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I’m Right! (For Some Reason)
The New York Times: IF we are reminded of anything this election season, it is that America is a house divided against itself. The anger and mistrust between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, often seems as bitter as it is reflexive. Most worrisome of all, we have grown so accustomed to this divide that we no longer flinch at the brazen political attacks on either side — even when the logic underlying these attacks is hard to fathom. Take the case of two political ads recently shown on television.
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Political strength
The Economist: Male Harris sparrows are pugnacious beasts. They signal their status by the darkness of their plumage, and woe-betide any male whose signal is false—for if an itinerant ethologist blackens a subordinate’s feathers, the dominant birds recognise it as a fraud and beat it up. Normally, though, behaviour and outward appearance are in alignment, having been arranged that way by evolution, and subordinate birds do not push their luck. For female Harris sparrows, however, plumage does not matter in this way.
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Psychologie: rêvasser stimule la créativité (daydreaming stimulates creativity)
Le Huffington Post: Vous culpabilisez parce que vous avez passé l'après-midi à rêvasser? Pas de panique. Sans le savoir, vous étiez peut-être en train de résoudre un problème. D'ailleurs, cela vous est peut-être déjà arrivé. Au volant, en voiture, en train de faire les courses, vous êtes concentré sur quelque chose qui n'a rien à voir avec votre travail lorsque soudain, Eurêka!, une idée ou la solution à un problème vient à vous. Ce qu'il se passe dans ces moments, des chercheurs en psychologie ont cherché à le comprendre un peu plus précisément, grâce à plusieurs études parues dans le dernier numéro de la revue Psychological Science.
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The New Face of Infidelity
The Wall Street Journal: Some 60 years ago, Alfred Kinsey delivered a shock to midcentury sexual sensibilities when he reported that at some point in their marriages, half of the men and a quarter of the women in the U.S. had an extramarital affair. No one puts much stock in Dr. Kinsey's high numbers any more—his sampling methods suffered from a raging case of selection bias—but his results fit the long-standing assumption that men are much more likely to cheat than women. Lately, however, researchers have been raising doubts about this view: They believe that the incidence of unfaithfulness among wives may be approaching that of husbands.
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If Smart Is the Norm, Stupidity Gets More Interesting
The New York Times: Few of us are as smart as we’d like to be. You’re sharper than Jim (maybe) but dull next to Jane. Human intelligence varies. And this matters, because smarter people generally earn more money, enjoy better health, raise smarter children, feel happier and, just to rub it in, live longer as well. But where does intelligence come from? How is it built? Researchers have tried hard to find the answer in our genes. With the rise of inexpensive genome sequencing, they’ve analyzed the genomes of thousands of people, looking for gene variants that clearly affect intelligence, and have found a grand total of two. One determines the risk of Alzheimer’s and affects I.Q.
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Finding good health info online
Fox News: We're becoming a nation of DIY doctors: A whopping 80 percent of Internet users have turned to the Web for health help, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. "We take it for granted that you can, for instance, look up the side effects for a prescription on your mobile device as the pharmacist fills your order, but this instant access to digital health information now is pretty remarkable," notes Betsy Humphreys, deputy director of the U.S. National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.
