Just Curious
Future - Science & Environment - Olympics: Dispelling doubts about exceptional feats
Could the fledgling field of performance profiling reveal the truth about Olympian achievements that defy expectation? It started with a splash, but the ripples continue to be felt. When 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen touched home to win a gold medal in the 400m individual medley, accusations began to fly.
By Anatoly Liberman It cannot but come as a surprise that against the background of countless important words whose origin has never been discovered some totally insignificant verbs and nouns have been traced successfully and convincingly to the very beginning of Indo-European. Fart (“not in delicate use”) looks like a product of our time, but it has existed since time immemorial.
Puzzling heritage: The verb ‘fart’
Routines are made up of a three-part "habit loop": a cue, a behavior and a reward. Understanding and interrupting that loop is key to breaking a habit, says journalist Charles Duhigg. iStockphoto.com Think about something it took you a really long time to learn, like how to parallel park.
Habits: How They Form And How To Break Them
Inside-Out Your Mind : Krulwich Wonders...
Look what Kent Rogowski did. He took a bunch of stuffed animals, kids' playthings, unstitched them, removed their insides, and turned them inside out. This masked red thing, I presume, is an inside-out, hmmm, I dunno, rag doll?
What's the secret to living happily alone? Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Earlier this year, divorcee Dominique Browning published an essay in the New York Times positing a gender gap in the talent for living alone.
Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone—Are women better at living alone?
As I fell — danger signs flashing in my brain: falling!
Why Men Can’t Stand to Be Alone After a Breakup or a Divorce — First Person
What you see at left is the front of her report card from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, a vocational school she attended in the late 1920s, after she had finished the eighth grade.
How I Found the Report Cards, and How They Changed My Life
Mass hysteria in upstate New York: Why Lori Brownell and 13 other teenage girls are showing Tourette’s-like symptoms
Screengrab from the Today show about illness at LeRoy High School © MSNBC Today show Last August, 16-year-old Lori Brownell passed out while head-banging at a concert.
Does a hibernating dormouse ever relieve itself? Photograph by ThinkStock. A video of an adorable snoring dormouse , deep in hibernation, has gone viral this week.
Snoring dormouse video: Do hibernating animals wake up to go to the bathroom?
Most folks who resolved to cut down on coffee this year are driven by the simple desire for self-improvement. But for coffee drinkers in 17th-century Turkey, there was a much more concrete motivating force: a big guy with a sword. Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire , would not have been a fan of Starbucks.
Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head! : The Salt
Introverts, who prefer quieter, lower-stimulation environments, have trouble thriving in today's extrovert-oriented culture, says author Susan Cain. iStockphoto.com