The science of love: How "positivity resonance" shapes the way we connect
by Maria Popova The neurobiology of how the warmest emotion blurs the boundaries by you and not-you. We kick-started the year with some of history’s most beautiful definitions of love. But timeless as their words might be, the poets and the philosophers have a way of escaping into the comfortable detachment of the abstract and the metaphysical, leaving open the question of what love really is on an unglamorously physical, bodily, neurobiological level — and how that might shape our experience of those lofty abstractions. She begins with a definition that parallels Dorion Sagan’s scientific meditation on sex: First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Fredrickson zooms in on three key neurobiological players in the game of love — your brain, your levels of the hormone oxytocin, and your vagus nerve, which connects your brain to the rest of your body — and examines their interplay as the core mechanism of love, summing up:
Japanese Students Create Brilliant Straw Home Heated by Compost
Japanese students at Waseda University have designed and built an innovative straw house that produces its own heat through agricultural fermentation. During the cold months, dried straw is composted in acrylic cases within the house using the low-odor Japanese “bokashi” method. The fermentation naturally heats up the house by generating 30° celsius heat for up to four weeks. The project, called “A Recipe To Live,” stands in the coastal town of Taiki-cho in Hokkaido. During the hot summer months, the natural shelter dries straw inside transparent window shelves. Photos by LIXIL
This Is How You Love An Introvert
Make eye contact as frequently as possible. You should learn to know each earthy rim of her irises better than your own, so that when she doesn’t talk, you can at least understand the language of her glare. Ask her questions. Let her play the Call, not just the Response. While you are used to filling the silence with your own anecdotes and her cough-like laugh, still make the effort to hear her stories. They won’t come easy. Touch her. Do not confuse her patience with tolerance. When you fight, do not expect her to crack. Do not start a Cold War; muteness has always been her defense. When she chooses to wear the red scarf instead of the seven other brown, black and grey ones hanging in the closet next to it, let her know how beautiful it is to see her in color. Do not, though, lose yourself for her. When you see her, smile.
GMin's Innovation Labs: Enabling Generations of Young Innovators | GLOBAL MINIMUM
It will take anywhere from 3 seconds to 1 minute for your pic to upload, depending on how big it is. You're going to see this message every time you post a new pic. So, we're making the text really long so that it'll take you at least five picture uploads to read it all. Here's what we're thinking...While your first picture is uploading think about someone you want to kiss.
The Pixel Density Race and its Technical Merits
While this has always been an issue that’s been in the background since Android OEMs started releasing devices with display PPIs above the 300-400 “retina” range, recent events have sparked a broader discussion into the value of pursuing the PPI race that is happening between Android OEMs. Within this discussion, the key points of contention tend to center upon the various tradeoffs from increasing resolution, and whether an increase in pixels per inch (PPI) will actually have a perceivable increase. If there is any single number that people point to for resolution, it is the 1 arcminute value that Apple uses to indicate a “Retina Display”. This number corresponds to around 300 PPI for a display that is at 10-12 inches from the eye. In other words, this is about 60 pixels per degree (PPD). While all of these resolution values are achievable by human vision, in practice, such values are highly unlikely. Thus, there are multiple sets of tradeoffs that come with increased resolution.
What It’s Like to Live in a Universe of Ten Dimensions
by Maria Popova What songwriting has to do with string theory. What would happen if you crossed the physics of time with the science of something and nothing? You might get closer to understanding the multiverse. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space, Rob Bryanton — a self-described “non-scientist with an inquisitive mind,” whose dayjob as a sound designer involves composing music for TV series and films — proposes a theory of the universe based on ten dimensions, a bold and progressive lens on string theory based on the idea that countless tiny “superstrings” are vibrating in a tenth dimension. For a taste, here is a mind-bending explanation of ten dimensions might mean: The project began as a set of 26 songs, exploring the intersection of science and philosophy. Before launching into the additional dimensions, Bryanton also breaks down the familiar three: HT It’s Okay To Be Smart Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
6 areas of research that offer fascinating conclusions on sexuality
The standard narrative of human sexual evolution says: men provide women with goods and services in exchange for women’s sexual fidelity. But is that really true or relevant today? Christopher Ryan, the co-author of Sex at Dawn with Cacilda Jethá, takes a deeper look and has quite a few bones to pick with this idea. Christopher Ryan: Are we designed to be sexual omnivores? “My hope is that a more accurate updated understanding of human sexuality will lead us to have greater tolerance for ourselves, for each other, greater respect for unconventional relationship configurations like same-sex marriage or polyamorous unions, and that we’ll finally put to rest the idea that men have some innate instinctive right to monitor and control women’s sexual behavior,” Ryan says. Below, read up on some more lines of research that suggest out-of-the-box ideas about our sexuality. Photo credit: iStock
We Are a Cosmic Accident: Alan Lightman on Dark Energy, the Multiverse, and Why We Exist
by Maria Popova How we drew the one we have from the zillions of possible universes in the cosmic lottery hat. Questions like why our world exists and what nothing is have occupied minds great and ordinary since the dawn of humanity, and yet for all our scientific progress, they continue to do so, yielding only hypotheses rather than concrete answers. But there is something immutably heartening in the difference between the primitive hypotheses of myth, folklore and religion, which handed off such mysteries to various deities and the occasional white-bearded man, and the increasingly educated guesses of modern science. The most compelling example of fine-tuning is dark energy — an invisible and unexpected cosmological force that hides in empty space and works against the universe’s slowing expansion, a sort of “cosmic accelerator pedal” that is speeding up its expansion and causing galaxies to drift away from one another. On one thing most physicists agree. Donating = Loving
The Science of Orgasms and Your Brain on Porn
By Maria Popova We’ve already explored the origins of sex, the neurochemistry of heartbreak, and how drugs affect desire. But what, exactly, happens in the brain when the body belts out its ultimate anthem of sexual triumph? But what about sexual experiences that don’t involve direct contact with a partner? For more on this ceaselessly fascinating tangle of biology and behavior, see the recently released The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction by neuroscientist Larry Young and journalist Brian Alexander, who take us inside the living brain to explore how its neurotransmitters, hormones, and circuits shape the very behaviors we find ourselves most invested in.
