reblog.jointselecta.net

The Associated Press
Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He — or she — did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die.
Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the […]

From the BBC:
Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before […]

Henry Harpending, a University of Utah anthropology professor who recently published a theory for why Ashkenazi Jews tend to have high IQ’s, says Dr. Lahn once suggested they co-author an article for Scientific American about the genetics of behavior, in which they could explain why “Chinese are boring.”
“I think that Bruce doesn’t understand political correctness,” […]

In the Boston Globe:
[A] growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to ask exactly that question. Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians’ brains and found that the “chills” that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated […]

Download of the Day: TVUplayer (Windows) - Lifehacker

FreeTube - Your Source for Streaming TV

Have you ever wondered why most of the people you know (and probably your elected representatives) insist on making dumb decisions when they are so clearly wrong? Below are ten reasons that they act like idiots without even knowing it. And as they say in poker, if you can’t spot the sucker at the table, […]

David Pescovitz:
A new study suggests that a small part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefontal cortex (DLPFC) is key to suppressing selfishness. Neuroscientists from the University of Zurich and Harvard Medical School used electricity to temporarily disable that portion in volunteers. Those subjects were happy to screw other people out of money in a […]

Mark Frauenfelder:

Meredith says: “Last week, a 15-year-old girl at Caney Creek High School (near Houston) complained to her father [Alton Verm] about “bad language” in Ray Bradbury’s classic SF novel Fahrenheit 451. Dad complained to the district and pushed for the book — which tells the story of a man in a futuristic, totalitarian society […]