Contrary to earlier studies, a new meta-analysis says that the increased risk of death associated with sitting for 8 hours a day could be eliminated for people who did a minimum of 1 hour physical activity per day. Examples of physical activity were brisk walking at 5.6 km/h or cycling for pleasure at 16 km/h. 

“Our message is a positive one: it is possible to reduce - or even eliminate - these risks if we are active enough, even without having to take up sports or go to the gym.

“It was determined the T-shirt was offensive to some people and so the decision was made to pull it from the sales floor,” Jane Bockholt said. Ann Moliver Ruben, the 70-year-old psychologist who designed the shirt and sold them to the store, said the retailer’s response means “that promoting females as leaders is still a very threatening concept in this country." A buyer at the company reportedly said that the shirt "goes against Wal-Mart's family values."

Trump openly calls for the U.S. to commit war crimes and advocates for the murder of innocent women and children. After veterans speak out claiming U.S. soldiers would not commit war crimes or torture children, Trump insists that they will if he orders them. He calls for the U.S. to start torturing prisoners in any way ISIS does. He says he would declare a world war, and he doesn't rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe. He promises to forcibly seize foreign oil fields in foreign countries. He encourages his supporters to use violence, and defends supporters who assault others. Etc. Etc.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is an excellent book – but one with many flaws. First, there is the list of studies that simply haven’t held up through the “replication crisis” of the last few years (for example, the first substantive chapter is on priming). Also, Kahneman describes hot hands as a "widespread cognitive illusion", whereas newer studies have found that there is a hot hand. And on organ donation rates, Kahneman describes the difference between European countries as being due to differences in form design, when in fact those European countries with high “donor rates” never ask their citizens whether they wish to be donors.

Oral rehydration solution, milk, and (to a lesser degree) orange juice had a significantly higher hydration index than water. Normally when you drink, it signals the kidneys to get rid of the extra water by producing more urine, but when beverages contain nutrients and electrolytes, the stomach empties more slowly with a less dramatic effect on the kidneys.

Furthermore, drinks containing moderate amounts of caffeine and alcohol or high levels of sugar had hydration indexes no different from water. The exceptions are very strong coffee drinks or strong alcoholic drinks like distilled spirits.

In 1896, the parents of a two-year-old killed due to the negligence of the Southern Railroad Company of Georgia asked a judge for compensation. They argued that their child performed errands worth two dollars per month, but they received nothing beyond the cost of a burial. The judge concluded that the child was "of such tender years as to be unable to have any earning capacity, and hence the defendant could not be held liable in damages."

In 18th century Europe, the death of an infant or a young child was a minor event, met with a mixture of indifference and resignation. Viviana Zelizer, in her book Pricing the Priceless Child, argues that children became “sacralized” in the late 1800s and early 1900s — transforming children from un-sentimentalized but economically useful little people to economically useless yet emotionally priceless treasures.

Colonial Americans buried infants without fuss, but in the 20th century, parents read books that advised them on how to cope with the unbearable loss of a child.

Lenin was a mushroom was a highly influential televised hoax, first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television. Sergey Kuryokhin, impersonating a historian, narrated his findings that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became a mushroom himself.

Soviet television had, up to that point, been regarded as conservative in style and content. As a result, a large number of Soviet citizens (one estimate puts the number at 11,250,000 audience members) took the deadpan "interview" at face value.

Perhaps the most notable result of the show was an appeal by a group of party members to clarify the veracity of Kuryokhin's claim. In response to the request one of the top regional functionaries stated that "Lenin could not have been a mushroom" because "a mammal can not be a plant."

After studying the composition of hundreds of Google’s teams, there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. Most confounding of all, two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness.

Using the Facebook API and a program that guesses id numbers of data stored in Facebook's database, people can read URLs that were sent privately through Messenger, potentially revealing sensitive information. Facebook isn't planning to do anything about it.

Includes a guide covering two decades of research into what makes for a dream job.

  “The robots use onboard cameras as well as a laser scanner to interpret their immediate environment. Knowing the range of its 3D-printer arm, each robot autonomously works out which part of an area—regardless of whether the area is flat or curved—it can cover, while other robots use the same technique to cover adjacent areas.  

Additionally the spiders have been programmed to have a level of autonomy. They know where they are, and when their batteries get low they will make their way back to a charging station and hand off whatever task they were working on to another spider in the system, allowing it to pick up where they left off. 

The lens is quite unlike the curved disks of glass familiar from cameras and binoculars. Instead, it is made of a thin layer of transparent quartz coated in millions of tiny pillars, each just tens of nanometres across and hundreds high.

The focal spot of the flat lens was typically 30% sharper than its competition, meaning that in a lab setting, finer details can be revealed. The lenses, being planar, can be fabricated in the same foundries that make computer chips.

“Clozemaster is gamified language learning in context through mass exposure for learners of all levels. It aims to answer the question, "What should I do after duolingo?" and provide a more sentence based and contextual learning experience to complement other language learning apps like Memrise and Anki.

"We use an algorithm inspired by the human brain. It uses the stylistic elements of one image to draw the content of another. Get your own artwork in just three steps."

Here's a blog with examples.

Out of the 1,779 bills in the Gilens/Page data set, majorities of the rich and middle class agree on 1,594. That leaves only 185 bills on which the rich and the middle class disagree; on those 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant.

They also looked at the views of the poor — those at the 10th percentile of the income scale. Here, too, there's lots of agreement. The poor, middle class, and rich agree on 80.2 percent of policies. However, policies supported by the poor and no one else passed a mere 18.6 percent of the time, suggesting that the rich and middle are effective at blocking policies that the poor want.

“The results from our randomised experiment suggest that computer devices have a substantial negative effect on academic performance,” the researchers concluded, suggesting that the distraction of an electronic device complete with internet access outweighed their use for note-taking or research during lessons.

The research had an unusual twist: the students involved were studying at the West Point academy in the US, where cadets are ruthlessly ranked by exam results, meaning they were motivated to perform well and may have been more disciplined than typical undergraduates.

Research published last year by the London School of Economics found that banning mobile phones improved outcomes for low-achieving students, and had no significant impact on high-achievers.

Pilot-wave theory, or Bohmian mechanics, is an alternate way to describe quantum mechanics, in which every particle has an actual, definite location, even when it’s not being observed. A paper from 1992 claimed that particles, in Bohm's theory, would have to follow absurd trajectories as they traverse the double-slit experiment.

But in a paper published in Science Advances, Steinberg and his colleagues describe what happened when they actually performed the experiment. They found that the photon trajectories aren’t surrealistic after all — or, more precisely, that the paths may seem surrealistic, but only if one fails to take into account the nonlocality inherent in Bohm’s theory.

Sugar doesn't melt, it undergoes thermal decomposition, which breaks it down into something new: caramel.

“In fact, caramel is so unlike sucrose, C12H22O11, that its nature can't be expressed by a single chemical formula. Instead, it's a mixture of caramelan (C15H18O9), caramelane (C12H9O9), caramelen (C36H48O24), caramelene (C36H25O25), caramelin (C24H26O13), and over a thousand other compounds "whose names," one scholar lamented in 1894, "science seems to have invented in a fit of despair."

In a 300°F (150°C) oven, granulated sugar will caramelize slowly. With only one hour of toasting, it mellows with a complexity totally unlike plain sugar. Within three hours, thermal decomposition liberates enough water that the sugar begins to clump as stronger caramel notes develop, changes that intensify into hour four.

Because water is a by-product of caramelization, deeply caramelized sugar is super clumpy, but these chunks are highly porous and easily demolished in a food processor, giving you granulated caramel that behaves like sugar in recipes, but tastes like caramel.