If you look at the internet today, there are a few things that you can learn about humanity: 1. Our political systems have serious problems. 2. Communicating without using real faces or names can strip us of our empathy and turn us into cruelty machines. 3. We...
The idea that you need an average of eight hours of sleep each night is for most of us so ingrained that it might as well be embroidered on the insides of our eyelids. But it hasn’t always been this way. Most of our ancestors, in fact,...
What if your Fitbit, or Apple Watch, or whatever other doodad you use to obsessively track how many steps you take each day didn’t just keep tabs on your body, but actually made you money in the process? That’s the premise of a new paper out of...
Last week a first-time Tinder date postponed me in favor of getting stoned . “Hey my friend has just turned up with some weed, I think therefore it’s unlikely I’m going to make it to the pub later,” she wrote. I’ll be honest: it’s not the most...
Work sucks. But work is especially terrible when you’re the office outcast. Office misfits live in “perpetual stress,” says Ryan Vogel, assistant professor of management at Penn State-Erie. Vogel has studied office misfits (his term for people whose personal values don’t coincide with their employer’s) since 2010,...
Dutch Small, a publicist from Houston, has a habit of misplacing his wallet on drunken nights out. That’s why he loves his checkbook. When his credit cards are gone (until, of course, replacements arrive in the mail), he pays via personal check at places like Target, Walmart,...
When a relationship ends, people tend to do one of two things. The first is to purge — to scorch the ground upon which your roots had grown. This part of your life is now over, and nothing can be gained from looking back on it. The second is...
It began with a blog post. Last year, on April 28, software engineer and author Lauren Voswinkel published a plea for workers to disclose their salaries online with the hashtag #talkpay. The first step to rooting out discriminatory hiring practices against women and minorities was to identify...
The night is going smoothly. You’re out at the bar with your friends having a great time. Then, all of a sudden, a fight breaks out. It’s the same friend every time. He’s wildly punching another of your friends. Or the guy standing behind him. Or the...
We live in an age in which people willingly lube up homemade electrodes, strap them to their heads, and then crank up some voltage to zap their brains. It’s called transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS, and it is very much a thing — there’s some slick consumer products you...
Once upon a time, the internet was made up of awkward personal blogs and weird webpages about string theory. Then, for a while, it was mostly made up of cats (plus some quizzes). But in the past year or so, the internet has entered a new phase:...
World-class athletes are known for their willingness to embrace extreme training regimens and unorthodox treatments in their pursuits of physical excellence — treatments that often look a little outlandish to the mere mortals who watch from the stands. During the London Olympics, beach volleyball players and others drew notice...