Many people are wired to seek and respond to rewards. Your brain interprets food as rewarding when you are hungry and water as rewarding when you are thirsty. But addictive substances like alcohol and drugs of abuse can overwhelm the natural reward pathways in your brain, resulting in intolerable cravings and reduced impulse control.A popular misconception is that addiction is a result of low willpower. But an explosion of knowledge and technology in the field of molecular genetics has chan ...read more
An ocean away from their kindred in Africa, a group of invasive hippos roaming the Colombian wild has garnered quite the controversial reputation. The river-dwelling mammals don’t exactly belong in this environment, yet an estimated 91 of them currently inhabit the Magdalena River basin in Colombia. As the hippo’s numbers burgeon, the scramble to curtail population growth has reached a boiling point. The consequences that have arisen from the hippos’ presence, scientists warn, will only am ...read more
We live in a world full of distractions and are more stimulated than ever. As a result, attention is divided and scattered. It’s difficult to know what to pay attention to and we can easily get distracted from tasks at hand. Our culture is driven by productivity and success as determinants of happiness — a culture of "more." But sometimes, when we are chasing more, we end up having less. Because of this, a new, viral trend called ‘monk mode’ helps delegate our internal resources more eff ...read more
Lions certainly deserve their prestige as emperors of the African savanna, but they’ve recently been humbled by a tiny, pesky troublemaker: ants. A team of researchers noticed that the invasive big-headed ant species has been putting a damper on lions’ predation patterns by inadvertently assisting their main prey, zebras. Researchers led by University of Wyoming Ph.D. student Douglas Kamaru spotted this occurrence at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The results, published in Science, show a ...read more
You might think that the more a robot or virtual person resembles a real human, the more comfortable we would be with them. But oddly, that’s not entirely true. As robots and virtual people get closer to being lifelike, we do tend to like them more — up to a point. A cute robot with big, round eyes and a happy smile is far more endearing than one that looks like a microwave oven on wheels.However, somewhere along the road to realism, things start to change. As robots get very close to being ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine