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Nicole Berg's stunted wheat field is so short and sparse she doesn't think the combine can even reach the wheat without, as she puts it, eating rocks.

Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.

Little moisture since February in wide swaths of the region is to blame. And drought is deepening across the West, with federal drought maps showing massive and growing areas of red.

And West Virginia upped the ante, adding the chance to win hunting rifles or shotguns.

Governors across the country are resorting to almost shameless incentives to lure Americans who haven’t gotten a coronavirus vaccine to willingly take a jab.

Businesses, too, have stepped in to nudge the unvaccinated. The percentage of a state’s population that has been vaccinated varies dramatically. Some states are approaching 70%, and others are still below 50%.

"Perception by the senses rather than by the intellect." (Dictionary.com)

"Perception by or based on stimulation of the senses." (Medical Dictionary)

We perceive the world through our five senses. (Hearing, Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste) Our sense receptors are stimulated by sensory information. The brain translates the sensory information into sensations such as sound, taste, temperature, etc. Higher centres in the brain either ignore or recognize the sensations and their meanings, based on neuronal networks of past association and expectation. (Some of this stage 3 work actually involves reasoning).  Click the video to see a coffee-taste expert discuss the intricacies of how different coffees taste.    Sense perception is an important dimension of comprehending the world around us. It allows us to gather information from the outside world, so we can then go on to hopefully make sense of it

Words and phrases swam through my mind, but they didn’t add up to anything useful. Laurie switched to a restaurant scenario: “Do you have a table for four?” “I’d like two glasses of red wine.” I knew I had seen all the pieces in Duolingo’s sentences. But I was utterly unable to recall them and pull them together.

The app had made me a master of multiple-choice Italian. Given a bunch of words to choose from, I could correctly assemble impressive communiqués. But without a prompt, I was as speechless in even the most basic situations as any boorish American tourist.

learning English, in particular, can be a ticket out of poverty.

A violent mob, whipped into a frenzy by politicians, tearing apart a town to overthrow the elected government.

A violent mob, whipped into a frenzy by politicians, tearing apart a town to overthrow the elected government.

They destroyed black-owned businesses, murdered black residents, and forced the elected local government - a coalition of white and black politicians - to resign en masse.

Dorothy "Dot" Cole was the oldest living US Marine veteran when she died on January 7. She was 107 years old.

Cole decided she would take a stance to support her country after Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

"There were women volunteering with the Red Cross and knitting while sitting in church, so I thought I had to do something,

Why do so many of us hide our heads in the sand when faced with the possibility of a catastrophic future event?

we are governed by two cognitive systems: one that is more automated and drives instinctual decisions—like quickly moving away from danger—and another that involves more considered thought and drives deliberate decisions—like deciding what house to buy.

In these cases, we tend to rely on six biases that can lead us to misperceive our situation and potentially take wrong action (or avoid action altogether). These are nicely described in The Ostrich Paradox, as follows: Myopia: The tendency to focus more on the short-term costs than the future potential benefits of investments. Amnesia: The tendency to forget the lessons of past disasters. Optimism: The tendency to underestimate the likelihood of future hazards. Inertia: The tendency to maintain the status quo or adopt the default option when uncertain about the future benefits of investing now. Simplification: The tendency to selectively consider only certain factors when making choices involving risk. Herding: The tendency to follow the “wisdom” of the crowd.

Es así como, casi sin darnos cuenta, comenzamos a comportarnos como productos, siempre buscando tener más compradores, en función de la identidad más "vendedora".

Aunque tiene el potencial para convertirse en el Gran Hermano, la diferencia con la versión de George Orwell es que en ella las cámaras y micrófonos eran instaladas en contra de la voluntad de sus habitantes, mientras que

"Trino, luego existo", podría ser el eslogan del hombre moderno, para quien su valor se mide a menudo en el número de amigos virtuales que logra acumular, en cuantos 'Me Gusta' obtiene por sus comentarios, imágenes y publicaciones en red.

Situated around 2,400 miles from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Islands are about as remote as it’s possible for islands to be. In the last 5 million years, they’ve been repeatedly colonized by far-traveling animals, which then diversified into dozens of new species. Honeycreeper birds, fruit flies, carnivorous caterpillars ... all of these creatures reached Hawaii, and evolved into wondrous arrays of unique forms.

The most spectacular of these spider dynasties, Gillespie says, are the stick spiders. They’re so-named because some of them have long, distended abdomens that make them look like twigs. “You only see them at night, walking around the understory very slowly,” Gillespie says. “They’re kind of like sloths.” Murderous sloths, though: Their sluggish movements allow them to sneak up on other spiders and kill them.

Gillespie has shown that the gold spiders on Oahu belong to a different species from those on Kauai or Molokai. In fact, they’re more closely related to their brown and white neighbors from Oahu. Time and again, these spiders have arrived on new islands and evolved into new species—but always in one of three basic ways. A gold spider arrives on Oahu, and diversified into gold, brown, and white species. Another gold spider hops across to Maui and again diversified into gold, brown, and white species. “They repeatedly evolve the same forms,” says Gillespie.

Fake news existed long before the internet. In an essay on political lying in the early 18th century, the writer Jonathan Swift noted that "Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it." You have to hire a train to pull the truth, explained English pastor Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century, while a lie is "light as a feather ... a breath will carry it."

MIT researchers recently studied more than 10 years' worth of data on the most shared stories on Facebook. Their study covered conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings, misleading reports on natural disasters, unfounded business rumors and incorrect scientific claims. There is an inundation of false medical advice online, for example, that encourages people to avoid life-saving treatments such as vaccines and promotes unproven therapies. (Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop is just one example.)

The psychological research does, however, offer us a silver lining to this storm cloud, with various experiments demonstrating that people can learn to be better lie detectors with a little training in critical thinking.

Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL) has received a $2.2 billion revolving line credit to help the beleaguered company stay afloat, it announced Monday.

Stocks are deep in the red at midday. The Washington gridlock on fiscal stimulus measures has overshadowed hopes that the Federal Reserve's onslaught of new monetary moves would lift markets higher.

The novel coronavirus outbreak has forced many people to stay home and work -- and kids are "going" to school virtually as well. That's a big reason why video conferencing company Zoom Video Communications (ZM) has been one of the rare Wall Street winners while the broader market has plunged into bear status.

The human eye can distinguish approximately 10 million colors. If you’re anything like us, you’re probably wondering where the other colors are. Is this it? Are we condemned to a life of boring blues and requisite reds? Will we groan at greens and yawn at yellows forever? Apparently not: turns out there are six colors that you can see that don’t exist.

One major problem is that stopping the virus from spreading requires us to override our basic intuitions.

Three cognitive biases make it hard for us to avoid actions that put us in great collective danger.

1. Misleading Feedback

The language we speak can impact the colors we recognize

If a language only has two terms, they are almost always related to black and white (dark and light). If they have three, that third color is almost always red. And so on into green, yellow, and blue.

A huge 9th-century stone monument in Sweden may have been erected by Vikings who feared a repeat of a cold climate crisis that took place more than 300 years earlier, according to a new study.

A new interdisciplinary study by scholars from Swedish universities has concluded that the inscription is about anxiety triggered by a son's death and fears of a new cold climate crisis.

The study was based on archaeological research on a cold climate catastrophe from the years 536 to 550, which affected Scandinavia. The crisis took hold after a series of volcanic events and led to lower average temperatures, crop failures, hunger and mass extinctions. It is also estimated that the population of the Scandinavian Peninsula fell by 50% or more.

Facebook FB 1.57% researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform

A Facebook team focused on user well-being suggested a range of fixes, and the company implemented some, building in optional features to encourage breaks from social media and to dial back the notifications that can serve as a lure to bring people back to the platform.

You’re also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head.

Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel “discomfort” about who you are

Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying—but they’re counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.

if all of those bad presentations really led to broad societal ills, the proof is hard to find.

Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether the software really influences our ability to process information. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored multiple reviews synthesizing this literature. On the whole, he told me, the research suggests that Tufte was partly right, partly wrong. PowerPoint doesn’t seem to make us stupid—there is no evidence of lower information retention or generalized cognitive decline, for example, among those who use it—but it does impose a set of assumptions about how information ought to be conveyed: loosely, in bullet points, and delivered by presenters to an audience of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the physical environment for the slide-deck age, Kernbach said: Seminar tables, once configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.

When I spoke with Kernbach, he was preparing for a talk on different methods of visual thinking to a group of employees at a large governmental organization. He said he planned to use a flip chart, draw on blank slides like a white board, and perhaps even have audience members do some drawing of their own. But he was also gearing up to use regular old PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he told me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his audience. The organization was NASA.

New CNN chief Chris Licht has a message for his employees: not everything needs to be labeled “Breaking News.”

Licht came to the conclusion there should be parameters around when to use the red chyron

“This is a great starting point to try to make ‘Breaking News’ mean something BIG is happening,” Licht wrote in the memo, which CNBC has obtained. “We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers. You’ve already seen far less of the ‘Breaking News’ banner across our programming. The tenor of our voice holistically has to reflect that.”