United Academics

Always get an energy boost after your after dinner dip? Or are you that kind of person that wakes up before the alarm? Big chance you are either one of those people, and an even bigger chance that you are sometimes jealous of the other group. It’s nice to not turn into a boring tired person before the party begins and to be able to sleep until you really have to get up. Or is it nicer to don’t have

Why do humans often make independent but similar discoveries at about the same time? What makes us repetitively stumble upon that new word or phenomenon that we just learned about the other day? And how do mice know all about our poison and traps? Is it because all members of a species share a thelepathic-like collective memory? It is an idea suggested by just a few scientists without much actual data to build upon, yet it recieved a lot of

‘Take a look at this drawing of a flower and a butterfly’, designer Richard Seymour once asked hisTED-audience. ‘Look at it and feel. Do you think it is beautiful? Now take another look after I have told you that this drawing was the last act on this world of a five year old girl that died of cancer. Feel again. Do you now experience something different?’ The little experiment made the audience rethink the experience of beauty. A feeling that,

We humans don't stand a chance against stories. What our ancestors were doing around the campfire still has a great impact on us. So if you need to do a speech, keep these 5 powers of storiesin mind: 1. Action Your audience might be passively sitting down when listening to your speech, but you can activate many parts of their brains by telling them a little story. Adding action is always good. Brain scans have shown that when listeners hear

Picture a group of almost identically dressed girls sitting and giggling together. Then think of a couple of boys walking around kicking garbage cans. In which one of these two groups would individuals have the most trouble sticking to their own values? Two Croatian researchers were curious and set up an experiment to measure susceptibility to peer pressure of 475 high school students. First they asked them to fill in various questionnaires about peer pressure and attachment to friends. Just

It is one of these weird things we hear about Japan and makes us wonder if it is true. Do Japanese teenagers really lock themselves up in their room for years? Why? Does this only happen in Japan? And is this an official psychological disorder? Hikikomori, or withdrawn, people are mostly young Japanese men or boys, at around age 15, from middle class families, two BBC journalists write in an article about the phenomenon. The youngsters feel a lot of

In the L.A. Times of April third, 1988, journalist Nicole Yorkin paints a picture of a family’s regular workday in 2013. With the help of futurologists and technology specialists she predicts many things strikingly well, like all sorts of communication via internet. But other fantasies we are still waiting for now that it is 25 years later, if they ever enter our daily lives at all. Five examples: 1. The biggest dream that didn’t yet make it to reality is

Our brain may be the key culprit in causing crime, argues neurologist Adrian Raine in his new book The Anatomy of Violence. He talks about the connection between eating fish and killing people, about whether or not we should believe in free will, and about his personal experience with extreme violence. Isn’t it just logical that a criminal act starts in the brain? "It should be logical, and yet it’s a perspective that’s really been ignored for the past 70

It’s not only that people gain weight because they are bad at resisting the temptation of a snack. Gaining weight in turn also increases the inability to control eating impulses. Media like Yahoo and LiveScience enthusiastically brought this surprising news a few weeks ago, pointing to a study published in Psychological Science on april 29th. Was this an exaggeration of a vague association that was found? It didn’t seem like it. The offical press release didn’t differ much in suggesting

It’s of course a difficult question with many answers and a lot of them are still unknown . But with some specific health problems we are starting to understand what happened to keep them alive. A new example is Factor V Leiden, a blood mutation present in around 5 percent of Caucasians, that is associated with thrombosis and pregnancy complications, such as miscarriage. The mutation started in just one individual 34.000 years ago, relatively shortly after the Caucasians split apart