laboratoryequipment:

The High Value of Water

If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve already used running water in your home today. But you’re in a minority: globally, at least a billion people have no nearby source of water, while of the remaining six billion or so, only 42 percent have running water in their homes or a tap in the yard, according to the World Health Organization.

Now a new field experiment, co-authored by MIT economist Esther Duflo, shows just how much access to clean water matters to people. Residents of Morocco, the experiment demonstrates, are willing to take out loans and pay twice as much for water per month in order to have it piped into their homes. And despite the dent in their bottom-line finances, people in households that gain running water report significant improvements in well-being and happiness.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/01/high-value-water

approachingsignificance:

How Changing Visual Cues Can Affect Attitudes About Weight

Changing negative attitudes about body size might be as simple as changing what you see.

When women in England were shown photos of plus-sized women in neutral gray leotards, they became more tolerant.

When the women were shown photos of anorexic women, attitudes became more positive there, too. “Showing them thin bodies makes them like thin bodies, more, and showing them fat bodies makes them like fat bodies more,” says Lynda Boothroyd, a psychology researcher at Durham University in England, who led the study.

She calls it a “visual diet,” changing what your eyes eat.

The researchers also tested photos of women in designer clothes and found the test subjects thought better of the well-dressed women, fat or thin. The glamour effect existed independent of the change in perception caused by repeatedly seeing the leotard-clad women.

Not terribly surprising results, but the moral of the story summer up pretty nicely: “Perhaps that’s why we’re so obsessed with thinness, even if most of the people around us are found to be larger. We’re constantly fed images of very slim actresses and models, all beautifully dressed.” 

(via ikenbot)

ikenbot:

curiositycounts:

Person to person, wouldn’t it be interesting to see if everyone did this what the spectrum of “achievement” would include?

wired:

Of all the images that have ever been made, would you be able to select just 100 to represent our species and human achievement? Trevor Paglen’s Last Pictures is a project to do not only that, but also launch those images into geosynchronous orbit around Earth – all so that long after humans are gone, any space-wanderer will be able to fathom what humanity was all about.

If that one picture of Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama discussing science and religion doesn’t make it, I’m calling this a sham.

approachingsignificance:

America’s Facebook Generation Is Reading Strong

The e-reader haters and the people that disparage e-readers drive me nuts. Sure, this is only one study and has its limitations, but children are reading more than their parents. Attribute a lot of that to the recent surge in adolescent literature, like Harry Potter and similar titles, but also attribute some of that variance to the increased availability of reading devices (including e-readers and a recent surge in the Library Sciences to get children back into the library). 

Children never waited in line for hours to get a book when I was growing up.

“We found that about 8 in 10 Americans under the age of 30 have read a book in the past year. And that’s compared to about 7 in 10 adults in general, American adults. So, they’re reading — they’re more likely to read, and they’re also a little more likely to be using their library.”

“We heard from e-book readers in general [that] they don’t want e-books to replace print books. They see them as part of the same general ecosystem; e-books supplement their general reading habits. And we heard from a lot of younger e-book readers about how e-books just fit into their lives — how they can read when they’re waiting in line for class, or waiting in line for lunch. One reader in particular told us that when he has a book that he loves, he wants to be able to access it in any format. So with the Harry Potter series and the [Song of Ice and Fire] series, he’s actually bought all of those books as print books and as e-books, just because they matter that much to him …

“We haven’t seen for younger readers that e-books are massively replacing print books. That might happen in the future, but right now we’re just seeing them sort of as a more convenient supplement.”

Also, don’t be pretentious and quit hating e-readers. 

Photo by ryancatalani

approachingsignificance:

20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Alcohol

1. Sobering disclaimer: The family of compounds known as alcohols are all toxins that can kill you, whether instantly, quickly, or gradually.
2. Yet one of them—ethyl alcohol, or ethanol—is a staple of the human diet. Archaeologist Patrick McGovern speculates that fermented beverages were made as early as 100,000 years ago, when people first spread out of Africa.
3. The seeds Johnny Appleseed sold to farmers throughout Ohio and Indiana produced apples that were inedible, but perfect for making hard cider.
4. According to the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, our zest for alcoholic beverages derives from our distant ancestors’ impulse to seek the ripest, most energy-intensive fruits.
5. Designated driver at the zoo: The Malaysian pen-tailed treeshrew routinely chugs the equivalent of nine glasses of wine a night in naturally fermented nectar, and yet it remains fully functional.
6. For a treeshrew, that is.
7. Fermentation occurs when enzymes, typically produced by yeast, convert sugar molecules in grapes or grains into ethanol.
8. That process can also happen in your digestive system, spiking every 100 ml of blood with 0.01 to 0.03 mg of alcohol.
9. Seriously, officer! Japanese doctors have observed patients with “auto-brewery syndrome,” in which high levels of candida yeast in the intestines churn out so much alcohol that they can cause drunkenness.
10. No digestion required. Ethanol is such a small, simple molecule—just two carbon atoms, six hydrogens, and a spare oxygen—that it pours directly out of the stomach and small intestine into the bloodstream.
11. A lean, muscular person will be less affected by drink than someone with more body fat: Water-rich muscle tissues absorb alcohol effectively, preventing it from reaching the brain.
12. Drunkenness is considered an impairment of the neurons in your head, but Australian researchers recently reported that part of the feeling may result instead from the effect of ethanol on the brain’s immune system. The finding could lead to new treatments for alcoholism.
13. The times they are a-changin’. In 1895 Anheuser-Busch launched Malt-Nutrine, a 1.9 percent-alcohol-content beer prescribed by physicians as a tonic for pregnant women and a nutritional beverage for children.
14. Until 1916 whiskey and brandy were listed as scientifically approved medicines in the United States Pharmacopeia.
15. Drinking and driving: Surplus wine in Sweden is distilled into ethanol, mixed with gasoline, and sold to service stations.
16. Ethanol was widely used as an industrial fuel in America until a tax on alcoholic beverages, levied to help pay for the Civil War, prompted a switch to kerosene and methanol.
17. Methanol, a distillation 
of wood pulp, can destroy the optic nerves. “Blind drunk” was Prohibition-era slang for damage 
caused by drinking grain alcohol that had been cut with methanol by unscrupulous bootleggers.
18. Interstellar brewery: The nebulas where stars form abound with hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, 
the atomic building blocks of alcohol.
19. Sure enough, astronomers found vast quantities of ethanol—as much as that in 400 trillion trillion beers—
in G34.3, an interstellar cloud some 10,000 light-years from Earth.
20. Resolution for 2012: Don’t stare at the cork. The 
carbon dioxide in champagne bottles creates 90 pounds of 
pressure per square inch, three times the pressure in automobile tires. Flying corks can cause retina detachment, double vision, and blindness. Happy New Year!

I usually like the # of Things You Don’t KNow About... pieces, but I already knew most of these. Maybe that just speaks to some of my favorite pleasures and pastimes.

(via scinerds)

scinerds:

Gelada, Ethiopia

An adult male gelada rests in the early morning light after ascending the steep, sleeping cliffs of the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia. This male won his right to mate by successfully deposing the old leader. Now he must defend his harem by tending to his females’ needs and fighting off anxious bachelors waiting for their chance to become harem leader.

Photograph by Clay Wilton

cwnl:

Moon Statues

Let those who tread here, heed the warning.

The full Moon rises behind the famous statues of Easter Island in the South Pacific. The statues, called moai by the Polynesians, were carved from volcanic rock by the islanders between 400 and 1500 A.D. By 1500 about 1000 statues had been carved, and 324 erected.

The largest is 37 feet tall and weighs 85 tonnes. Carving and erection ceased because of the total deforestation of the island. This was caused partly by use of the island’s trees as rollers and levers for erecting the statues. Deforestation led to soil erosion, starvation, civil war and eventually to the complete collapse of the island’s culture.

by David A. Hardy

Moral of the story? even if you have amazing workmanship and artistry within a culture, you’re still prone to extinction once you partake in the destruction of the living environment around you.