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Primal Fear: Can Monkeys Help Unlock the Secrets of Trauma?
On Valentine’s Day, 2018, five months after Hurricane Maria made landfall, Daniel Phillips stood at the edge of a denuded forest on the eastern half of a 38-acre island known as Cayo Santiago, a clipboard in his hand, his eyes on the monkeys. The island sits about a half-mile off the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, near a village called Punta Santiago. Phillips and his co-workers left the mainland shortly after dawn, and the monkeys had already begun to gather by the time they arrived, their screams and oddly birdlike chirps louder than the low rumble of the motorboat that ferried the humans. The monkeys were everywhere.
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Dreading Congestion Pricing? You Might Feel Differently After the Fact
While many motorists may oppose paying a fee to enter the city center now, drivers’ perceptions of the policy are likely to improve once it actually goes into effect.
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Some People Are Great At Recognizing Faces. Others…Not So Much
Every day, Marty Doerschlag moves through the world armed with what amounts to a low-level superpower: He can remember a face forever. "If I spend about 30 seconds looking at somebody, I will remember their face for years and years and years," he says. Doerschlag began to recognize his talent well into adulthood, after a series of strange encounters and sightings. There was the man he recognized in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, someone he'd sat behind three years earlier at a Michigan vs. Ohio State football game. (Doerschlag remembered the man but not the score of the game.) There were the company Christmas parties where he could always remember exactly who was whose spouse.
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The Risks of Blasting Your Employer on Social Media
A study shows how much people criticize their employers and colleagues on social media, and what consequences they face when they do so.
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We Gossip About 52 Minutes A Day. That May Not Be As Toxic As It Sounds
Almost everyone gossips. And a new study finds that people spend about 52 minutes per day, on average, talking to someone about someone else who is not present. But here's the surprise: Despite the assumption that most gossip is trash talk, the study finds that the vast majority of gossip is nonjudgmental chitchat. "We actually found that the overwhelming majority of gossip was neutral," says study author Megan Robbins, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, who studies how people's social interactions are related to their health and well-being.
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Reducing Climate Change by Making It Less Abstract
There is no longer any doubt: the world is getting warmer, and humans are partially to blame. Unless we make significant changes at both the individual and societal level in the coming years, the consequences could be catastrophic. However, such changes are inherently difficult to enact because they cut directly against human nature. Humans are naturally prone to making short-term decisions (for instance, taking the plane rather than the train) as opposed to pursuing longer-term collective interests. In other words, they often prefer benefits in the concrete “here and now” to those that occur in the abstract future. But how can this tendency be overcome?
