Why History Needs Software Piracy
"Roughly 23,000 titles were originally released on computer systems that used floppy disks or cassette tapes as their primary storage or distribution medium. If game publishers and copyright law had their way, almost all of those games would be wiped from the face of the earth by media decay over the next 10 years. Many would already be lost."

  Cars Kill Cities

  Rodents exhibit empathy by setting trapped friends free
Empty cages didn’t inspire rats to learn how to open the door nearly as well as those who were motivated to rescue a trapped rat. By the end of the experiment, only five of 40 rats learned to open an empty cage, while 23 of 30 rats learned to open the cage to free an occupant. (And trapped stuffed animals fared no better than empty cages.)

To push the limits of the rats’ goodwill, Bartal and her team pitted a trapped rat against trapped chocolate, forcing a rat to choose which one to release. “These rats adore their chocolate,” she says. The results astonished Bartal: The rats were equally likely to free a rat in distress as they were to free the sweets. To a rat, a fellow rodent’s freedom was just as sweet as five chocolate chips. And the niceness doesn’t stop there: “The most shocking thing is they left some of the chocolate for the other rat,” Bartal says. “It’s not like they missed a chocolate,” Bartal says. “They actually carried it out of the restrainer sometimes but did not eat it.”

  Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See
"They showed the images to dozens of volunteers, using an eye tracker to hold the images fixed relative to the viewers' eyes. This ensured that light from each color stripe always entered the same retinal cells; for example, some cells always received yellow light, while other cells simultaneously received only blue light. Amazingly, they said they perceived colors they'd never seen before. (...) They were unable to name or describe the color. One of these observers was an artist with a large color vocabulary."

  The Ten Commandments - the basis of our laws and morals
"So you're banning a fundamental driving force of their economic system?" "What, do you think I should encourage it as well as ban it?"

  People do not become more conservative as they age
"There persists an enduring belief that people get more conservative as they age -- making older people more likely to vote for Republican candidates. Ongoing research, however, fails to back up the stereotype. While there is some evidence that today's seniors may be more conservative than today's youth, that's not because older folks are more conservative than they use to be. Instead, our modern elders likely came of age at a time when the political situation favored more conservative views. In fact, studies show that people may actually get more liberal over time when it comes to certain kinds of beliefs."

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