Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Ten years ago, Nature published a paper with a simple title: Oxytocin increases trust in humans. The paper described an experiment carried out by Swiss scientists, who asked volunteers to entrust money in an anonymous partner. This anonymous partner could either repay their trust by reimbursing them, or betray them by keeping the cash. Amazingly,…
One night during the third year of my PhD program, I sat on my bed with a packet of tranquilizers and a bottle of vodka. I popped a few pills in my mouth and swigged out of the bottle, feeling them burn down my throat. Moments later, I realized I was making a terrible mistake….
Rand Paul was having a decent night in the fourth Republican debate Tuesday, until he fielded a question about climate change. With his answer, he disappointed those who thought he might deliver reality-based comments. Paul, like the rest of the GOP candidates, wants to repeal President Barack Obama’s legacy-making Clean Power Plan reining in carbon…
Hey brah, what’s your favorite energy drink? Red Bull? Monster? Rock Star? Male Gaze? Do you embrace your guy friends while maintaining an arm-wrestle-like hand-clasp between your bodies? Do you enjoy infusing your body with guarana before doing some reps and contemplating the precariousness of manhood? If so, you might be one of the gentlebros…
The record high for today is 74 degrees set in 1948. As of 11 a.m. it was 71 in Central Park. Whether we warm four more degrees to set a new record it entirely up to the clouds at this point. A few breaks of sun would do the trick but the latest forecasts have…
If you live near a Civil War-era cemetery, rotting corpses may be on the attack. While there’s no need to fear the walking dead, homeowners should watch out for toxins leaking out of old graves that could be contaminating drinking water and causing serious health problems. When someone died at the turn of the century,…
LIKE some people who might rather not admit it, wolves faced with a scarcity of potential sexual partners are not beneath lowering their standards. It was desperation of this sort, biologists reckon, that led dwindling wolf populations in southern Ontario to begin, a century or two ago, breeding widely with dogs and coyotes. The clearance…
A rare bloom turns the arid Atacama desert in Chile into a magnificent carpet of mauve-colored flowers after the region’s heaviest rain in 20 years. (Reuters) The Atacama Desert in Chile, known as the driest place on Earth, is awash with color after a year’s worth of extreme rainfall. In an average year, this desert…
For patient T6, 2014 was a happy year. That was the year she learned to control a Nexus tablet with her brain waves, and literally took her life quality from 1980s DOS to modern era Android OS. A brunette lady in her early 50s, patient T6 suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou…
Last Thursday, the nation watched with a mix of amusement and horror as the House Benghazi committee spent 11 hours grilling Hillary Clinton on a bizarre farrago of issues, many of which bore only tangential connection to the Benghazi attack. Over the past few weeks, the political narrative seems to have shifted from “Clinton in trouble” to…