Human Factors
We tend to think real connection value only comes from close friends and family…
Ask people to picture a good commute and many of us imagine the same thing: quiet.
Human Factors
The first McDonald's ever to open in the Soviet Union welcomed 38,000 Russians on…
The first McDonald's in the Soviet Union was, by every available measure of Cold War-era symbolic significance, one of the more substantial single commercial events of the entire late-20th-century collapse of Soviet-bloc communism.
Human Factors
Before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, Italian cooking had no…
Half the ingredients in what most of the world now considers its national cuisine were, on 11 October 1492, on the opposite side of the planet from where they would eventually be eaten.
Human Factors
Murray Bowen’s family projection theory describes anxiety moving through…
In 1966, Murray Bowen formalised the family projection process, a clinical account of how anxiety can move through family relationships. Later behavioural and epigenetic studies examine different mechanisms and do not establish Bowen’s model as inherited biology.
Psychology
Most people don't realize Maslow revised his famous hierarchy of needs, and the top…
Here is a fact that probably unsettles almost everything a psychology textbook taught you about human motivation: the pyramid at the centre of the story was never drawn by the man whose name it carries.
Human Factors
Thought of the day by Stoic philosopher Seneca
Seneca wrote: "Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
Science & Engineering
In May 1980, the World Health Organization officially declared that smallpox had…
The last person to catch smallpox naturally was a 23-year-old Somali hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin, who was diagnosed on 26 October 1977 in the town of Merca on Somalia's Indian Ocean coast.
Human Factors
14,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, a group of hunter-gatherers in…
The oldest verified evidence of the emotional bond between humans and dogs is the small skeleton of a puppy that would have died in a matter of days if the Ice Age hunter-gatherers who buried it had not spent approximately six weeks nursing it back to health.
Science & Engineering
When a human and a dog gaze into each other's eyes, both of them release oxytocin
The chemical mechanism that binds a human mother to her nursing infant appears to also bind a human to their family dog — and, on the available experimental…
Human Factors
After a Hollywood film starring Leonardo DiCaprio put an obscure Thai island beach…
The most idyllic-looking beach in Southeast Asia was destroyed by the movie that made it famous, and then destroyed again by the tourists that the movie brought.
Human Factors
When FIFA gave the 1994 World Cup to the United States, it did so on one condition
FIFA's condition for giving the World Cup to a country that did not particularly want it was that America had to build itself a professional soccer league before the tournament arrived.
Human Factors
Mitophagy is the cellular housekeeping that dismantles broken mitochondria
Mitophagy, the cellular process that dismantles broken mitochondria, was named by Norwegian biochemist Per Ottar Seglen in 2005. Its slow failure with age is now considered a driver of aging itself, not just a consequence — and the same pathway that fails catastrophically in early-onset Parkinson's fades gently in everyone else.
Human Factors
Psychotherapist Alfred Adler believed the cure for our unhappiness is oddly…
We are writers and editors reading psychological research and the history of ideas, not clinicians, psychologists, or therapists.
Psychology
Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter in late 2010 that his own children had…
In 2010, a year after unveiling the iPad in Cupertino, Steve Jobs told New York Times reporter Nick Bilton that his own children had never used one. The quote, published four years later, set the template for a Silicon Valley pattern that has held ever since.
Human Behaviour
Elite freedivers can hold their breath for more than eleven minutes on a single…
Take a breath in, right now, and hold it. Somewhere between thirty and ninety seconds from now, most people feel a mounting pressure to breathe again that becomes difficult to ignore.
Human Factors
Within a single four-minute window on a football pitch in Mexico City in June of…
The single greatest player of the 1980s scored the single most controversial and the single most celebrated goals in World Cup history within four minutes of…