The surprising benefit of meditative walks. “The goal is to take some time in which you’re physically occupied but not mentally engaged, such as walking, jogging or swimming, and focus your attention on a single problem.”
The human brain’s characteristic wrinkles help to drive how it works. A model of the brain’s geometry better explains neuronal activity than a model based on the ‘connectome’.
This infinite tiling pattern could end a 60-year mathematical quest.
Lorraine Daston on the history of rules. Her latest book Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022) is on my list.
Cormac McCarthy has passed away.
A guide to Cormac McCarthy’s books.
I already posted this once, but no harm posting it again Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper.
Climate feedback loop interactions could accelerate global warming and not all of these feedback loops are fully accounted for in current climate models.
Body-based units of measure in cultural evolution. For as long as humans have produced things, there have been reasons to measure. Early measurements made use of what people had at hand—parts of their bodies—to create relatively standardized measurements. Kaaronen et al. looked at the development and use of body-based measurements across more than 180 cultures (see the Perspective by Chrisomalis) and found that such measures occur across cultures and commonly form the base of measurement systems.
Wait, what? Rampant groundwater pumping has changed the tilt of Earth’s axis. Human depletion of underground reservoirs has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than 4 centimetres per year.
The illusion of moral decline. “In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.”
The absurd logistics of concert tours.