There are a lot of wall chargers and docks out there for iOS devices. A lot. So many. But it's nice to see one that's simple, portable, flexible, and smartly designed. It's just sort of a relief. If you need this, here it is, and it's 10 bucks. Done.
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Welcome to Crazy Town, where the moon landing was staged, 9/11 was a hoax, vaccines and teeth-strengthening fluoride are poisons distributed by the government, Barack Obama isn't really a citizen, and the Earth is absolutely not on an irreversible path toward hot, pollution-driven destruction. Conspiracy theories, the lifeblood of the real America.
A new study probes the connections between conspiratorial thinking (conspiracist ideation) and the tendency to eschew certain well-established scientific facts, finding that conspiracy theorists were far more likely to be against vaccinations, and somewhat more likely to be skeptical of climate change science and genetically modified food.
The researchers, from the University of Western Australia, used an online survey of 1,001 U.S. participants to gauge attitudes toward conspiracy theories, vaccines, climate change and GM foods, asking people how much they agreed with statements like "the risk of vaccinations to maim and kill children outweighs their health benefits." They found the participants with greater conspiracy ideation also tended to reject the scientific issues they asked about, especially in the case of vaccines.
"People who tend toward conspiratorial thinking are three times more likely to reject vaccinations," lead author Stephan Lewandowsky (who recently moved to the University of Bristol from UWA) told Mother Jones.
Lewandowsky also found links between conservative, free-market thinking and rejecting climate science--if you can imagine. The was no association between political affiliation and acceptance of GM foods. While there was some minor evidence linking political affiliation and anti-vaccine beliefs, that road goes both ways: both anti-Big Pharma progressives and antigovernment libertarians get in on the Jenny McCarthy craze.
The study appears in PLOS ONE.
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Everyone is discounting the iPhone 5c already, and it's making for some great deals for prospective buyers. Yesterday Best Buy announced that it would be selling the iPhone 5c with a $50 gift card, and Radio Shack announced a very similar deal today. As to not be left out, Walmart has announced its very own deal, offering the iPhone 5c at the discounted...
Now that Chrome 30 is done and dusted, Google has released Chrome 31 in beta -- and it's a big deal for Android users. The new browser lets users add iOS-like web shortcuts to the home screen, with specially optimized sites launching as full-screen web apps. Version 31 also brings the desktop ... Say goodbye to getting wrapped up in miles of cord connecting your MP3 player to your headphones as you listen to music. These little earphones, named Split, make up a completely wire-free music player in their own right. Though only in the prototype stage, it's designed to have 256 megabytes of memory and can be controlled through a simple click of the jaws. Split's creators are looking for $435,000 in Kickstarter funds to work out the last kinks in manufacturing and design and get them nestled in your ears.
Here are the basics: The magnetic earphones turn on when you split them apart. Since there is no cord to connect the two earbuds, they're essentially two MP3 players that play your music at the same time, synchronized by radio waves. Bite once, and a built-in accelerometer will tell the device to cycle through tracks. Bite twice in a row to adjust the volume. If you want to use it while eating or chewing gum, you can lock the player by tapping the right earphone.
Split can only store around 24 songs, according to the Kickstarter campaign, so this wouldn't be something you'd depend on to entertain you through a long trip, but it seems perfect for running or working out. It's designed to charge with a USB cord, though the creators are still working on getting the device to charge and upload songs at the same time.
Look at how happy this woman is not to have to disentangle her scarf from her headphones!
How good do they actually sound? This is what the creators say:
For a $155 pledge, you can snag your own pair. Toss in a few extra bucks, and you can even choose between colors: black, pearl, purple, citrus or the standard red. No guarantees when it'll actually make it out of development, though.
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Depression has been linked to memory impairment, but being depressed doesn't affect all types of memory uniformly. A new study suggests that people with depression can remember the big picture, but have difficulty with memories of fine details--distinguishing the differences between similar memories.
Brigham Young University professor Brock Kirwan and one of his former grad students, D.J. Shelton, set up a memory test where participants were asked to look at various objects that popped up on a computer screen, and mark them as a new object (something they hadn't seen in the test already) or an old object (that they had seen). Out of 83 participants, those who were more depressed (assessed by pre-study surveys) could usually tell the difference between objects they had or hadn't seen before, but were significantly more likely to categorize objects that looked similar, but not exactly the same, as "old."
Granted, I too might have a hard time distinguishing between a few of these:
"They don't have amnesia," according to Kirwan. "They are just missing the details."
The paper suggests that this issue distinguishing similar memories could have to do with the fact that depressed people have been shown to have smaller hippocampi than control groups--the hippocampus being a vital brain region for memory processing. Some of Kirwan's previous work has connected the hippocampus to pattern separation abilities. During depression, the researchers hypothesize that the brain seems to stop producing new neurons in the hippocampus, in turn affecting pattern separation abilities.
However, the authors do admit to a few limits to their work. Their study didn't use people with a clinical diagnosis of depression, and the average level of depression in their participant pool was fairly mild, according to their evaluations. (They ruled out 15 participants from their dataset for antidepressant use, since it has been suggested to increase neurogenesis, the creation of neurons.) So it's hard to establish causation between depression, neurogenesis and pattern separation abilities. "We suggest that future research in this area is needed to better determine the type of relationships between psychological disorders, pattern separation, antidepressants, and neurogenesis," they write.
The study is in the November 1 issue of Behavioral Brain Research
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You might think the cheap plastic rake you grabbed at the hardware store is more than adequate given you really only use it for about one month out of the year. But that's only because you haven't been introduced to Quirky's wonderful new Rake 'n' Tamp which not only wrangles leaves, it also tamps them down so you can squeeze as much as possible into every bag.
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You use them every day. They're some of the most simple, but useful, devices in existence. They're used the world over. But who, exactly, invented knives, forks and spoons?
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