Fact O' The Day

[Krandall]

"Nissan has developed a self-healing iPhone case."


Nissan is testing what it refers to as a "self-healing" iPhone case -- a phone cover coated in "Scratch Shield" paint. According to the automaker, the innovation is "a world first in paint technology" whose structure reacts to scratches by reverting to its original shape, and thereby erasing them. The process allegedly takes between an hour and a week, depending on the size of the scratch. Nissan is beta-testing the product now, and intends to release the case later this year if reactions are positive.

[Krandall]

"Miami is the happiest city in which to work."


Employment forum CareerBliss compiles an annual list of the happiest and unhappiest cities for work. Data comes from polling employees about their relationships with their coworkers, opportunities for advancement, compensation, work atmosphere, and other factors that express their general job satisfaction. The 2012 list, based on data from 43,000 respondents, found that the happiest cities were Miami, FL; Worcester, MA; and Oklahoma City, OK. Incidentally, the average salary in Miami was just under $54,000 -- some $8,000 less than the average salary in New Haven, CT, which ranked as the unhappiest city on the list (the second and third unhappiest were Dayton and Milwaukee).

[Krandall]

"People's willingness to believe in evolution is mainly based on intuition."



A study in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching sought to clarify the motivating factors in a person's willingness to accept evolution (previous studies have had mixed results in trying to equate knowledge level and religiosity with evolution acceptance). The study surveyed 124 soon-to-be biology teachers in Korea, selected for their similar educations; teacher preparation courses in Korea are highly standardized, making the participants' overall educational experiences very similar. The study found that respondents believed in evolution in accordance with their gut feelings. How "true" the basic concepts "felt" to them had more impact on their conclusions than any other factor -- even having more knowledge on the subject had less of an effect on people's conclusions than intuition did.

[Peelz]

I cant believe in things that don't seem possible no matter how I try. wish I could. life would be simple LOL

"that which makes more sense is closer to truth, than that which you only choose to believe"

[Krandall]

"Moving at the same pace as someone else makes you more likely to agree with him."



A study conducted at USC's Marshall School of Business asked participants to walk alongside an experimenter, either trying to keep stride, walking purposefully out of sync, or walking at whatever pace was comfortable. Participants were then given questionnaires on their perceptions of the experimenter (how much they liked him, how close they felt to him and how similar to him they felt). The participants who were instructed to keep in step thought they were more similar to the experimenter than those who walked at their own pace or stayed intentionally out of step. A second study made groups perform a task while listening to music on headphones that either kept them in sync or kept them working at different rates and again, the participants felt closer to their in-sync peers.

[Krandall]

"Powerful people believe themselves to be taller than they are."



Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Cornell asked the participants of their study to think about situations in which they'd had power over someone else, or in which someone else had held power over them. They were then asked to estimate their height in relation to a pole that was exactly 20 inches taller than they were. The people who thought about power situations felt that the pole was closer than their counterparts did. In another experiment, when asked to choose video game avatars that most closely resembled them, empowered people frequently chose taller avatars than the disempowered group did. Finally, the study's participants were asked to play out manager/worker scenarios and then to list their actual heights; participants who played the part of the manager consistently supplied inflated heights.

[Krandall]

"Simply cutting calories, of any kind, is a more effective dieting strategy than monitoring fat, protein, or carbohydrate proportions."


A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition assigned several hundred participants one of four diets: high protein, low fat, high carbs; average protein, low fat, high carbs; average protein, high fat, low carbs; or high protein, high fat, low carbs. All of the diets, assigned to overweight participants, cut 750 calories a day from their daily intake. The study found no difference in results between the diets. Participants were also able to maintain their weight loss (an average of eight pounds overall) at the two-year mark. Researchers concluded that actual adherence to a diet is the most important factor in its success, and that a diet someone is actually likely to follow is more beneficial than any particular proportional breakdown.

[Krandall]

"Certain names tend to correlate with certain facial features."



Upon noticing that she often mixed up the names of two of her students, a cognitive scientist at Miami University in Ohio realized that her forgetfulness was due to the fact that their names, to her, failed to match their faces. Robin Thomas therefore designed an experiment, asking her colleagues and 150 students to design faces that "fit" 15 common male names (all the faces white, all with the same hairstyle). A second group of students largely agreed that the names matched their faces, particularly the names Jason, Brian, Bill, and Bob ("Bob" is a round-seeming sound, for example, and the "Bob" face was suitably rounded). Follow-up studies found that students were also better able to remember faces that had names they thought "fit."

[Krandall]

"Facebook can be harder to resist than tobacco or alcohol."



A study at Chicago University's Booth Business School tested 205 participants by asking them to self-report the frequency and intensity of their various desires over the course of a week, ending up with over 10,000 individual responses. The first two strongest urges which the participants failed to resist were sleep and leisure; third was social media, followed by e-mail (both of which came ahead of tobacco or alcohol on the list of responses). Cigarettes and alcohol, theorized the researchers, come with associated costs, as well as situational availability; social media has no such drawbacks. Incidentally, respondents were much better at resisting urges for sex, sports or spending money.

[Peelz]

i like my alcohol


But, I see it every day...

also, you hear of the growing social site "pinterest"?

Its like a "check this out" thread from here, but for women. FInd something you like, pin it to your page, somebody else steals it... kinda genius, but....

Spreading like a disease. That's All I hear these days....

[Krandall]

"Men are as likely as women (and sometimes even more likely) to want marriage and children."


A Match.com study called Single in America, designed by biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, found that men are far more open to commitment than the stereotype implies. According to the study, both men and women are as likely, overall, to want to get married (33% want to tie the knot). Furthermore, men in every age group are actually more interested in having children, even in the 21-to-34 age group (51% of men in that group want kids, compared to 46% of women). Men were also less likely to report that they'd needed more space in a relationship (58%, compared to 77% of women), and less likely to insist on nights out with friends (23%, compared to 35% of women).

[Krandall]

"Obesity may be, in part, a transmittable disease."


The fact that obesity can result from shared behaviors is not particularly groundbreaking; studies on that subject go back decades. But a new study in the journal Nature indicated that obesity may have a component that is literally infectious. Researchers examined mice who'd been engineered with a fatty liver disease that made them obese, and then placed them in a cage with healthy mice, whereupon the healthy mice gained weight as well. In this case, the cause was digestive bacteria, which increased dramatically in the obese mice and were transferred to the healthy mice. The same mechanism of transfer for these digestive tract microbes is not as likely in humans, given that mice eat each other's waste, but the study suggested a very serious possibility in the spread of a very common problem (75% to 100% of obese people suffer from fatty liver disease).

[dragonz]

"Powerful people believe themselves to be taller than they are."

Shut up shorty & get back in your corner!

[Krandall]

"Social media makes users feel worse about themselves."


Stanford researchers studied girls ranging from 8 to 12 years old and found that those who spend a lot of time using media (not just social networks, but television as well) are more likely to feel out of the ordinary and inferior to others. Because this effect could also be a cause (in that the more socially awkward girls would choose to spend their time this way instead of out in public), researchers investigated further and found that as the girls spent more time having actual face-to-face conversations, they were more likely to report feeling better about themselves and their social standing. The study authors also noted past findings indicating that heavy media multitaskers scored worse in three major aspects of cognitive function (memory management, filtering and, ironically enough, task switching).

[Peelz]

"Social media makes users feel worse about themselves."


Stanford researchers studied girls ranging from 8 to 12 years old and found that those who spend a lot of time using media (not just social networks, but television as well) are more likely to feel out of the ordinary and inferior to others. Because this effect could also be a cause (in that the more socially awkward girls would choose to spend their time this way instead of out in public), researchers investigated further and found that as the girls spent more time having actual face-to-face conversations, they were more likely to report feeling better about themselves and their social standing. The study authors also noted past findings indicating that heavy media multitaskers scored worse in three major aspects of cognitive function (memory management, filtering and, ironically enough, task switching).

the raptorsource must make you positively suicidal