Year: 2012

Impact Lab > 2012
Analysis, Health & Fitness, New Discoveries, Science & Technology News

Father’s who sleep closer to their children experience a drop in testosterone

Fathers who co-sleep with their children may be more responsive their children’s needs.

Mothers and fathers both are biologically adapted to respond to children. New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that dads who sleep near their children experience a drop in testosterone. Previous research from humans and other species suggests this decrease might make men more responsive to their children’s needs and help them focus on the demands of parenthood.

 

 

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Science & Technology News

13 things that just don’t make any sense

There are mysteries in this world that still confound us.

1 The placebo effect

You induce pain in someone several times a day, for several days. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.  But, don’t try this at home.

 

 

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Analysis, Business, Science & Technology News

The limitations of venture capital on true innovation

Republicans and Democrats will agree on little during this years elections, including how to get the U.S. economy growing.  Will it take higher taxes or smaller government to get the economy growing again? One path to growth that is widely agreed upon is technological innovation, which has historically been closely associated with the American venture-capital-backed startup company.

 

 

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Education, Internet, Science & Technology News

Estonia’s ambitious plan to get 6 year olds to learn coding at school

The idea is that children in grades 1-4 will take coding classes as part of their normal curriculum.

Codeacademy and Bloc are hot new startups that teach people to code.  They help people learn to program quickly and easily and they have helped spawn a cultural movement lauded by the likes of Tim O’Reilly and Douglas Rushkoff.

But, some people are taking the idea a little further.

 

 

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Analysis, Big Problems, Health & Fitness

How will doctors handle the influx of new patients in 2014?

An influx of 30 million patients will impact primary care.

I distinctly remember that in first grade I had an idea of breathtaking wisdom and profundity. Candy should be free. You may have had a similar thought at the same age. This idea was supported by an incontrovertible rationale, namely that I really liked candy. Tragically, it only took a moment for my parents to expose a flaw in my otherwise revolutionary scheme. They suggested that if candy were free, no one would bother making candy. All candy makers would do something else that allowed them to make a living. Thus exposed to the painful realities of life, I put the thought out of my head for about forty years.

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Analysis, Food, Science & Technology News

Doubt cast on advantages of organic produce and meat

Researchers say organic foods are no more nutritious and no less likely to be contaminated.

Are organic fruits and vegetables more nutritious than conventional fruits and vegetables?  Maybe — or maybe not.

Scientists at Stanford University have weighed in on the “maybe not” side of the debate after an extensive examination of four decades of research comparing organic and conventional foods.

 

 

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Analysis, Brain, New Discoveries, Science & Technology News

Study of brain’s visual center finds men and women really do see things differently

Men and women do see things differently.

New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Biology of Sex Differences finds that the way that the visual centers of men and women’s brains works is different. Men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving stimuli, but women are better at discriminating between colors.

 

 

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Analysis, Education, Latest Trend

The library becoming more popular than ever, but books no longer the primary focus

The New York Public Library recently embarked on a controversial plan to move two to three million books off-site.

The New York Public Library (NYPL) retired its pneumatic-tube system sometime last year. It had been used to request books for more than a century. The New York Public Library opened in 1911 and that pneumatic call system had changed little since then. You still filled out a slip, and you still turned that slip over to a clerk, who would load it into a metal cartridge. The cartridge would be driven by air pressure to a station down in the stacks, where another clerk would retrieve your book, which was then sent back up to the call desk by a dumbwaiter. In recent years, this procedure would take about 20 minutes. In decades past, I’m told, it was closer to five.

 

 

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