I'm always fascinated by studies of other animals intelligence.  Why are humans such extreme environment modifiers whilst other not-as-intelligent-but-not-dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks animals barely intentionally modify their environment at all?

Richard Byrne and Anna Smet of the University of St. Andrews tested 11 African elephants on what’s known as the object-choice task. In this task, a food reward is hidden in one of several containers and the experimenter signals which one by pointing to it.
…
What’s so remarkable about the elephants’ success on the object-choice task is that they did it spontaneously. Byrne says that in studies of other species, the animals have had the opportunity to learn the task.

Elephants Get the Point – Wired Science

Originally posted on Google+ · October 14, 2013

Rational and rigorous thinking ability.  True beliefs.  A lot of knowledge.

Unfortunately, these things aren't pre-requisites to running a successful business, being awesome at your hobby, being a pro athlete, being the Pope, or being a politician.

The simplest demonstration of this is that it barely requires a coin toss to find two successful people with opposing views on just about any subject.

The reason I said it's unfortunate that rational thought and the like aren't a pre-requisite for success is that it seems to be the tendency for humans that are successful at their chosen fields to think that their success is an indication of their "rightness" about life, the universe, and everything.

Originally posted on Google+ · October 13, 2013

It sounds like flipped schools might work for some definition of "work".

I'd definitely like to see some more thorough studies of this, but it looks like the school they focus on in this article got a lot of benefit from it.

What is a flipped school you ask?

In a flipped school, teachers record their lectures and other materials, and students watch those at home and then do labwork/"homework" at the school.

It sounds like the actual format of these recorded videos is still in a state of flux, but I like the idea of the teachers who have 3-6 minute videos that make it easy for students to rewatch them to grasp things they don't understand.

Turning Education Upside Down
“Flipped schools,” where students watch video lessons at home and do “homework” in class, are showing early promise in improving learning.

Originally posted on Google+ · October 13, 2013

For this, I would normally type "Here's some paint on a speaker filmed in slow motion."  

However, I'm not going to type that since all that information is contained in the video title which you can see on the video below.

Originally posted on Google+ · October 12, 2013

An interactive visualization of 100,000 nearby stars.

100,000 Stars
An interactive 3D visualization of the stellar neighborhood, including over 100,000 nearby stars. Created for the Google Chrome web browser.

Originally posted on Google+ · October 12, 2013

Biswamoyopterus laoensis is a large flying squirrel that weighs 1.8 kg and measures about 42 inches (1.08 m) in total length – the body is about 18 inches (0.46 m) long and the tail is 24 inches (0.62 m) long.

Biswamoyopterus laoensis: New Species of Flying Squirrel from Laos | Biology | Sci-News.com
An international team of biologists has described a new species of flying squirrel in the genus Biswamoyopterus.

Originally posted on Google+ · October 12, 2013

www.eso.org/public/archives/images/screen/eso0936b.jpg

Originally posted on Google+ · October 11, 2013

The Atlantic discusses how the shut down of the Silk Road could be making the world less safe.

On many thousands of occasions, drug dealers in foreign countries decided that, rather than using armed truck drivers, bribed customs agents, desperate drug mules, thuggish regional distributors, and street level drug dealers who used guns to defend their territory, they’d just mail drugs directly to their far away customers. Of course, folks at the beginning of the supply chain were still often violent drug cartels who one hates to see profit. But from the perspective of the many innocents who suffer from the black market supply chains involved in traditional drug sales, narcotics via mail order would seem to be a vast improvement.

Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place? – Technology – The Atlantic
The Atlantic covers breaking news, analysis, opinion around politics, business, culture, international, science, technology, national profiles on the official site of the Atlantic Magazine.

Originally posted on Google+ · October 11, 2013

 This one is particularly cool.

Originally posted on Google+ · October 11, 2013

I'm usually pretty hip to all the cutting edge technologies out there, but somehow I have never even heard of a single pixel camera.  Yet, now they're making 3d movies with them.

First 3D Movies From a Single Pixel Camera | MIT Technology Review
Single pixel cameras are revolutionising imaging. Now researchers have built one capable of tracking a moving object and creating a 3D film of its motion

Originally posted on Google+ · October 10, 2013