Human Factors
In 2021, Japan appointed a Minister for Loneliness
In February 2021, the Japanese government decided that loneliness was a matter of state.
Science & Engineering
Tattoo ink doesn’t just stay in the skin
A group of researchers at the Università della Svizzera italiana gave mice small foot tattoos in black, red or green, then watched under the microscope where the ink went.
Science & Engineering
Experienced birdwatchers were found to have denser, more structurally complex brain…
When an expert birdwatcher encounters a species they have never identified before, what they are doing with their brain is not simply trying harder than a beginner would.
Psychology
Between the mid-teens and the mid-twenties, the human brain records an unusually…
Ask most adults over forty to list the memories that come back to them unprompted, and a strange pattern shows up.
Psychology
The 'Mozart effect' began as a fifteen-minute bump on one spatial-reasoning test…
The 1993 study was real. It measured a small, temporary gain on a single spatial task in adults. Almost everything the phrase came to mean was added afterward.
Earth & Life
Being highly sensitive to your environment is not a weakness but an evolutionary…
Roughly one in five people, on the current best population estimates, notices the buzzing of a fluorescent light in an office that most other people cannot hear.
Earth & Life
The Eastern Jin army was outnumbered by more than five to one at the Fei River in…
The invasion had been building for a decade. Fu Jian, ruler of the Former Qin dynasty and a member of the Di ethnic group from the northwestern grasslands, had spent the 370s systematically conquering every other state in northern China.
Science & Engineering
TOTO introduced the Washlet in 1980 — and by 2020 electronic bidet seats were…
In June 1980, the Japanese sanitary-equipment manufacturer TOTO Ltd launched the Washlet — a new consumer electronic device that bolted onto the top of a…
Human Factors
To read a newspaper in Japan, a person needs to know three completely different…
Reading the front page of a Japanese-language newspaper in 2026 requires, at minimum, four things.
Human Factors
On the morning of December 26, 2004, a 10-year-old British girl named Tilly Smith…
On the morning of Sunday, 26 December 2004 — about two hours after a 9.1-magnitude megathrust earthquake had ruptured the Indian Ocean seafloor 250 kilometres…
Human Factors
In 2014, a neuroscientist named Gregory Berns trained a group of dogs to lie…
In March 2014, three American researchers published a paper in Behavioural Processes titled "Scent of the Familiar: An fMRI Study of Canine Brain Responses to Familiar and Unfamiliar Human and Dog Odors.
Human Factors
For almost 15 years, a retired psychology professor worked with his Border Collie…
In June 2004, in the specific suburb of Spartanburg, South Carolina where the 76-year-old retired psychology professor emeritus John W.
Science & Engineering
Stand up too fast and the stars filling your vision aren't imaginary
The drifting spots you see when you stand up too fast are not imaginary. A brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the photoreceptors, running on some of the most expensive metabolism in the body, fire phantom signals as their power fails.
Human Factors
In 1914, the Irish-born explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail from London for…
On Saturday, 8 August 1914 — five days after the British declaration of war against the German Empire that would produce the subsequent four-year catastrophe…
Science & Engineering
For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist…
In late 2012, the American film director Christopher Nolan formally took over a Warner Brothers science-fiction project that had been drifting through…
Human Factors
In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of…
On the evening of Saturday, 6 January 1912, in the meeting hall of the Frankfurt Geological Association, a 31-year-old German meteorologist named Alfred…