NAUTIL.US
Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language
When Paul Kay, then an anthropology graduate student at Harvard University, arrived in Tahiti in 1959 to study island life, he expected…
nautil.us
Learning to Read in Your 30s Profoundly Transforms the Brain
The learning process leads to a reorganization that extends to deep brain structures.
NAUTIL.US
The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face
Nine years ago, I was sitting in a college math physics course and my professor spelt out an idea that kind of blew my mind. I think it isn’t a stretch to say that this is one of the most widely applicable mathematical discoveries, with applications ranging from optics to quantum physics, radio astronomy, MP3 and JPEG compression, X-ray crystallography, voice recognition, and PET or MRI scans.
nautil.us
Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds
A lesson in how to break out of filter bubbles.
nautil.us
The Key to Good Luck Is an Open Mind
Luck can seem synonymous with randomness. To call someone lucky is usually to deny the relevance of their hard work or talent. As Richard Wiseman, the Professor of Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, puts it, lucky people “appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky breaks.”
NAUTIL.US
Modern Media is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will
How the attention economy is subverting our decision-making and our democracy. // It’s not that James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab (motto: “Every Bit as Good”), had a “God, what I have I done?” moment during his time at Google. But it did occur to him that something had gone awry.
NAUTIL.US
The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. // ABSL provides fodder for researchers who reject the idea that there’s a genetic basis for the similarities found across languages. Instead, they argue, languages share certain properties because they all have to solve similar problems of communication under similar pressures, pressures that reflect the limits of human abilities to learn, remember, produce, and perceive information.
nautil.us
The Popular Creation Story of Astronomy Is Wrong
The old tale about science versus the church is wide of the mark.
nautil.us
What’s Wrong with Bananas
How industrial agriculture stole sex from our most important fresh fruit crop.
NAUTIL.US
Why Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing
Have you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too.
Nautil.us
To a Cigarette Maker, Your Life Is Worth About $10,000
If you had to put a price on your life, what cash amount do you think it would be? What about $100,000?
nautil.us
There Is No Such Thing as Unconscious Thought
A behavioral scientist unravels one of our most cherished conceptions.
Grupo de Whatasapp (apenas anúncios)
todo conteúdo, design e programação por Eduardo Pinheiro, 2003-2024
(exceto onde esteja explicitamente indicado de outra forma)