When we listen to a new musical phrase, it is the brain's motor system — not areas involved in hearing — that helps us remember what we've heard, researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans last month.
You can't tell someone what order the songs are in, but you always know what the next one is when a song ends. That's apparently the motor cortex at work.
Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world in its long and colourful history, new research has found.
Today in random history facts...
In the new version of Paper released last week, you mix colors with your fingers, like it's paint--only somehow more beautiful. This one magical feature burned a year of development time, resurrected the work of two dead German scientists, and got Apple's attention.
The only problem with describing the wonderful development process for this new user-interaction is that you can't actually interact with the end result to see how well it works.
There's a better system. It goes by various names, including "microgrid" and "distributed generating." The basic idea is to make the electric network more like the Internet. If well implemented, a better topology would make power failures less likely, and shorter when they happen. The key is to decentralize: to turn a regional electric network into a network of smaller, neighborhood networks, that no single points of failure, so no one substation can take down half a million homes.
How exactly are both the New York Times and the Associated Press incapable of serving election results right now?
Flashpoint Season 5 Episode 1, "Broken Peace", is one of the most moving episodes of television I've ever watched.
A New Yorker article from 1995 about New York City, skyscrapers, and hurricanes back in 1978.
In 1978, structural engineer William LeMessurier discovered a mistake in his design for the Citicorp Center (the Citigroup Center these days) that put it in extreme danger of collapsing, just as hurricane season was approaching.
There's a joke floating around that rings a little too true: "A million people walk into a Silicon Valley bar. None of them buys anything. The bar is declared a rousing success."
We shouldn't be proud of building startups, we should be proud of building sustainable businesses selling products and services people want.
The authors conclude that consumers' cognitive tendencies play a strong role in determining how they will respond to advertising. For those with a need to know, the more details, the better (assuming the details make sense, at least). There's an entirely separate population which, if given the details, will end up less likely to purchase a product.
The effect is correlated with consumers' results on the cognitive reflection test, a measure of how much thought you put into picking non-intuitive but correct answers, or in other words, how much time you might spend comparing things.
With each new generation of Windows Phone, Microsoft not only closes the gap with iOS and Android in important ways, but it also differentiates in important ways — and that might be more true in version 8 than ever before.
There aren't a ton of compelling features (in my opinion) in this release due to the work necessary to port the software to a new kernel (though there are huge wins from that effort), but The Verge's review (and Ars Technica's) missed some of the cool tweaks that I haven't seen discussed publicly yet that will delight many people. Publicly announced features include Wallet and NFC, Kid's Corner, updated lock and home screen customizations, and new apps powered by the improved developer story such as Pandora, Cut the Rope, Temple Run, Words with Friends, and Draw Something. Did I mention massive hardware spec boosts?