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The way people discuss the future varies from language to language. Some have a well-defined future tense, while others distinguish much between present and future. But does this point of grammar actually affect how we see the world? More »
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Film analyst Rob Ager has turned his focus on the "enduring and enigmatic enigma" of The Shining in an attempt to uncover the cryptic narrative tucked betwixt Stanley Kubrick's strange inconsistencies and the meaning behind the infamous black-and-white shot. More »
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In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Centered in Peru, it stretched across the Andes' mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today's Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru - all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled any in the Old World. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city building but nevertheless had no money. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all. More »
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Planning for 2012? Don't forget to add an extra day to February. The Gregorian calendar that we all know and love is a tricky beast, filled with weird irregularities including variable month lengths. More »
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There's a slim (but not insignificant) chance that an asteroid will hit the Earth some time in the next 100 years, causing an extinction-level event. But we're not willing to invest the relatively modest sums needed for a detection and deflection system. More »
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Global fossil fuel emissions skyrocketed last year to the highest levels ever recorded, undermining the widespread belief that the global financial crisis would cut carbon emissions. Though there was a brief, two-year decline in emissions, a new scientific report published this week offers compelling evidence that emissions in 2010 soared far above anything we've ever experienced. More »
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The levels of support received by any government-funded program are expected to fluctuate in kind with a country's budgetary fortunes, but the history of federally funded science in the United States has been especially strained by the ongoing transformation of the nation's budget. More »
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A recent Pew Research Center report shows that Americans really do believe in individualism and freewill. Only 36 percent of Americans polled said that they thought their economic fortunes were determined by forces beyond their control. Compare this number to the over 70 percent of Germans who believe their financial fates are beyond their personal control. The irony, writes Catherine Rampell in the New York Times, is that Americans actually have far less control over their economic destinies than their European counterparts. She explains: More »
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Some economists are referring to our current economic malaise as the "Lesser Depression" — but it could be getting worse soon. Europe is unraveling, China's October output fell off a cliff and the U.S. Supercommittee is about to push a round of austerity. More »
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Every year the U.N. releases its Human Development Index, a widely-respected ranking of nations based on levels of health care, education, economic growth, and other factors. But now, says one analyst, the long-respected ranking system has to be overhauled. Its definition of "development" is outdated because it doesn't take into account whether any of that development is sustainable from an environmental perspective. So which nations would rise to the top of the HDI if sustainability were taken into account? Chuluun Togtokh, a Mongolian environmental scientist and development policymaker, decided to find out. More »
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Even in decidedly "wealthy" countries, human health is not always guaranteed. In fact, studies show that the best indicator of a country's health is not its overall wealth, but how that wealth is distributed. Time Magazine's Maia Szalavitz reports: More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5852852&view=rss&microfeed=true For people who've had to foreclose on their mortgages over the past few years, the consequences can be more than financial. A group of epidemiologists have discovered that people over the age of 50 who've suffered through mortgage defaults are also facing deteriorating health as a result. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5852122&view=rss&microfeed=true Remember how the internet was going to create a whole new class of creators, who were going to be supercharging our economy by noodling on their laptops? Those people are hurting, thanks to a one-two punch of economic meltdown and the phasing out of old jobs like "video-store clerk" and "newspaper writer." Turns out the Information Age isn't so hot for middle-class culture industry types after all. Former io9 reporter Scott Timberg has a great rundown of the lost potential of the "Creative Class" over at Salon.com. More »
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If you've ever been inspired to develop a phone or tablet app that addresses issues of climate change, the global economy, or space exploration, listen up. More »
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Remember the Chinese ghost city of Ordos? After visiting this unpopulated metropolis (which was built for one-million residents) in 2009, Al-Jazeera went back to find that even though Ordos was still mostly unoccupied, construction kept chugging along. But why? More »
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"Do people who are genetically predisposed towards altruism tend to flock together? Or do people become more altruistic when they interact with others who display this trait? Or are external environmental conditions the major influence? Research shows that all three factors play a role. Whatever genetic predispositions people have, their prosociality changes according to where they are and who they are with. Much depends on their social environment." More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5836299&view=rss&microfeed=true The recession has hit everyone hard, but more men than woman are finding themselves without a steady income, and new studies show these men are reevaluating what being a breadwinner means. More »
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For the past three years we've been watching great economic institutions, from banks to nations, collapsing into chaotic uncertainty. The economic future looks murky at best, and apocalyptic at worst. You can prepare for the coming upheavals by reading nonfiction by economists, political scientists, and pundits. But sometimes it's hard to imagine what's coming next without a good story to illustrate different possibilities. More »
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The Dollar Auction shows us how people can become over-obsessed, lose large amounts needlessly, and make the ultimate irrational choice by doing the most rational thing at the time. See the edges of human denial and desparation, for only a dollar. More »
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So you want to be a mad scientist, and dedicate yourself to a life of the mind? It's not just a matter of finding mind-controlled minions and a bottle of Plutonium. Academic scientific research is a very pricey undertaking, with millions of person hours and billions of your tax dollars spent in an effort to bring the future a little closer to the present every year. To give you an idea of how your tax dollars are spent, here is a breakdown of a typical faculty member's financial situation, and how they stay afloat. More »
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Apart from professional sports, today America is mostly anti-union. Now a new study points to the drop in union numbers to explain the growing wage inequality over the last 35 years. From 1973 to 2007, wage inequality increased 40% among men and 50% among women, while at the same time union participation dropped from 34% to 8% for the former, and 16% to 6% for the latter. More »
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When a stock market bubble is about to burst, financial experts start using all the same words to describe what's going on, even if - especially if - those words are positive. Groupthink doesn't get much more perilous than this. More »
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When the power imbalances between men and women are eradicated, say psychologists, women philander as often as men do. That's because sexual infidelity is related to power, not gender. More »
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A new ATM for a Russian bank turns money machines into truth machines, using fingerprint recognition, 3-D face scans and voice analysis to determine whether customers are worthy of applying for credit cards. More »
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Microcredit institutes like Kiva claim to help small business in the developing world by offering small loans to people who aren't able to get them through the normal channels. Their claim is that these tiny loans help the people who are the most impoverished grow their businesses, and substantially improve their lot. Microfinance expert Dean Karlan has just published a study of the effects of microcredit, and while there are some advantages, they're definitely not what we originally thought. More »
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Even if we are incapable of following more than 150 friends on twitter, our computer overlords can track the humdrum ongoings of hundreds of millions of people with ease. What's more, new research suggests that seemingly inconsequential tweets (in large enough numbers) can have seriously far-reaching implications for people who play the stock market. More »
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In one of those quirky "lifestyles of the rich" stories, Fortune magazine recently highlighted Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's new hobby: slaughtering animals for food. This bloody-minded pursuit has been popular among the young and privileged for years now. Though the "killing your own meat" movement is being hailed as a kind of food-conscious, environmentally-friendly trend, it also echoes a millennia-old hobby of the aristocracy, who often hunted and killed animals in their leisure time. More »
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The major oil fields in the Gulf region have pumped more than half their oil, which is the point at which production usually begins to decline, one expert tells the Wall Street Journal. More »
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Last year, the stock market suffered what's now called "the flash crash." The prices of shares in the US fell by 6 percent in 5 minutes. How could it happen? Algorithms. The algorithms that now control the stock market. More »
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At least that seems to be the scam in China. Over at Asia Obscura, blogmaster Dean Pickles has reported seeing scattershot graveyards appearing on farmland throughout the Beijing suburbs. More »
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In its simplest terms, European prehistory can be divided into three parts: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. But there's a mysterious 300 year gap in prehistoric Britain, created by one of humanity's first economic bubbles. More »
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How much do you think Smaug, the magnificent dragon from The Hobbit, is really worth? Forbes writer Michael Noer says it's not that difficult to calculate: $8.6 billion. Want to know how he figured that out? More »
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Or, put another way, "Is our attitude to money like that to any other tool even though its use is symbolic and is not implemented in its physical structure?" More »
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I'm often shocked at how accurate some 20th century predictions of online shopping were. However, these retail prognosticators frequently miss the mark by assuming that individual goods would need to be photographed or videotaped live for consumers.  More »
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Don't let the dilapidated fishing boats or the rusting AK-47s fool you. Pirates mean serious business. A maritime industry group crunched the numbers and found that combating piracy threats cost governments and businesses between $7 and $12 billion every year. More »
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Check out this short film that illuminates the barriers between communities of people by tracking the movements of dollar bills. More »
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Anxiety over the mechanization of labor isn't a new phenomenon. In 1931, Modern Mechanics asked, "Is man doomed by the machine age?" Learn about the dangers of "robot music" and how miniature golf is a catalyst for economic progress. More »
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It looks like our automated creations are beginning to get the best of their meatbag overlords. Two studies show that automated labor is increasingly taking over middle-class jobs and that babies will regard humanoid robots as sentient beings. More »
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In Virginia, General Electric is shutting down its last incandescent lightbulb factory, marking the end of an era in American illumination - and factory jobs. More »
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After the "flash crash" that brought the stock exchange to its knees a few months ago, data analysis firm Nanex started looking into some odd patterns in stock trades. They discovered bot armies are affecting trades on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis. More »
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