Some research to support that sleeping shortly after studying helps retention:
"Overall, our results demonstrate that 1) the impact of 12 hr of waking interference on memory retention is strongly determined by word-pair type, 2) sleep is most beneficial to memory 24 hr later if it occurs shortly after learning, and 3) sleep does in fact stabilize declarative memories, diminishing the negative impact of subsequent wakefulness."

"A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural."

"When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? (...) What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch."

"In 1962, a French speleologist named Michel Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, his goal was to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.” Over the next decade, Siffre organized over a dozen other underground time isolation experiments, before he himself returned to a cave in Texas in 1972 for a six-month spell. His work helped found the field of human chronobiology."

"There was a very large perturbation in my sense of time. I descended into the cave on July 16 and was planning finish the experiment on September 14. When my surface team notified me that the day had finally arrived, I thought that it was only August 20. I believed I still had another month to spend in the cave. My psychological time had compressed by a factor of two."

"We analyzed sleep stages—the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, when dreaming occurs, and slow-wave sleep—and we made another discovery. We showed that there is a correlation between how long a person stays up and how much he dreams the next night. Roughly speaking, for every ten extra minutes of activity each day, a man gets one extra minute of REM sleep. We also found that the more you dream, the shorter your reaction time during your next phase of wakefulness. After we made this discovery, the French army tried to find drugs that artificially increase the amount of time spent dreaming, with the hope of producing very long days of thirty or more hours for soldiers."

"What is it about the underground that both attracts us and scares us? It is dark. You need a light. And if your light goes out, you’re dead. In the Middle Ages, caves were the place where demons lived. But at the same time, caves are a place of hope. We go into them to find minerals and treasures, and it’s one of the last places where it is still possible to have adventures and make new discoveries."

"At 82, the famed biologist E. O. Wilson arrived in Mozambique last summer with a modest agenda—save a ravaged park; identify its many undiscovered species; create a virtual textbook that will revolutionize the teaching of biology. Wilson’s newest theory is more ambitious still. It could transform our understanding of human nature—and provide hope for our stewardship of the planet."

"They’ll ad lib their way through this so-called “script” a few times, rolling tape the whole time. Then Jad or one of the show’s producers cuts together a version. They listen to it. Then they’ll go back and re-record bits of banter, to make a quicker transition from one section to the next, or to slow down and explain some point more thoroughly, or to set up a piece of tape slightly differently."

"The timing and entrance of every little note, each of the sound effects, the quotes, the echo on the voices and music, the tinniness or bassy-ness of each element in the mix, it’s all calibrated and machined like an expensive handmade watch. No other radio show sweats the production work to that extent; it’s not even close. And all that meticulous work is in the service of something that’s the opposite of careful and meticulous: this totally chatty, happy, loose, spontaneous-sounding conversation between Jad and Robert and their interviewees."

"Researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Lab have developed technology that may someday cure the common cold, influenza and other ailments."

"As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success — a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist — to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. (...) It may be true, in other words, that “nobody knows anything,” as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know."

I didn't know about this: the Little Ice Age was a period of cooling that lasted from the 16th to the 19th century. One of the proposed causes was a decrease in the human population numbers!

Malcolm Gladwell reports on Paul Ekman's work on identifying emotion through facial expressions and micro-expressions.

"If you only had a single statement to pass on to others summarizing the most vital lesson to be drawn from your work, what would it be? Seed asked eleven scientists this question. These are their answers."

Not using shampoo or soap when bathing. Doing this for 4 days, so far so good.

Exactly what it says on the tin.

"GelSight is a novel device that can be used as a 2.5D “scanner” for acquiring surface texture and shape. It consists of a slab of clear elastomer covered with a reflective skin."

"The French Culinary Institute's Tech N' Stuff Blog"

URL updated Feb 17, 2012. Previously was: http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/

"Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.

Our goal is to encourage life-long learning, and we have created this website as a portal of possibilities. A democratic space where people can listen and engage with ideas that inform contemporary history. Ideas that we believe will empower everyone to be a part of today’s cultural conversation."

If sexual orientation is biological, are the traits that make people seem gay innate, too? The new research on everything from voice pitch to hair whorl.