Emily and Laurice Alison are psychologists, who help counter-terrorism officers and the police in communicating and co-operating with criminal suspects, as well as extracting information out of them. Their methods are effective in two things: interrogating criminal suspects, and surprisingly, in making relationships at home better.

For the couple – who’ve been married for 21 years and have a 16-year-old son – the parallels with parenting have long been obvious and were underlined by the response of officers they’ve encountered on the intensive courses they run on how to interrogate terrorists.

Time after time, participants fed back that as well as learning invaluable skills for their professional lives, their approach was helping them deal with family and work relationships. “We were fascinated,” says Laurence, director of the Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology at Liverpool University. “We’d do a day on the best way to extract information from a dangerous prisoner and at the end of it participants would say, ‘This is such useful advice for me as a parent of teenagers.’”

What’s the secret ingredient to their effective communication? Find out over at The Guardian.

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Popular belief states that we only use 10% of our brain, which means that we can do more amazing things if we just used our brain more. Science, however, does not support this belief, as our brain is already doing more than what we expect it to. But where did this belief originate? Professor Sophie Scott sheds light on this matter over at BBC Reel.

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According to popular belief, music training helps in improving cognitive and academic performance. But is this really the case? Apparently, previous research about this topic has resulted in inconsistent conclusions, with some studys affirming the belief, and others stating the opposite. So which is true? A new study may have finally found the truth of the matter.

Researchers Giovanni Sala at Fujita Health University, Japan and Fernand Gobet at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK examined existing experimental evidence regarding the impact of music training on children’s non-music cognitive skills and academic achievement.

[...]

Giovanni Sala, the lead author said: “Our study shows that the common idea that ‘music makes children smarter’ is incorrect. On the practical side, this means that teaching music with the sole intent of enhancing a child’s cognitive or academic skills may be pointless. While the brain can be trained in such a way that if you play music, you get better at music, these benefits do not generalize in such a way that if you learn music, you also get better at maths. Researchers’ optimism about the benefits of music training appears to be unjustified and may stem from misinterpretation of previous empirical data.”

This does not mean to say, however, that music training is useless.

Fernand Gobet, the corresponding author added: “Music training may nonetheless be beneficial for children, for example by improving social skills or self-esteem. Certain elements of music instruction, such as arithmetical music notation could be used to facilitate learning in other disciplines.”

What are your thoughts about this one?

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Conventional wisdom tells us that we should start trying to be healthy as early as we can if we want to stay longer here on Earth. As they say, whatever man sows, that he shall reap also. So if you don’t take care of your body right now when you’re still young, you’ll suffer the consequences in the future when you get older.

Education and lifestyle behaviors in our teens and 20s appear to impact our risk of cognitive decline and dementia in later life, according to three new studies presented Thursday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference 2020.

A lack of access to high-quality education at an early age; being overweight during early adulthood; or having high blood pressure, diabetes and two or more heart health risk factors in the teen years, 20s and midlife were significantly connected to cognitive issues and dementia in later life, according to the new research.

Check out more details about this research over at CNN.

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Back in 2009, the late Stephen Hawking held a party for time travellers. That fateful day, nobody showed up as he waited and waited, and this event became Hawking’s experimental evidence that traveling back in time was impossible. But can the same be said if a person wanted to travel forward in time? Surprisingly, it is an entirely different story: we can travel forward in time, and science tells us five ways to do so. These are:

• Gravity
• Time
• Suspended animation
• Wormholes
• Using light

Know more details about these methods over at Cosmos Magazine.

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Last Saturday, double amputee Chris Marckres, of Hyde Park, decided to go skydiving in West Addison, Vermont. As he leapt from the plane however, he lost one of his prosthetic legs.

“I think my adrenaline was so high and I was just so excited, I didn’t realize I had lost it,” Marckres told NECN and NBC10 Boston.

Thankfully, the man landed safely despite losing one prosthetic leg, as he was harnessed to a skydiving instructor. After the incident, he immediately posted about his missing leg on social media. Fortunately, a farmer Joe Marszalkowski found Marckres leg the next day on the soybean field.

Beyond a few scratches, it was undamaged.

“You’ve always got to keep an eye out,” said Marszalkowski, who compared the discovery to a needle in a haystack. He said he was grateful he found the leg without running it over with a machine during the fall harvest.

“Or, God forbid, the combine sucked it up — it would’ve destroyed it,” Marszalkowski said.

The man’s pretty brave to skydive despite having no legs.

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If there was something that everybody wants gone, it's pain. Fortunately, we can experience that comfort for a short time through the use of topical and oral pain relievers. When it comes to topical pain relievers, creams and products containing cannabidiol (CBD) seem to be popular these days. Scientists, however, are worried for people who use these products, as it is still not fully known what the benefits and risks of using CBD are.

Head over to Discover Magazine to learn more about this topic.

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Over two years after he released his video that would give us a glimpse of how the Spongebob Squarepants series would look like if given the animé treatment, YouTuber Narmak finally makes a full fanmade episode based on the iconic Nickelodeon animated series. The video, titled SpongeBob Anime Ep #1: Bubble Bass Arc (Original Animation), premiered on YouTube last July 24.

As of this writing, the video now has over 7 million views.

What are your thoughts about this fanmade episode?

(Image Credit: Narmak/ YouTube)

In recent years, many games, such as Watch Dogs 2, Assassin’s Creed Origins, and Spider-Man, have incorporated a camera mode feature which allows you to capture beautiful environments and moments inside the game, and perhaps the best game that has this feature is none other than the recently released Ghost of Tsushima, where you can explore a part of 13th century Japan and capture epic moments there. But the camera mode feature is not only for epic moments; it can also be used for funny moments, and that’s what these gamers just did!

See the photos over at 9GAG.

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With candies, sprinkles, spoonfuls of gummy bears, and some scoops of ice cream, all wrapped up in cotton candy, this food, called a “cotton candy burrito”, would surely make a person’s tooth ache just by looking at it. Some commenters even remarked that he felt the need to brush their teeth just by looking at this food.

Would you eat one?

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One of the most painful things that a human being could experience is a heartbreak. A person who has been scarred by this experience can succumb to depression, anxiety, and sometimes, even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Love and heartbreak often go together. Sometimes, the suffering that comes with the end of a relationship helps us grow. It can force us to slow down, reflect on what happened, and learn to avoid repeating past mistakes. But other times, the suffering just crushes our soul. The pain becomes too much to bear, and it prevents us from moving on with our lives or opening ourselves up to positive relationships.

Thankfully, there are many ways that can help us move on, and one of these is science.

Early this year… a real-life technique for memory modification in response to heartbreak hit the newsstands. The coverage centered on Alain Brunet, a psychiatrist and expert in post-traumatic stress disorder at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In his lab, Brunet works with victims of what he calls “romantic betrayals.” These can range from harassment by a former lover to sudden abandonment by a long-term partner. He uses a technique known as reconsolidation therapy, which combines a drug-based treatment with practical exercises to change the emotional content of disturbing recollections. “We don’t treat the symptoms,” Brunet says of his method, “we treat the memory.”

Know more about Brunet’s method over at Nautilus.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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Natural disasters have always been with us, ever since the formation of our planet. Countless times have they shaped the landscape, and countless times have they helped change the course of history. It is said that “divine winds” were what saved Japan from the Mongol invasion under Kublai Khan.

The United States has had its own share of natural disasters, in the form of hurricanes, that helped shape the course of its history. David Kindy tells us of these instances over at his article at Smithsonian Magazine.

The history of Atlantic hurricanes is inextricably linked with the history of this country, from its colonial founding through independence and into modern times. A new book coming out later this summer, A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes by bestselling author Eric Jay Dolin, delves into the storms that shaped our society in ways we may not realize.

More about this over at the site.

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United States. 1800s. Tuberculosis is plaguing the land, and people didn’t know how to deal with it. At this time, the disease, which primarily attacks the lungs, was incurable, as antibiotics were yet to be discovered.

The only treatment physicians could recommend was going to the mountains, where the dry and fresh air was believed to help draw out moisture from the lungs and alleviate sufferings. Tuberculosis patients flocked to arid climates looking for cures and, if not, at least a good death. The assumption was, that while the disease surely destroyed the body, the mind grew sharp and imagination more vivid. This notion grew from the fact that so many literary figures succumbed to the disease, including Samuel Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Keats. So enticing the disease was that Lord Byron himself admitted, “I should like to die from consumption,” and novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, best known by her pen name George Sand, said of her lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, that he “coughs with infinite grace.”

With this recommendation given by the physicians at that time, people went to dry regions across the United States, and the city that benefited the most from this sudden “tuberculosis rush” was a young city called “Colorado Springs”.

Colorado Springs was founded in 1871. Located on the High Plains just east of the Rocky Mountains, the city enjoys comfortably cool and dry winters, with hot and sunny summers, while falls are pleasant and dry. The city has abundant sunshine year-round, averaging more than 250 sunny days per year. It was the [perfect] location to heal.

Learn more about the city made famous by tuberculosis, and how patients were treated there, over at Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum/ Amusing Planet)

Scientists at Hokkaido University in Japan have developed this hydrogel that can somehow “memorize” and “forget” information fed into it, much like how the human brain works. According to Kunpeng Cui, the assistant professor who lead the study along with Prof. Jian Ping Gong, the brain-like system of this hydrogel could be used in some systems, such as making messages disappear for security.

A paper on the research was recently published in the journal PNAS. In the time-lapse video below, you can see the word "gel" sequentially disappearing one letter at a time, due to the fact that each letter cut-out had been exposed to the hot water for an increasingly longer time period.

Find out more about this fascinating hydrogel over at New Atlas.

(Video Credit: Hokkaido Uni/ YouTube)

It is the late 1890s in Germany, and a new accessory designed to protect others just arrived in town. Surgeons at that time, however, didn’t want to use such a thing. This accessory was meant to keep bacteria from spreading as surgeons put their hands inside their patients' body cavities. The accessory was surgical gloves.

“Many historical accounts show deep impatience with past surgeons’ hesitation to adopt surgical gloves,” writes Thomas Schlich, historian of medicine… It would take “more than a decade of passionate argument” before surgeons finally accepted gloves as a necessity.

Learn more about how surgical gloves became widely accepted in Germany, as well as how surgical gloves evolved over time, over at JSTOR Daily.

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