It’s come to this. Perhaps it’s about time.
We live in singular times.
Technology encourages us to disappear into our own personal worlds.
Meanwhile, relationships seems to get harder and harder.
Why, in a sign of apocalyptic avenues approaching, even Facebook is launching a dating service.
Demand for exotic pets and collectors’ items drives a flourishing illegal trade in beetles, spiders, and more.
SPECIAL AGENT RYAN Bessey was in his office at the New Jersey branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in Galloway, on September 23, 2015, when he took a call from a colleague in the intelligence unit. The analyst told him that French customs officers had seized 115 emperor scorpions in two shipments from Cameroon. They were addressed to a man in Metuchen, New Jersey, named Wlodzimie Lapkiewicz.
If French authorities considered the bust important enough to tell the U.S. about it, Lapkiewicz was worth looking into, Bessey thought. He began to do some digging.
Continue reading… “Bug smuggling is big business”
Where did you find your last boyfriend or girlfriend, and the one behind that? Did they catch your eye while strolling through a park? Or did you find them perched on the edge of a barstool, sipping a Manhattan? Were you introduced through friends? Or was it a meet-cute situation?
Yeah, right. You know you totally met them online – on a dating website after filling out a meticulous profile, or just swiping right. A new study from Stanford sociologist and lead author Michael Rosenfeld shows that most heterosexual couples today meet on the internet (or smartphone). His research was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Continue reading… “This is the most popular way to find your significant other”
The wellness case for learning new skills
In the summer of 2016 I was very unhappy. I was coming up on my year anniversary of living in London, where we had moved from Brooklyn for my husband’s job, but I still felt pitifully lonely and poorly adjusted to the culture. I reentered therapy, tried to socialize often, started volunteering, and focused on doing things for pleasure rather than out of obligation.
But there was one thing that alleviated my sadness more than others: I learned to drive a stick shift.
In Europe, automatics were more expensive to rent, so it was in my best interest to try to overcome any manual driving anxiety head-on. My husband and I decided to spend two weeks in France, and I spent much of that vacation stalling out on country roads, navigating dreaded traffic circles, and ultimately speeding down the highways. When I returned to London I told people about the beaches and baguettes in France, but I mostly wanted to talk about how I could now officially drive stick.
I had discovered the beauty of “micromastery”: working to develop competence in a single, concrete skill. The term was coined by the writers Tahir Shah and Robert Twigger; Twigger later published his 2017 book, Micromastery: Learn Small, Learn Fast, and Unlock Your Potential to Achieve Anything, which contains instructions for laying a brick wall, making sushi, and brewing beer. In the introduction, Twigger writes that he was stymied by the idea that he had to work for years to acquire any truly valuable skill, but that he still wanted to learn and create, so he decided to focus on making the perfect omelet: his first micromastery.
Continue reading… “Why you should try micro mastery”
New research shows that one in 10 of them over 65 engages in college-style drinking behavior
Binge drinking is often portrayed as a college thing. But this risky form of imbibing actually declined among U.S. university students from 2005 to 2014. It is now most prevalent among people from 25 to 34 and is increasing among people over 50. And new research finds that 10.6% of seniors 65 and older are binge drinkers — though the actual total is almost surely higher.
Continue reading… “Baby Boomers on a drinking binge”
Kimchi, K-pop, and K-dramas. Welcome to Hallyu 2.0, in which everyone in the West is losing their minds over all things Korean.
Playing a starring role is a glorious onslaught of Korean beauty products, with the K-Beauty market now valued at over $13 billion, and $7.2 billion of which is from facial skin care alone. Serums, acids, oils, cushion compacts, CC creams, BB creams, masks that bubble on your face, masks to sleep in, volcanic clay, and snail slime are seeing improbably explosive popularity, and they’ve done so with accessible pricing and cute packaging that has grown women reaching for panda face masks.
“What people don’t see is the amount of government support and PR that drives interest.”
Jude Chao, director of marketing for BeautyTap and somewhat of an oracle on K-Beauty (who also happens to have excellent skin) believes in empowering the masses with education on K-Beauty ingredients. (Her blog, Fifty Shades of Snail, is a solid starting point if you’re overwhelmed by the 12,000 active brands on the market, the proliferation of which Chao believes is no coincidence.)
Continue reading… “How K-Beauty conquered the West”
“Robots And Racism,” a study conducted by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory in New Zealand and published by the country’s University of Canterbury, suggests people perceive physically human-like robots to have a race and therefore apply racial stereotypes to white and black robots.
Have you ever noticed the popularity of white robots?
You see them in films like Will Smith’s “I, Robot” and Eve from “Wall-E.” Real-life examples include Honda’s Asimo, UBTECH’s Walker, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, and even NASA’s Valkyrie robot. All made of shiny white material. And some real-life humanoid robots are modeled after white celebrities, such as Audrey Hepburn and Scarlett Johansson.
The reason for these shades of technological white may be racism, according to new research.
Continue reading… “Robot racism? Yes, says a study showing humans’ biases extend to robots”
A politician from Italy’s hard-right governing party is pushing legislation to combat teens’ “addiction” to their phones.
The bill proposes courses in schools and a public awareness campaign, plus “re-education” in health centers for worst-case scenarios.
Oxford psychologist Andrew Przybylski said the proposed law was a bad idea, and pointed to tech “addiction boot-camps” in China.
Continue reading… “Italy wants to treat phone addicts like drug addicts and send teens to rehab”
Scientists are debunking the link to hyperactivity
Contrary to decades of popular belief (and anecdotal evidence from generations of parents), a new study has found that there is no such thing as a sugar rush. That’s right. The sugar rush is a myth. Rather than making people feel energized and hyped, the new research suggests eating sweet foods actually causes people to experience the opposite: fatigue and a lack of alertness.
The results — which were published in June in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews — come from a meta-analysis of 31 published studies involving almost 1,300 people. A team of European researchers sought to understand the effect of sugar on people’s moods, including anger, alertness, depression, and fatigue. Overall, they wanted to know how does this carbohydrate impact both the way people feel in terms of pleasure, as well as cognitive ability and sharpness.
Continue reading… “There is no such thing as a sugar rush”
Nothing forms a bond like working closely with someone. But why are certain work friendships especially significant?
The modern workday takes up a lot of your time. A typical workday runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and the average commute hovers at about an hour a day total. That means that the majority of your time awake each day is spent at work—or getting there.
So it’s no surprise that you often form close relationships with colleagues, even to the point where you consider someone your “office spouse” or “work spouse.” According to a survey by Simply Hired, more than 50% of female employees and 44% of male employees said that they had a work spouse at some point in their careers. The topics they discussed with these coworkers ranged from other colleagues and work projects to problems at home, or sometimes even their sex lives.
Continue reading… “This is why you probably have a work wife or work husband”
MITA YUN DIDN’T get into robotics to save the world. The lunar rovers she built as a student at Carnegie Mellon, and the software she developed as an engineer for Google—that stuff was just practice. The things Yun really wanted to make were friends.
Yun had hungered for companionship since she was a little girl in China. She’d begged her parents for a pet, but no dice. These were the days of China’s one-child policy, so no sibling either. Instead, Yun’s parents filled her room with a menagerie of stuffed animals, which she liked to imagine springing to life, their little paws dancing on her bedspread, their little bodies stuffed with possibilities.
In 2017, Yun quit her job at Google to start building the friend she’d always wanted. She started a company, called Zoetic, and recruited a few other roboticists to take her imaginary sidekick and turn it into a commercial product. Two years later, she’s ready to introduce her creation: a small, interactive robot called Kiki, which goes on pre-sale later this month.
Continue reading… “The second coming of the robot pet”
For the first time in modern history, the world’s population is expected to virtually stop growing by the end of this century, due in large part to falling global fertility rates, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the United Nations.
By 2100, the world’s population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion, with annual growth of less than 0.1% – a steep decline from the current rate. Between 1950 and today, the world’s population grew between 1% and 2% each year, with the number of people rising from 2.5 billion to more than 7.7 billion.
Continue reading… “World’s population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.
