CULTURE EDITOR'S PICK PSYCHOLOGY Are Ghosts Real? Key Takeaway: A 2021 poll of 1,000 American adults revealed that 41% believe in ghosts, with 20% personally experiencing them. This equates to over 50 million spirit encounters in the U.S. alone. Ghostly encounters are often due to the way the brain interprets certain sights and sounds. However, physicists argue that ghosts cannot exist due […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
ART & DESIGN EDITOR'S PICK Why Do Artworks Have Frames? There’s a workshop at the Getty Center where the paintings aren’t the stars. Instead, the frames take center stage. In this bright and airy room, empty frames hang on the walls, and tools and books line the counters. There you’d find associate conservator Gene Karakker, who retired earlier this summer, choosing from an assortment of […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY SOCIOLOGY The End Of Suffering Most of us would describe ourselves as having a body, a mind and a soul (or spirit), as though these are not the same thing. The soul in particular is understood as being separate, not only from the mind and its thoughts, but from the realm of the physical world, and even physics itself. We […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PSYCHOLOGY SOCIOLOGY The Importance Of Struggle Without struggle, there is no gain, or transformation. Without struggle, our actions cannot coalesce, to harness the future. Without struggle, life is bland, and rudderless. Without struggle, we remain unprepared to meet the day’s — or life’s — challenges, and whatever magic we may have inside of us, it remains bottled up, untapped. Struggle is […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY SCIENCE The God Gene What makes a person want to believe in God? Is it the many delicate, impressionable years of their youth spent at the crowded Sunday Mass? Is it the comfort derived from the words of a holy book within which is promised a paradise just beyond this taxing life? Or is it an experience in their […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS TECHNOLOGY The Unstoppable Growth Of The Freemium Economy At a Twitter event for analysts, the company presented its plans — previously disclosed to the SEC — to double its revenue by the end of 2023, with the goal of reaching 315 million monetizable daily users. The company, which is doing well in the wake of last year’s threat of a shareholder rebellion to replace CEO Jack Dorsey, has interesting plans for […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
EDITOR'S PICK PHILOSOPHY The Idea Of God Has One Major Flaw I don’t believe, especially as an aspiring scientist, that I can call myself an atheist. At most I can claim to be agnostic for there is no way to prove that God doesn’t exist. Having grown up in the Southeastern United States, I was introduced at a young age to Christianity. It remains the religion […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
ART & DESIGN EDITOR'S PICK The Purpose Of Art Art has had a great number of different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of art is “vague” but that it has had many unique, different reasons for being created. Some of the functions of art are provided in […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
JOURNAL & RESEARCH SOCIOLOGY Understanding Otakus & Sex Robots Social robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life and sex robots are a sub-category of especially high public interest and controversy. Starting from the concept of the otaku, a term from Japanese youth culture that describes secluded persons with a high affinity for fictional manga characters, we examine individual differences behind sex robot appeal (anime […] Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Democratising Finance Through Artificial Intelligence Key Takeaway: Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing investment by making professional financial insight and portfolio management accessible to everyone. AI-powered robo-advisers, such as Betterment and Vanguard, are democratizing investment and providing tailored advice to a new generation of investors. With 31% of gen Zs and 20% of millennials using robo-advisers, the financial industry is adapting […] Written by Heather He March 19, 2024March 19, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
The Final Frontier Of Forensic Science Key Takeaway: Nasa’s Artemis program is set to return astronauts to the Moon and establish a permanent orbiting laboratory by the end of the decade. As humanity’s footprint expands, a new field emerges: astroforensics. Space presents a unique and harsh environment for forensic investigations, with altered gravity, cosmic radiation, extreme temperatures, and oxygen-providing climate systems. […] Written by Zack Kowalske March 18, 2024March 18, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
The Future Of Spacesuits Key Takeaway: The Polaris Dawn mission, which includes the first spacewalk organized by a private company, has been delayed due to complications with the design and development of a suitable spacesuit. Moon suits are a key element of Nasa’s Artemis lunar programme that have yet to be delivered. Spacesuits are no longer expected to be […] Written by Yang Gao March 11, 2024March 11, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Why We Will Never Master The Financial Markets Key Takeaways: Stock market enthusiasts often claim to predict financial market trends with great accuracy, but this is not possible due to the uncertainty and unpredictable nature of the environments in which we make daily decisions. Human cognition tends to favor a reductionist approach to information processing, sometimes called “tunneling,” which can lead to biased […] Written by Benoît Béchard March 8, 2024March 8, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Is There Life On Europa? Key Takeaway: The Juno mission has sampled Jupiter’s atmosphere for the first time, revealing that Europa’s icy surface produces less oxygen than previously thought. Europa has an ocean below its icy surface with twice the amount of water as Earth’s oceans and an ocean floor in contact with rock, enabling chemical water-rock interactions that produce […] Written by Andrew Coates March 7, 2024March 7, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
The Halo Effect Key Takeaway: A recent study suggests that the “halo effect” is more complicated than previously thought, as attractive people may receive more help from strangers, higher wages, and more job opportunities. This can lead to more favorable treatment in life, such as lighter prison sentences. However, in court, jurors show biases, and more attractive defendants […] Written by Robin Kramer March 6, 2024March 6, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Secrets Of The Queen Bee Key Takeaway: Bees, including honey bees, are important pollinators of many crops and plants. However, most bees do not have queens, and most live without them. Instead, a single female lays eggs in a simple nest, providing pollen and nectar. Bees have a social structure with thousands of workers who support the queen. Bee queens […] Written by Phil Starks March 5, 2024March 5, 2024 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Rethinking Education Key Takeaways: The Industrial model of education that fueled the modern era and its dizzying reach did its job incredibly well. In his writing, Flynn illustrates study after study, spanning nations and decades, in which modern educational gift of abstraction — a transcendent sign of intelligence, as we saw in Raven’s Matrices — has been […] Written by Anthony Fieldman March 2, 2022October 19, 2022 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
How China Is Transforming Its Economy Through Learning I highly recommend reading the McKinsey Global Institute’s new report, “Reskilling China: Transforming The World’s Largest Workforce Into Lifelong Learners”, which focuses on the country’s biggest employment challenge, re-training its workforce and the adoption of practices such as lifelong learning to address the growing digital transformation of its productive fabric. How to transform the country […] Written by Enrique Dans February 1, 2021February 1, 2021 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
Why You’re Not Seeing Success With Influencer Marketing With the new year around the corner, now is a good time to re-evaluate your past marketing strategies and gear up for the year ahead. For some businesses, influencer marketing has simply not seemed to live up to its lofty promises of genuine engagement, credibility, and transparency. Some have claimed that it has been failing […] Written by Michael Tan January 14, 2021January 15, 2021 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked
A New Philosophy of Business I’m about to ask you to take a mental leap. For the next 8 minutes, suspend your notions of what a business is, and I’ll propose a new lens for you to look through. There are a lot of questions asked around what “community” means for business. “Where should community fit in my organization?” and […] Written by Empirics Asia September 5, 2018September 5, 2018 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked