-
I Jumped Out of a Plane to Learn the Benefits of Stress
I’m sitting in the back of the plane when the pilot announces we’ve reached maximum altitude. One of the crew gets up and – somewhat theatrically – slides open the side of the plane. In ones and twos, we shuffle towards the open door. When it comes to my turn, standing on the edge of a two-mile vertical drop, I’m more terrified than I’ve ever been. Thankfully, as a first-time jumper, I’m strapped to an experienced parachutist who will guide us down. I don’t even have to take the next step. But my brain is screaming at me not to go through with it. Behind me, my instructor gently pulls my head back so I can hear his reassuring words over the roaring wind.
-
Women in Science Are Doing All Right
The toy maker Mattel recently honored International Women’s Day by making “role model dolls” of women in science, tech, engineering and math jobs, while lamenting that “girls are systemically tracked away from STEM.” It’s a cliché that these fields are rife with sexism, but at least in academia the data disagree, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
-
They May Be Just Acquaintances. They’re Important to You Anyway.
Victoria Tirondola and Lam Gong first struck up a conversation last spring at the dog run in Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, N.J., when they realized that each owned a dog named Abby. Ms. Tirondola, 65, an insurance sales representative who lives in nearby Cedar Grove, has a tiny bichon-poodle mix. Mr. Gong’s Abby, older and portlier, is a terrier-beagle. They chatted about dogs at first. Then they learned that they both cooked, so “we talked about food and restaurants,” said Mr. Gong, 67, a retiree living in Clifton. “And how much better my cooking is than his,” put in Ms. Tirondola.
-
A Decoder That Uses Brain Scans to Know What You Mean — Mostly
Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence. The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines, rather than trying to replicate each word, a team reports in the journal Nature Neuroscience. "It's getting at the ideas behind the words, the semantics, the meaning," says Alexander Huth, an author of the study and an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at The University of Texas at Austin. This technology can't read minds, though. It only works when a participant is actively cooperating with scientists.
-
There Are Better Ways to Study That Will Last You a Lifetime
Picture your preschooler’s teacher pulling you aside at pickup time to say that your child was “not taking responsibility” for learning the alphabet. You’d be puzzled and probably angry. It’s not up to a 4-year-old to make sure he learns the alphabet. That’s the teacher’s job. But as your child gets older, he’ll increasingly be expected to teach himself. High school seniors must read difficult books independently, commit information to memory, schedule their work, cope with test anxiety and much more. These demands build slowly across the grades, essentially forming a second, unnoticed curriculum: learning how to learn independently.
-
Sorry, Weed Probably Does Not Make You More Creative
Many cannabis users are convinced that the drug not only heightens their mood, but also their creativity. Creative luminaries also seem to endorse this idea. Steve Jobs said that marijuana and hashish would make him “relaxed and creative” while astronomer and author Carl Sagan believed that cannabis helps produce “serenity and insight.” In the artistic sphere, Lady Gaga said she smokes “a lot of pot” when writing music, and Louis Armstrong called marijuana “an assistant and friend.” Despite these popular beliefs about the creative potency of cannabis, scientific consensus has remained hazy. Now new research suggests that cannabis may not be a gateway drug to creativity after all.
