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A new study suggests that people who naturally get more REM sleep may be less sensitive to frightening things.

For the study, a team of researchers from Rutgers University sent 17 subjects home with sleep-monitoring devices—headbands that monitor their brain waves, wristbands that track arm movements, and sleep logs—and asked them to sleep as they normally would for a week. They were monitoring how much sleep they were getting—especially REM, or rapid-eye-movement sleep.

Each night, most people sleep about seven or eight hours, about two hours of which is REM sleep, the stage of sleep in which the body relaxes fully and most dreams occur.

Smartphones, those digital portals of constant information, have become so integrated into most Americans’ lives, they’re like extra—yet essential—appendages. Some 72 percent of Americans own a smartphone, compared to the global median of 43 percent. But studies have shown that overuse can have a negative impact on your posture, eyesight, and hearing, not to mention distract drivers and pedestrians. More recently, researchers who study the relationship of mobile phone use and mental health have also found that excessive or “maladaptive” use of our phones may be leading to greater incidences of depression and anxiety in users.

Cell phones, and smartphones in particular, have an undeniably addictive quality, earning an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 5th edition. A review of literature on cell phone addiction, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, describes cell phone and technology addiction manifesting in one or more of the following ways: choosing to use your device even in "dangerous or prohibited contexts;" losing interest in other activities; feeling irritable or uneasy if separated from your phone; or feeling anxiety or loneliness when you’re unable to send or receive an immediate message. The researchers also find that adolescents and women may be more susceptible to this behavioral addiction.

So while the research remains inconclusive, it might be worth taking a look at how you feel before and after you spend copious amounts of time on your cell phone. It may be harmless—or it may offer an opportunity to improve your mental health.

An informal fallacy is an attempt at making a logical argument where there’s a failure in the reasoning itself. This can stem from a number of causes, such as the misapplication of words and phrases, or misunderstandings based on inappropriate assumptions. Illogical sequences in an argument can also cause informal fallacies. While informal fallacies can result in inaccurate arguments and false conclusions, that doesn’t mean they can’t be very persuasive.

When negotiating, for instance, it’s fairly common for self-made millionaires to employ informal fallacies. Many self-made millionaires develop well-defined plans on how they’ll use informal fallacies as part of their preparation as well as regularly incorporate these fallacies into verbal dueling with adversaries.

Confusing causality for correlation: You connect events that happened at the same time or one after another even though one need not have caused the other.

Earlier this year, Merriam-Webster made news by designating “they” as its “Word of the Year.” It seemed a fitting cap to a year in which the very structures of language itself were the subject of debate and scrutiny over its real effects on how we live, especially where it concerns the advancement of human rights. Across the globe, people are posing questions about how we use language to describe people and situations, and whether the words we use are inclusive enough of all genders and orientations.

This intense debate is epitomized in the Spanish-speaking world, where a teenage-led movement to eliminate gender from the language has made strides this past year, forcing different generations to have a conversation about what is acceptable in 2019.

“the language form has divided the feminist movement from which it originated. While some within the movement insist on speaking in a way that includes non-binary people, others have resisted, preferring to emphasize the voices of women by using feminine words.”

However, there remains many fascinating and unanswered questions when it comes to light, many of which arise from its dual nature. For instance, how is it that light can be apparently without mass, but still behave as a particle? And how can it behave like a wave and pass through a vacuum, when all other waves require a medium to propagate?

This included rejecting Aristotle’s theory of light, which viewed it as being a disturbance in the air (one of his four “elements” that composed matter), and embracing the more mechanistic view that light was composed of indivisible atoms

In Young’s version of the experiment, he used a slip of paper with slits cut into it, and then pointed a light source at them to measure how light passed through it

You're missing a potentially vital opportunity to practice essential survival skills.

That's the theory explored by a recent report from Nautilus, which focuses on the science of dreaming. For a long time the general consensus has been that dreams, be they delightful or terrifying, are useless: a mish-mash of experiences, impulses, memories, and that random episode of The Walking Dead that you watched just before bedtime, all distilled into a surreal nightmare in which you're being chased through the halls of your old high school by zombies … and for some reason, you're not wearing pants.

Though not formally researched, anecdotes abound from people who've dreamed of a frightening experience only to then live through it in real life

Fifty years after humans first left bootprints in the lunar dust, it’s an enticing idea. The effort and the commitment of brainpower and money, and the glorious achievement itself, shine as an international example of what people can do when they set their minds to it. The spinoff technologies ended up affecting all of our lives.So why not do it all over again — but instead of going to another astronomical body and planting a flag, why not save our own planet?

But President Kennedy did not have to convince people that the moon existed. In our current political climate, the clear evidence that humans have generated greenhouse gases that are having a powerful effect on climate, and will have a greater effect into the future, has not moved the federal government to act with vigor. And a determined faction even argues that climate change is a hoax, as President Donald Trump has falsely stated at various times.

The task of reversing that accumulation of greenhouse gases is vast, and progress is painfully slow.

Eventually, Shlain, a filmmaker, extended the idea into a full day without screen use. She called it a tech shabbat — after the Jewish day of rest — and she has written several articles and a recent book, called “24/6,” about the idea.

“The digital revolution has blurred the lines between time on and time off, and time off is disappearing,” she wrote in The Boston Globe. “As for our leisure time, we’ve created a culture in which we’re still ‘working’ while we play: needing to photograph every moment, then crafting witty posts of our ‘fun, relaxing activities’ on Instagram, then obsessively checking responses. We can barely catch our breath in the tsunami of personal and work digital input, which results in us not being truly present for any of it.”

The break did require some adjustments. On Friday night, we printed out directions to a restaurant where we were eating on Saturday, but we forgot to print directions home and had to use an old-fashioned road map. Imagine that.

to assess the relationship between cognitive skills, vocabulary, factual knowledge, and exposure to certain fiction and nonfiction authors

those who read literary fiction performed better on tasks like predicting how characters would act and identifying the emotion encoded in facial expressions. These speak to the ability to understand others' mental states, which scientists call Theory of Mind.

If we engage with characters who are nuanced, unpredictable, and difficult to understand, then I think we're more likely to approach people in the real world with an interest and humility necessary for dealing with complex individuals

Not only are machines rapidly catching up to — and exceeding — humans in terms of raw computing power, they are also starting to do things that we used to consider inherently human

Quite simply, humans are amazing pattern-recognition machines. They have the ability to recognize many different types of patterns - and then transform these "recursive probabalistic fractals" into concrete, actionable steps.

Intelligence, then, is really just a matter of being able to store more patterns than anyone else

Most recently, some researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited.

But in the 1950s, the botanist Royal Alexander Brink discovered that, under different environmental conditions, maize plants with identical genomes expressed different-colored kernels, and these colors were heritable. It was some of the first evidence for epigenetic inheritance. Since then, more examples of inheritance without a clear genetic basis have come to light, as have a variety of possible mechanisms for epigenetic inheritance.

C. elegans worms infected with viruses would defend themselves by generating small RNAs that targeted and neutralized the viruses. Moreover, the subsequent offspring of the roundworms also made these small protective RNAs, even though they had never been exposed to the viruses.

Do heuristics, the shortcuts that the brain takes, support efficient decision making or does it impede efficient decision making?

Humans have neither unlimited resources nor unlimited time to take decisions. So, the brain has always developed smart heuristics, shortcuts to take efficient decisions.

One other key thought put forward by Gigerenzer is that there is a big difference between risk and uncertainty. We are dealing with risk when you know all the alternatives, outcomes and their probabilities. We are dealing with uncertainty when you don’t know all the alternatives, outcomes or their probabilities.

The US share of global GDP is nearly 15%. If our economy can't stabilize and then recover from the coronavirus pandemic, it will be harder for the world to do so

it's imperative that Congress write fair, generous legislation to get us through the economic shutdown required to fight the virus

But that isn't what's happening. Republicans accuse Democrats of not moving fast enough. Democrats accuse Republicans of short-changing American workers and favoring big corporations.

Abiding insight into the aim of human existence from the man who revolutionized science and coined the word “philosopher.”

Alongside his revolutionary science, Pythagoras coined the word philosopher to describe himself as a “lover of wisdom” — a love the subject of which he encapsulated in a short, insightful meditation on the uses of philosophy in human life.

We form beliefs in a haphazard way, believing all sorts of things based just on what we hear out in the world but haven’t researched for ourselves.

It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way: We hear something; We believe it to be true; Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false

“People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. In fact, believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary comprehension than it is like rational assessment.”

sweeping series of measures that pushed the 106-year old central bank deeper into uncharted territory.

central bank said it will buy unlimited amounts of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities to keep borrowing costs at rock-bottom levels -- and to help ensure chaotic markets function properly. It also set up programs to ensure credit flows to corporations as well as state and local governments.

unnerved investors are by the pandemic, the Fed’s moves failed to spark anything beyond a brief rally in stocks and corporate bonds Monday after weeks of staggering losses