LuxuryYacht writes A new study shows that the way your brain responds to photos of of maggots, mutilated carcasses, and gunk in the kitchen sink gives a pretty good indication of whether you’re liberal or conservative. “Remarkably, we found that the brain’s response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual’s political ideology, ” Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute psychology professor who led the study, said in a written statement. 83 men and women viewed a series of images while having their brains scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. The images included the disgusting photos described above, along with photos of babies and pleasant landscapes. Afterward, the participants were asked to rate how grossed out they were by each photo. They also completed a survey about their political beliefs, which included questions about their attitudes toward school prayer, gun control, immigration, and gay marriage. There was no significant difference in how liberals and conservatives rated the photos. But the researchers noted differences between the two groups in the activity of brain regions associated with disgust recognition, emotion regulation, attention and even memory. The differences were so pronounced that the researchers could analyze a scan and predict the person’s political leaning with 95 percent accuracy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
Reactions To Disgusting Images Predict a Persons Political Ideology
schwit1 writes What was first thought to be a piece of debris left over from the launch of three Russian military communication satellites has turned out to be a fourth satellite capable of maneuvers: “The three satellites were designated Kosmos-2496, -2497, -2498. However, as in the previous launch on December 25, 2013, the fourth unidentified object was detected orbiting the Earth a few kilometers away from ‘routine’ Rodnik satellites. Moreover, an analysis of orbital elements from a US radar by observers showed that the ‘ghost’ spacecraft had made a maneuver between May 29 and May 31, 2014, despite being identified as ‘debris’ (or Object 2014-028E) in the official U.S. catalog at the time. On June 24, the mysterious spacecraft started maneuvering again, lowering its perigee (lowest point) by four kilometers and lifting its apogee by 3.5 kilometers. Object E then continued its relentless maneuvers in July and its perigee was lowered sharply, bringing it suspiciously close to the Briz upper stage, which had originally delivered all four payloads into orbit in May.” This is the second time a Russian piece of orbital junk has suddenly started to do maneuvers. The first time, in early 2014, the Russians finally admitted five months after launch that the “junk” was actually a satellite. In both cases, the Russians have not told anyone what these satellites are designed to do, though based on the second satellite’s maneuvers as well as its small size (about a foot in diameter) it is likely they are testing new cubesat capabilities, as most cubesats do not have the ability to do these kinds of orbital maneuvers. Once you have that capability, you can then apply it to cubesats with any kind of purpose, from military anti-satellite technology to commercial applications. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Laboratory operates the longest particle accelerator of its kind—it’s produced groundbreaking work in particle physics over the decades, as well as several Nobel prizes. But surprisingly, it also played a major role in the early web: By hosting the first web site in the US . It wasn’t much to look at, but that’s not important. Read more… 
Having already proven its value defending the skies over Tel Aviv—shooting down 85 percent (735 rockets) of incoming fire during the recent Gaza War—Rafael’s Iron Dome missile defense shield is taking its talents to the high seas. Read more… 
Roku was already the best little streaming device money could buy . But now, Google has gone and given Roku access to all your Google Play goodies . Which, more than just being an unprecedented move on Google’s part, makes Roku pretty much unstoppable. Read more… 
Good news Microsoft Office power users! You’ll soon be able to use the new and improved Outlook for Mac. That’s good news, because the new Outlook for Mac looks pretty awesome . And since a lot of people use Outlook, this upgrade is going to improve a lot of email experiences. Read more… 
itwbennett writes: Assuming that people who use the anonymity network want to also use Facebook, the social network has made its site available on Tor, Facebook software engineer Alec Muffett said in a post on Friday. Facebook also decided to encrypt the connection between clients and its server with SSL, providing an SSL certificate for Facebook’s onion address. This was done both for internal technical reasons and as a way for users to verify Facebook’s ownership of the onion address. Since it is still an experiment, Facebook hopes to improve the service and said it would share lessons learned about scaling and deploying services via an onion address over time. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Google Calendar’s been updated so now you don’t need to refresh for new appointments to appear. Finally. Read more…