facial expressions to judge how a person is feeling. Instead, surprisingly, people rely on body cues. Hillel Aviezer, a psychology researcher at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, wanted to see how accurately people can read intense, real-world facial expressions — instead of the standardized, posed images of facial expressions that are usually used in lab tests. ...
