Be Kind to Yourself When You Screw Up
Mark Leary, Aeon Magazine
Learning to be kind to yourself when you (inevitably) make mistakes could have a remarkable effect on your happiness.
Mark Leary, Aeon Magazine
Learning to be kind to yourself when you (inevitably) make mistakes could have a remarkable effect on your happiness.
Edwin Cartlidge, Phys. World
Millionaire former chief technology officer of Microsoft Nathan Myhrvold is at loggerheads with a group of NASA astrophysicists over the latter's ability to accurately measure the properties of tens of thousands of asteroids in the solar system. Myhrvold, who has a physics PhD but is not an asteroid expert, accuses NASA scientists of making serious errors when analysing data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope (WISE), but has in turn been accused of many errors himself.
Laura Beil, Science News
A deadly infection that has now spread to three states is puzzling disease investigators. The illness is caused by Elizabethkingia anopheles, a bacterium commonly found in soil and water and that, until now, has rarely caused problems.
Michael Bond, NewScientist
There is no such thing as a rational voter. Several decades of surveys and opinion polls show that elections and referendums are decided as much by ideology and emotion as a sober analysis of policies and manifestos.
Gaynell Terrell, High Country News
The bald eagle has been the national symbol since 1782, but the Western artist Charlie Russell was right: The buffalo was far more important to the story of the American West.
Agence France-Presse
The lionfish, a tropical creature with poisonous barbs and a painful sting that can kill humans in rare cases, may be spreading in the Mediterranean, a conservation group warned Monday.
Mikkel Beck, ScienceNordic
A team of scientists have discovered the remains of Athens’ first navy base built in the Greek golden age.
Jori Lewis, Hakai Magazine
In West Africa, the sawfish was once a source of cultural pride and power. What happens to traditional African cultures as it disappears?
Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian
Life as a male chick has never been ducky. Instead, the lives of newborn males in egg production facilities have been short and grim. But that sad era will finally come to an end, reports Ben Rosen for Christian Science Monitor. A new technology makes it easier to ID a chick’s sex before they’re born, allowing egg producers to pledge to do away with the grisly practice of culling male chicks.
Veronique Greenwood, Nautilus
Sperm are the cheetahs of the microscopic world: Made of little more than molecular muscle and batteries, tipped with a payload of genetic information, they are optimized for speed. But to orient themselves before their epic, seven-inch sprint (it’s more impressive if you’re less than one three-thousandth that size), they first need to sniff out the location of the egg—and, it turns out, the analogy to the sense of smell may be particularly apt.
B. Goldman, Scope
Much as I wholeheartedly wish death unto every extant mosquito wherever he or she may buzz, that wish is very unlikely to come true anytime in the foreseeable future. But in profiling the vulnerabilities of a few of the viral pestilences the tiny tormentors transmit, Stanford researchers have struck a blow for humanity.
A. LaFrance, Atlantic
Multispectral scanning reveals ancient text on the fabled Antikythera Mechanism, and suggests the machine was a mechanical textbook.
Alex Berezow, ACSH
Brain training games, like those made by NeuroNation and Lumosity, are marketed either explicitly or implicitly as a scientifically verified way to enhance your cognitive ability and to make you smarter. The creators of these games may not be happy with the latest science, however.
Adam Frank, New York Times
LAST month astronomers from the Kepler spacecraft team announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets, all orbiting stars outside our solar system. The total number of such “exoplanets” confirmed via Kepler and other methods now stands at more than 3,000.
Paige Williams, New Yorker
Lee Berger has announced one fossil find after another, and has proclaimed two new species of ancestral human. Do the bones live up to the hype?
Hunter Oatman, CW
Death was everywhere. From the slaughtering of animals to inexplicable epidemics to the fatal complications of childbirth, it’s hard to overstate the ubiquity of dying in 18th-century Europe. And yet, since few people understood the many potential failings of the human body, most simply held fast to their faith and left the rest up to God.