On an afternoon in May, 1953, author Aldous Huxley drank a glass of dissolved mescaline, the main psychoactive ingredient in the peyote cactus, and found his home rather transformed. At one point, he looked at a flower arrangement he had appreciated that morning in a clear-headed state for its colors.“But that was no longer the point,” Huxley writes. “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, mome ...read more
In the field of economics, the sunk cost fallacy — also called the sunk cost effect — is notorious. It occurs whenever we double down on poor financial decisions based on past investments that can't be recouped.But the phenomenon isn’t relegated only to the realm of business. You may be surprised to learn that it often rears its ugly head in our relationships as well.Sunk Cost Fallacy Examples Christopher Olivola, an associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, offers up ...read more
A 2022 attempt at creating a sweeping family tree for the human race, and at least three others, reached back 2 million years, long before Homo sapiens are believed to have originated in Africa 200,000 years ago.The study from Oxford’s Big Data Institute drew on 3,601 human genomes taken from several modern databases, eight ancient individuals and 3,589 more ancient samples derived from 100 other studies. Using specialized algorithms, the researchers fleshed out the tree further, adding limbs ...read more
This article was originally published on November 3, 2022. Ada Byron was on her best behavior when first presented to the British Royal Court — though she found the event and its attendees to be underwhelming. A few weeks later, however, the 17-year-old accompanied her mother to a mathematics lecture. That event captured her imagination and changed her life.Within the next decade, she married and became Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. But historians remember her as Ada Lovelace, a computer sci ...read more
Forensic science is supposed to be a scientific process. But for decades, critics have complained evidence isn’t always evaluated in a laboratory setting, and empirical studies don’t back the methods of analysis.The consequences for faulty forensic evidence have been severe. Forty-five percent of wrongful convictions that were later overturned due to DNA evidence were found to be the result of inaccurate evidence. Advocacy groups such as the Innocence Project argue that many forensic t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
