As you may already know, what and how you buy can be political. To whom do you want to give your money? Which companies and corporations do you value and respect? Be mindful about every purchase by carefully researching the corporations that are taking our money to decide if they deserve our support. Do they have a record of polluting the environment, or do they have fair-trade practices and an end-of-life plan for the products they make? Are they committed to bringing about good in the world? For instance, my family has found a company producing recycled, plastic-packaging-free toilet paper with a social conscience. They contribute 50 percent of their profits to the construction of toilets around the world, and we're genuinely happy to spend our money on this special toilet paper each month. Remember that the corporate world is built on consumers, so as a consumer you have the power to vote with your wallet and encourage companies to embrace healthier and more sustainable practices with every purchase you choose to make.

North America's native cuisine met the same unfortunate fate as its native people, save for a few relics like the Thanksgiving turkey. Certainly, we still have regional specialties, but the Carolina barbecue will almost certainly have California tomatoes in its sauce, and the Louisiana gumbo is just as likely to contain Indonesian farmed shrimp. If either of these shows up on a fast-food menu with lots of added fats or HFCS, we seem unable either to discern or resist the corruption. We have yet to come up with a strong set of generalized norms, passed down through families, for savoring and sensibly consuming what our land and climate give us. We have, instead, a string of fad diets convulsing our bookstores and bellies, one after another, at the scale of the national best seller. Nine out of ten nutritionists view this as evidence that we have entirely lost our marbles.

Sudden success or winnings can be very dangerous. Neurologically, chemicals are released in the brain that give a powerful burst of excitement and energy, leading to the desire to repeat this experience. It can be the start of any kind of addiction or manic behavior. Also, when gains come quickly we tend to lose sight of the basic wisdom that true success, to really last, must come through hard work. We do not take into account the role that luck plays in such sudden gains. We try again and again to recapture that high from winning so much money or attention. We acquire feelings of superiority. We become especially resistant to anyone who tries to warn us—they don't understand, we tell ourselves. Because this cannot be sustained, we experience an inevitable fall, which is all the more painful, leading to the depression part of the cycle. Although gamblers are the most prone to this, it equally applies to businesspeople during bubbles and to people who gain sudden attention from the public.

It is not the peasant's goal to produce the highest possible time‐averaged crop yield, averaged over many years. If your time‐averaged yield is marvelously high as a result of the combination of nine great years and one year of crop failure, you will still starve to death in that one year of crop failure before you can look back to congratulate yourself on your great time‐averaged yield. Instead, the peasant's aim is to make sure to produce a yield above the starvation level in every single year, even though the time‐averaged yield may not be highest. That's why field scattering may make sense. If you have just one big field, no matter how good it is on the average, you will starve when the inevitable occasional year arrives in which your one field has a low yield. But if you have many different fields, varying independently of each other, then in any given year some of your fields will produce well even when your other fields are producing poorly.

The elements any particular animal needs are relatively predictable. They are predictable based on the past: what an animal's ancestors needed is likely to be what that animal also needs. Taste preferences, therefore, can be hardwired. Consider sodium (Na). The bodies of terrestrial vertebrates, including those of mammals, tend to have a concentration of sodium nearly fifty times that of the primary producers on land, plants. This is, in part, because vertebrates evolved in the sea and so evolved cells dependent upon the ingredients that were common in the sea, including sodium. To remedy the difference between their needs for sodium and that available in plants, herbivores can eat fifty times more plant material than they otherwise need (and eliminate the excess). Or they can seek out other sources of sodium. The salt taste receptor rewards animals for doing the latter, seeking out salt in order to satisfy their great need.

Long-term elephant groups are composed exclusively of adult females and juvenile males and females. Elephant leaders are typically chosen from among the oldest females in the group, and this matriarch is relied on to coordinate group movements, migration, and responses to threats, such as lions. The leader's role in these situations is to call the other elephants to action and direct them toward threats or opportunities. She doesn't dash out in front to provide protection (when threatened by lions, all the adults position themselves in front to protect their young); nor does she suffer hardships on behalf of her group. The leadership she provides is in the form of guidance. Because leadership does not give her preferential access to food sources or mating opportunities, elephant leaders do not gain unique benefits from their position.

A patient of mine who is more of an outwardly focused perfectionist feels angry when other people make errors, forget things, misplace objects that he needs, respond too slowly, or give him incorrect information. These kinds of things would probably bother most people, but for some perfectionists these errors feel personal. It can seem as if others are intentionally doing these things just to irritate you. In most cases, these situations are not that simple. They do not involve just the perpetrator (the one who made the mistake) trying to do harm to the victim (the perfectionist). There are usually many other circumstances that influence the situation. For example, the person giving misinformation may be new on the job, may have been misinformed by her boss, may be correct under different circumstances, or may have misunderstood the question. When you oversimplify, none of these "excuses" matter because you are focused only on the wrong-doing and your upset feelings.

Clearly, bright colours are advantageous for prey defences. But how did they evolve? One possibility is that conspicuous colours evolved first, followed by distastefulness. For example, some brightly coloured birds like kingfishers are distasteful. Their colours may have been favoured for better mate attraction or territory defence and then, because they also increased conspicuousness to predators, this then favoured the evolution of distastefulness. The other possibility is that distastefulness came first. This may apply to those insects, such as caterpillars of the monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, which feed on plants containing toxins and incorporate the toxins in their bodies as a defence against predation. It is plausible that here distastefulness evolved first followed by conspicuousness. In this case, then, bright colouration evolves specifically as a warning device.

Leslie doesn't realize it, but she stalled out from her fear of failure. She imagined hundreds of reasons why her ideas might not work, and then used these reasons as "legitimate" excuses for not taking action. Leslie needed to face up to the fact that she concocted her own reasons for failing to act, and that the development of those reasons, if not grasped and eliminated, could lead to her being stymied further. Leslie functions like many of those who never go forward with their ideas — the professor who never finishes writing his book, the artist who never paints the picture she dreams about and mentions to others, the business person who has a wonderful money-making scheme but never implements it. The fear of failure in these people extends beyond an inability to reach a level of success or a level of perfection. To these people — and Leslie might well be one of them — if their project isn't flawless, if it isn't of Nobel Prize quality, then, in their minds, it's a failure, and they will delay taking action because they cannot tolerate being imperfect.

Motivational psychologists explain human behavior in terms of deep-seated psychological fears, desires, and needs. These needs include self-esteem, social approval, and a sense of efficacy. Motivational psychology helps us understand, for example, why almost all German diplomats before World War I gave false or misleading reports on the likely reactions of European countries to Austrian and German military moves. The reason is that they were simply frightened of the consequences of not telling the notoriously intolerant German foreign ministry what it wanted to hear. The one German diplomat who accurately reported the likely response of Britain to a German violation of Belgian neutrality, Ambassador Prince Karl Lichnowsky in London, was dismissed in Berlin as having "gone native," a judgmental error that itself can be explained in terms of a well-documented motivational-psychological tendency: namely, the desire to avoid the psychological pain of admitting one's own error. Because Germany's entire strategy for swift victory in 1914 depended on Britain staying out of the war, Lichnowsky's accurate reports would have been extremely unsettling if they had been accepted.

If there's one thing koalas are good at, it's sleeping. For a long time many scientists suspected that koalas were so lethargic because the compounds in eucalyptus leaves kept the cute little animals in a drugged-out state. But more recent research has shown that the leaves are simply so low in nutrients that koalas have almost no energy. Therefore they tend to move as little as possible—and when they do move, they often look as though they're in slow motion. They rest sixteen to eighteen hours a day and spend most of that unconscious. In fact, koalas spend little time thinking; their brains actually appear to have shrunk over the last few centuries. The koala is the only known animal whose brain only fills half of its skull.

Thomas Edison was indeed a creative genius, but it was not until he discovered some of the principles of marketing that he found increased success. One of his first inventions was, although much needed, a failure. In 1869, he created and patented an electronic vote recorder, which recorded and totalled the votes in the Massachusetts state legislature faster than the chamber's old manual system. To Edison's astonishment, it failed. Edison had not taken into account legislators' habits. They didn't like to vote quickly and efficiently. They liked to lobby their fellow legislators as voting took place. Edison had a great idea, but he completely misunderstood the needs of his customers. He learned from his failure the relationship between invention and marketing. Edison learned that marketing and invention must be integrated. "Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent," he said. "Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success." He realized he needed to put the customers' needs first and tailor his thinking accordingly.

Some of animal communication techniques are instinctive and require no learning. The honeybee, for example, needs no lessons to execute or understand its dance. This particular language is obviously carried from one generation of bees to another in the genes. In other cases, animal language seems to arise from both genetically transmitted information and environmental learning. One way to test this statement with songbirds is to raise the birds in an environment in which they do not hear the songs characteristic of their species. Some species, such as flycatchers, can produce their songs even when raised in acoustic isolation. Others, such as wrens, must have a model from which to learn. In an experiment with cowbirds, for example, chicks from North Carolina were raised around Texas adults. The result: The chicks grew up singing with a strong Texas accent!

In 1985 the typical American reported having three people he could confide in about important matters. By 2004 his network had shrunk to two, and it hasn't bounced back since. Almost half the population say they have no one, or just one person, in whom they can confide. Considering that this included close family members, it reflects a stunning decline in social connection. Other surveys show that people are losing ties with their neighborhoods and their communities. They are less likely to say they trust other people and institutions. They don't invite friends over for dinner or participate in social or volunteer groups as they did decades ago. Most Americans simply don't know their neighbors anymore. Even family bonds are being strained. By 2004 less than 30 percent of American families ate together every night.

While economic theory is not the driving force behind hyperconsumerism, it has certainly provided a convenient rationalization. Hyperconsumerism is the result of a combination of factors, psychological and sociological, as well as economic. Purchasing a new thing is a simpler, more easily controllable source of pleasure than building a new connection with another human being. To the extent that material possessions are a source of status in any particular society, it can also be an easier, more manageable source of social standing and self-esteem. And there can be a kind of mild narcotic rush, a fleeting sense of relief from the blues, connected to acquiring a new thing. Many of us have experienced that feeling on occasion; and some of us become addicted to it as means of "self-medication." They seem to live by the slogan, "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping."

Driven by enlightenment ideals, exploration gradually evolved from the wholesale plunder of foreign lands in search of gold to more virtuous scientific purposes. Instead of conquerors, explorers were now botanists, physicists, astronomers, and anthropologists. It was no longer enough to merely find the world — exploration now meant truly discovering it. Curiosity had always been an exploratory motive, but an international competition for prestige based on scientific discovery was something new. Even the ships were intended to reflect the new ideals under which they sailed, with names such as Discovery, Resolution, Endeavour, Adventure, Géographie, Naturaliste, and Astrolabe. Some ventures, such as the French 1735 mission to Ecuador to measure the shape of Earth, were virtually devoid of nonscientific purpose. Nevertheless, even purely scientific voyages were intended to enhance the image of the sponsoring nation in an eighteenth-and-nineteenth- century equivalent of the Cold War space race. In this exploratory contest, a new figure emerged: the scientist-hero, conquering ignorance on behalf of the nation.

The original idea of a patent, remember, was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits, but to encourage them to share their inventions. A certain amount of intellectual property law is plainly necessary to achieve this. But it has gone too far. Most patents are now as much about defending monopoly and discouraging rivals as about sharing ideas. In the years before World War I, aircraft makers tied each other up in patent lawsuits and slowed down innovation until the US government stepped in. Much the same has happened with smartphones and biotechnology today. New entrants have to fight their way through "patent thickets" if they are to build on existing technologies to make new ones.

Children develop the capacity for solitude in the presence of an attentive other. Consider the silences that fall when you take a young boy on a quiet walk in nature. The child comes to feel increasingly aware of what it is to be alone in nature, supported by being "with" someone who is introducing him to this experience. Gradually, the child takes walks alone. Or imagine a mother giving her two-year-old daughter a bath, allowing the girl's reverie with her bath toys as she makes up stories and learns to be alone with her thoughts, all the while knowing her mother is present and available to her. Gradually, the bath, taken alone, is a time when the child is comfortable with her imagination. Attachment enables solitude.

Much of the spread of fake news occurs through irresponsible sharing. A 2016 study from Columbia University in New York City and Inria, a French technology institute, found that 59 percent of the news from links shared on social media wasn't read first. People see an intriguing headline or photo in their news feed or on another website and then click the Share button to repost the item to their social media friends―without ever clicking through to the full article. Then they may be sharing fake news. To stop the spread of fake news, read stories before you share them. Respect your social media friends enough to know what information you are sending their way. You may discover, on close inspection, that an article you were about to share is obviously fraudulent, that it doesn't really say what the headline promises, or that you actually disagree with it.

If you want to use the inclined plane to help you move an object (and who wouldn't?), then you have to move the object over a longer distance to get to the desired height than if you had started from directly below and moved upward. This is probably already clear to you from a lifetime of stair climbing. Consider all the stairs you climb compared to the actual height you reach from where you started. This height is always less than the distance you climbed in stairs. In other words, more distance in stairs is traded for less force to reach the intended height. Now, if we were to pass on the stairs altogether and simply climb straight up to your destination (from directly below it), it would be a shorter climb for sure, but the needed force to do so would be greater. Therefore, we have stairs in our homes rather than ladders.

You know that forks don't fly off to the Moon and that neither apples nor anything else on Earth cause the Sun to crash down on us. The reason these things don't happen is that the strength of gravity's pull depends on two things. The first is the mass of the object. The apple is very small, and doesn't have much mass, so its pull on the Sun is absolutely tiny, certainly much smaller than the pull of all the planets. The Earth has more mass than tables, trees, or apples, so almost everything in the world is pulled towards the Earth. That's why apples fall from trees. Now, you might know that the Sun is much bigger than Earth and has much more mass. So why don't apples fly off towards the Sun? The reason is that the pull of gravity also depends on the distance to the object doing the pulling. Although the Sun has much more mass than the Earth, we are much closer to the Earth, so we feel its gravity more.

Testing strategies relating to direct assessment of content knowledge still have their value in an inquiry-driven classroom. Let's pretend for a moment that we wanted to ignore content and only assess a student's skill with investigations. The problem is that the skills and the content are interconnected. When a student fails at pattern analysis, it could be because they do not understand how to do the pattern analysis properly. However, it also could be that they did not understand the content that they were trying to build patterns with. Sometimes students will understand the processes of inquiry well, and be capable of skillfully applying social studies disciplinary strategies, yet fail to do so because they misinterpret the content. For these reasons, we need a measure of a student's content understanding. To do this right, we need to make sure our assessment is getting us accurate measures of whether our students understand the content they use in an inquiry.

In physics, the principle of relativity requires that all equations describing the laws of physics have the same form regardless of inertial frames of reference. The formulas should appear identical to any two observers and to the same observer in a different time and space. Attitudes and values, however, are subjective to begin with, and therefore they are easily altered to fit our ever-changing circumstances and goals. Thus, the same task can be viewed as boring one moment and engaging the next. Divorce, unemployment, and cancer can seem devastating to one person but be perceived as an opportunity for growth by another person, depending on whether or not the person is married, employed, and healthy. It is not only beliefs, attitudes, and values that are subjective. Our brains comfortably change our perceptions of the physical world to suit our needs. We will never see the same event and stimuli in exactly the same way at different times.

When we see an adorable creature, we must fight an overwhelming urge to squeeze that cuteness. And pinch it, and cuddle it, and maybe even bite it. This is a perfectly normal psychological tick―an oxymoron called "cute aggression"―and even though it sounds cruel, it's not about causing harm at all. In fact, strangely enough, this compulsion may actually make us more caring. The first study to look at cute aggression in the human brain has now revealed that this is a complex neurological response, involving several parts of the brain. The researchers propose that cute aggression may stop us from becoming so emotionally overloaded that we are unable to look after things that are super cute. "Cute aggression may serve as a tempering mechanism that allows us to function and actually take care of something we might first perceive as overwhelmingly cute," explains the lead author, Stavropoulos.

People seem to recognize that the arts are cultural activities that draw on (or react against) certain cultural traditions, certain shared understanding, and certain values and ideas that are characteristic of the time and place in which the art is created. In the case of science, however, opinions differ. Some scientists, like the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane, see science in a similar light ― as a historical activity that occurs in a particular time and place, and that needs to be understood within that context. Others, however, see science as a purely objective pursuit, uninfluenced by the cultural viewpoint and values of those who create it. In describing this view of science, philosopher Hugh Lacey speaks of the belief that there is an underlying order of the world which is simply there to be discovered ― the world of pure fact stripped of any link with value. The aim of science according to this view is to represent this world of pure fact, independently of any relationship it might bear contingently to human practices and experiences.

When we get an unfavorable outcome, in some ways the last thing we want to hear is that the process was fair. As outraging as the combination of an unfavorable outcome and an unfair process is, this combination also brings with it a consolation prize: the possibility of attributing the bad outcome to something other than ourselves. We may reassure ourselves by believing that our bad outcome had little to do with us and everything to do with the unfair process. If the process is fair, however, we cannot nearly as easily externalize the outcome; we got what we got "fair and square." When the process is fair we believe that our outcome is deserved, which is another way of saying that there must have been something about ourselves (what we did or who we are) that caused the outcome.

Minimal processing can be one of the best ways to keep original flavors and taste, without any need to add artificial flavoring or additives, or too much salt. This would also be the efficient way to keep most nutrients, especially the most sensitive ones such as many vitamins and anti-oxidants. Milling of cereals is one of the most harsh processes which dramatically affect nutrient content. While grains are naturally very rich in micronutrients, anti-oxidants and fiber (i.e. in wholemeal flour or flakes), milling usually removes the vast majority of minerals, vitamins and fibers to raise white flour. Such a spoilage of key nutrients and fiber is no longer acceptable in the context of a sustainable diet aiming at an optimal nutrient density and health protection. In contrast, fermentation of various foodstuffs or germination of grains are traditional, locally accessible, low-energy and highly nutritious processes of sounded interest.

A computational algorithm that takes input data and generates some output from it doesn't really embody any notion of meaning. Certainly, such a computation does not generally have as its purpose its own survival and well-being. It does not, in general, assign value to the inputs. Compare, for example, a computer algorithm with the waggle dance of the honeybee, by which means a foraging bee conveys to others in the hive information about the source of food (such as nectar) it has located. Some bees might not bother to make the journey, considering it not worthwhile. The input, such as it is, is processed in the light of the organism's own internal states and history; there is nothing prescriptive about its effects. The "dance" ― a series of stylized movements on the comb ― shows the bees how far away the food is and in which direction. But this input does not simply program other bees to go out and look for it. Rather, they evaluate this information, comparing it with their own knowledge of the surroundings.

There are deep similarities between viral contagion and behavioral contagion. For example, people in close or extended proximity to others infected by a virus are themselves more likely to become infected, just as people are more likely to drink excessively when they spend more time in the company of heavy drinkers. But there are also important differences between the two types of contagion. One is that visibility promotes behavioral contagion but inhibits the spread of infectious diseases. Solar panels that are visible from the street, for instance, are more likely to stimulate neighboring installations. In contrast, we try to avoid others who are visibly ill. Another important difference is that whereas viral contagion is almost always a bad thing, behavioral contagion is sometimes negative ― as in the case of smoking ― but sometimes positive, as in the case of solar installations.

Sleep is clearly about more than just resting. One curious fact is that animals that are hibernating also have periods of sleep. It comes as a surprise to most of us, but hibernation and sleep are not the same thing at all, at least not from a neurological and metabolic perspective. Hibernating is more like being anesthetized: the subject is unconscious but not actually asleep. So a hibernating animal needs to get a few hours of conventional sleep each day within the larger unconsciousness. A further surprise to most of us is that bears, the most famous of wintry sleepers, don't actually hibernate. Real hibernation involves profound unconsciousness and a dramatic fall in body temperature ― often to around 32 degrees Fahrenheit. By this definition, bears don't hibernate, because their body temperature stays near normal and they are easily awakened. Their winter sleeps are more accurately called a state of torpor.