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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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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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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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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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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Solving the software developer shortage

Moving development to the cloud and offering the IDE as a service to developers, a significant amount of their workload has been removed.

The sentiment that software is taking over the world has become widely accepted throughout the tech community.  Last year it was examined in depth by Marc Andreessen.  However, as software continues to infiltrate nearly every industry, there’s a serious consequence taking shape. The demand for development continues to grow exponentially, but the amount of qualified developers that are available to produce this commodity is not. Simply put, the world is running out of developers.

 

 

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HBO brings streaming-only service to Europe

Some Europeans will get access to the full complement of HBO content for a small fee.

According to Variety, in mid-October an HBO streaming service that does not require an associated cable subscription will be rolled out in Europe. It is confined to only a few European countries, but it’s an embrace from Time Warner to cord-cutters that non-HBO customers have long sought.

 

 

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Why we all need to understand ‘big data’

Big data

“Big data” – where does it come from?  Why aren’t companies like Facebook and Google concerned about big data? The answer is that the web companies are the forerunners. Driven by social, mobile, and cloud technology, there is an important transition taking place, leading us all to the data-enabled world that those companies inhabit today.

Will 3D printing technology make gun control impossible?

Second Amendment advocates want to make acquiring arms as easy as downloading a file and hitting Print.

Technological advances are about to make the gun debate in the United States a whole lot more intense. Forbes highlighted a project last week called Wiki Weapon that wants to prototype the world’s first fully printable gun.

 

 

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Chocolate may help lower risk of stroke in men

The beneficial effect of chocolate consumption on stroke may be related to the flavonoids in chocolate.

According to a new study, eating a moderate amount of chocolate each week may be associated with a lower risk of stroke in men. The study was published in the August 29, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “While other studies have looked at how chocolate may help cardiovascular health, this is the first of its kind study to find that chocolate, may be beneficial for reducing stroke in men,” said study author Susanna C. Larsson, PhD, with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

 

 

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