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?
Puzzling heritage: The verb ‘fart’ 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. Even the nuances have not been lost: one thing is to break wind loudly (farting); quite a different thing is to do it quietly (the now obscure “fisting”). Habits: How They Form And How To Break Them. 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 hide caption itoggle caption iStockphoto.com. Inside-Out Your Mind : Krulwich Wonders... When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink? Search for a bird by entering name, description, and keywords, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Scale2/scale2.swf?bordercolor=white. Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone—Are women better at living 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. She and her single female neighbors, she wrote, relish the freedom to eat at odd hours and monopolize the bed, while men are indifferent to these perks. Nesting at home, she went on to assert, women feel safe. “Men,” though, “are hard-wired to feel danger all the time … Being alone feels dangerous to a man.”
Why Men Can’t Stand to Be Alone After a Breakup or a Divorce — First Person. As I fell — danger signs flashing in my brain: falling!
Falling! — I curled up to protect my head, landing squarely on my tailbone. Pain lighted up my spinal cord. My brain joggled in its cradle. Bright lights dazzled my eyes. How I Found the Report Cards, and How They Changed My Life. 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.
As you can see, she had a perfect attendance record—this despite moving several times, having a deceased father, and being hard of hearing. If you click through the rest of Marie's student record, you'll see that the school's staff initially described her as "slow" and "irritable" (perhaps due to her hearing problems) but that she eventually gained confidence and made the honor roll. You'll also see that the school helped to place her in more than a dozen sewing and dress-finishing jobs after she graduated, and that at one point she was scolded for not returning to a job after her lunch break. It all reads like the storyboard for a movie or a play—the rough outline of a young woman's life, from her mid-teens through early adulthood, with the later chapters still to be written.
But this was 1996. Mass hysteria in upstate New York: Why Lori Brownell and 13 other teenage girls are showing Tourette’s-like symptoms. Snoring dormouse video: Do hibernating animals wake up to go to the bathroom? Photograph by ThinkStock.
A video of an adorable snoring dormouse, deep in hibernation, has gone viral this week. English dormice sleep from October to April, and animals as diverse as squirrels, lemurs, and bears all hibernate for stretches of time during the year. Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head! : The Salt. 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. Under his rule, the consumption of coffee was a capital offense. hide captionThough Murad IV banned tobacco, alcohol and coffee, some say he consumed all three and his death was the result of alcohol poisoning. The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations. Quiet, Please: Unleashing 'The Power Of Introverts' Introverts, who prefer quieter, lower-stimulation environments, have trouble thriving in today's extrovert-oriented culture, says author Susan Cain.
iStockphoto.com hide caption toggle caption iStockphoto.com From Gandhi to Joe DiMaggio to Mother Teresa to Bill Gates, introverts have done a lot of good work in the world. But being quiet, introverted or shy was sometimes looked at as a problem to overcome. In the 1940s and '50s the message to most Americans was: Don't be shy. Susan Cain — who considers herself an introvert — has written a new book that tells the story of how introversion fell out of style. Quiet.