A study led by Prof. Mark Weiser of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Psychiatry and the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital has determined that young men who smoke are likely to have lower IQs than their non-smoking peers. Tracking 18- to 21-year-old men enlisted in the Israeli army in the largest ever study of its kind, he has been able to demonstrate an important connection between the number of cigarettes young males smoke and their IQ. (More from SCience Daily)

NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018 

Warning: Your reality is out of date! You think some facts don’t change, right?
Wrong!
When I was at school, there were just nine planets in our solar system and now…?

Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

Read More from Samuel Arbesman from Harvard Medical School on Boston.Com

More here.

“Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.” – Sylvia Plath

Is religion and a belief in a God-like creature just an extrapolation of a child’s “imaginary friend”?

If so, why can’t we, as a race, grow up? 

From childhood, humans are capable of forming enduring, stable and important social relationships with fictional characters, imaginary friends and super heroes. Thus, for humans, it is not difficult to imagine a god who is although invisible and intangible, yet somehow involved with them. Religious thoughts are based on tacit assumptions, when people proclaim their loyalty to a particular faith, they subscribe to claims for which there is no evidence.

Read more from Brain Blogger

Get them to wtach this Video.

Several great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009.
1. If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. According to a study conducted at San Francisco State University, the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things you do. One reason is adaptation: we adapt to all things material in our lives in a matter of weeks, no matter how infatuated we were with the coveted possession the day we got it. 

Erica Bree Rosenblum/University of Idaho

The White Sands of New Mexico are a good place to study evolution in progress. One reason is that the terrain, gypsum dunes white as a sheet of paper, is so different from the surrounding area. Another is that the dunes formed only about 6,000 years ago.

Ignorethe unwarranted claims that hacked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK expose human-made climate change as a conspiracy. Away from those headlines, an equally intense battle is taking place over access to the data showing global warming is real.

From Ramayana Bridge:

The recently discovered bridge currently named as Adam’s Bridge made of chain of shoals, c.18 mi (30 km) long, in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka, reveals a mystery behind it. The bridge’s unique curvature and composition by age reveals that it is man made. The legends as well as Archeological studies reveal that the first signs of human inhabitants in Sri Lanka date back to the a primitive age, about 17,50,000 years ago and the bridge’s age is also almost equivalent.

The ability to control time in both a forward and backwards direction is possible within the laws of our mathematics and physics. The overview by Dr. David Lewis Anderson compares ten different technologies an methods. Key characteristics are identified for each and described in the article.

If you want to find out more about Quantum Tunneling and other curious shit, click here (if you dare).