I know, my friends, you have nothing to read, so I'm going to take care of my dear content consumers.
Norwegian researchers, using the currently fashionable method of crowdfunding, that is, raising funds with the whole global village, are going to sponsor the production of tens of kilograms of MDMA (popularly known as the club pills "Ecstasy") and psilocybin, the main ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. But not to get high, as you might have thought, but to supply research scientists all over the world with these substances.
The thing is, in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the US and the UN frantically added all psychoactive substances to the number 1 prohibited list ("having no known medical use"). The question of how substances can ever get a medical use if they are banned and researching them involves unbelievable legal red tape never crossed the authorities' minds.
For many years, there was stagnation in this field, and only recently have psychedelics and empathogens ("Ecstasy") started being researched again. The potential for treating mental disorders (which, by the way, affect 30% of the population in developed countries) is huge, but the pharmaceutical industry isn't interested in the research in the slightest — these substances can't be patented, and worse still, many of them, after just a single dose, keep working for months or even years.
Imagine a pill costing a dollar or two that you only need to take a couple of times, rather than popping it every day for months like modern antidepressants or tranquilizers. True, taking it has to be accompanied by a course of psychotherapy, otherwise the benefit might turn into harm.
Thanks to the Norwegians, who will supply the whole world with the raw materials, this could become a reality in a decade or two.
2. https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/love-hormone-oxytocin-helps-men-eat-better
The intimacy hormone oxytocin makes men eat healthier, eat less fat. Perhaps a new weight-loss drug will soon appear (with a side effect of loving thy neighbor?)
A basic guide to meditation for beginners. Basically, this is more or less how I practice it myself.
In short: you sit in a comfortable pose, observe your breathing for twenty minutes, how the air enters your nose and how it leaves. If thoughts come, you shouldn't concentrate on them, you need to accept that they happened, and gently switch your attention back to your breathing. You shouldn't have any attitude toward what is going on, you just need to gently and calmly monitor your breathing.
By practicing regularly, you'll get a profit in the form of better concentration skills and greater inner peace. It sounds simple, but the effect is guaranteed to you by numerous studies (if you do everything right, of course).
4.https://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
About survivorship bias. In short, the bombers that returned after heavy anti-aircraft fire need to be reinforced not where there are a lot of holes, but where there are none. This is counter-intuitive, but the answer is simple: if a plane returned with holes, it means it's tough enough in that spot, but the planes that didn't return can't tell you where their holes are, because they went down.
The same is true in business, relationships, and other areas: you can't learn only from successful examples, because they tell you what you need to do to achieve success, but they don't tell you what you shouldn't do in order not to fail.
Music makes us happy for the same reason as food, sex, gambling, and other goodies: it acts on the human dopamine reward system. By and large, this doesn't really explain anything, of course, but it's still interesting, because researchers have shown this on an MRI for the first time.
6. https://www.the-village.ru/village/food/kto-kormit/177103-petya-myasnik
Petya went from being a programmer to being a butcher. Because he wanted to live life this way and that way, he wanted something interesting and unexpected, I gather.
In Russian!
A surprisingly decent piece on the Delfi portal with links to studies, about how various mechanisms work at the onset of falling in love, like the smell of unwashed t-shirts or the ability to play the guitar.
8. https://medium.com/backchannel/how-a-lone-hacker-shredded-the-myth-of-crowdsourcing-d9d0534f1731
Crowdsourcing isn't useful everywhere, and it's certainly no panacea: in large crowdsourcing projects with conflicts of interest, some participants will engage in sabotage to the point of collapsing the project, one hacker found out.
9. https://web.archive.org/web/20170313055206/https://izvestia.ru/news/583857
If you let clerics with their "moral and ethical" criteria into art, they won't leave a single stone standing — they'll ban everything they can and can't, they'll create a state where joy and happiness are banned as a class.
Men love women with big asses not because of the ass itself, but because of the 45-degree curve of the spine.