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Simply walking through a sketchy-looking neighborhood can make you feel more paranoid and lower your trust in others

In a study published in the journal PeerJ, student volunteers who spent less than an hour in a more dangerous neighborhood showed significant changes in some of their social perceptions.

The researchers’ goal was to investigate the relationship between lower income neighborhoods and reduced trust and poor mental health.

the most interesting explanation for Trump’s rhetoric is that it represents the purest form to date of what is the wave of the future—in which political communication, once mediated by writing, is increasingly liberated by mass media technology and restored to the style of plain speech.

I argued that it was no accident that the virulence of our political rhetoric has risen neatly alongside such inventions as YouTube and high-speed internet connections. Writing, the piece noted, is conscious and slow, and allows an intellectual distance less likely in speech, which is more about the “I” (witness, therefore, the self-directed focus of most rap, a highly “spoken” form of music). Earlier politicians had to rely on writing and speechifying—talking “in writing”—which are better suited for the more cerebral realms

of ambiguity and extended argument. Talk, which comes in packets of, on the average, about ten words at a time, is all about the immediate and the emotional. Today’s broadband, podcasts, and streaming allow one person to get immediate and emotional with the entire nation whenever they feel like it.

If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.

Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.

First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.

n 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times

Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instance