Cocaine Scholars Lure Delicious Music Conundrum
The China Conundrum by Tom Bartlett and Karin Fischer (New York Times): Universities in America are starting to actively court Chinese students, but there is sometimes a wide divide between American university culture and Chinese scholastic culture. Plenty of students have no qualms about paying people to write their admissions essays and cheating on the English test (and then are bewildered where they need to understand English); there isn’t enough emphasis in Chinese-based admissions centres that these tests are useful and not just formalities. The university I teach at also puts some effort in getting international students, and I sometimes wonder how much of what I say goes in one ear and out the other - if I talk too fast or use too much idiom (though, at the same time, idiom can be useful in appealing to local students who think you’re there to entertain them…). [via]
Sherlock Holmes And The Adventure Of The Impudent Scholars by Jenny Hendrix (The Awl): The world of Sherlock Holmes scholarship comes across as a high-class boys club fandom from the 1950s; they argue over minutiae, and the fandom even has ‘The Game’, where the object of The Game is to - as straight-faced as possible - to put across the myth that Sherlock Holmes actually existed. Except instead of tumblrs, they had clubs and annual dinners, possibly wearing monocles.
The Most Delicious Lab by Rowan Jacobsen (Boston Globe): Cheese tastes that way because it’s basically off-milk, right? Wrong. If cheese is tasty, the taste is mostly made up of microbes and fungi. Mmm, tasty cheese. Though, maybe Keith Richards was right to suggest that he has survived to the present day because he never eats cheese. [via]
The Lure Of Horror by Christian Jarrett (The Psychologist): Why do people like horror films, asks Jarrett? Well, there’s a certain kind of person who really digs horror movies - people with lower empathy, thrillseekers, and more aggressive people. But there’s also some science suggesting that, if you’re a male teenager on a date, you should take your female friend to a horror movie - when she sees that you are calm and strong in the face of horror, she will (according to lab research, at least) find you more attractive - it’s a gender roles thing (and thus may not work if she has had it up to here with female gender roles).
Does Music Change The Taste Of Wine? by Jonah Lehrer (The Frontal Cortex): Yes. Research by Adrian North (who does lots of social psychology of music research) shows that different kinds of music (happy, sad, upbeat, etc) consistently flavour the wines that people are tasting. But this is less because music is super powerful and more because taste, as an sensation, is very unsure of itself and is very easily influenced.
Is Nicotine A Gateway To Cocaine Addiction And Cancer? by Maia Szalavitz (Time): Nicotine - you know, that stuff in cigarettes that gets you addicted to them - appears to have the ability to change epigenetic markers in your cells, which influence what DNA the cells pay attention to. As a result of these changes, people on nicotine appear to also be more susceptible to, say, cocaine addiction. Additionally, there may well be something about the way nicotine changes those epigenetic markers which increases the carcinogenicness of a carcinogen.
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Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show...Mildura. Kim Chalmers did
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