The Surprising Science Behind Why and When We Yawn

Maria Konnikova, writing for The New Yorker, explores the fascinating reasons why we yawn:

Yawning is one of the first things we learn to do. “Learn” may not even be quite the right word. Johanna de Vries, a professor of obstetrics at Vrije University Amsterdam, has discovered that the human fetus yawns during its first trimester in the womb. And, unless we succumb to neurodegenerative disease, yawning is something we keep doing throughout our lives. “You don’t decide to yawn,” Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and the author of “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond,” told me. “You just do it. You’re playing out a biological program.” We yawn unconsciously and we yawn spontaneously. We can’t yawn on command—and we sometimes can’t stop ourselves from letting out a big yawn, even at the most inopportune times. (Case in point: Sasha Obama’s infamous yawn during her father’s 2013 Inaugural Address.) But what, precisely, are we accomplishing with all this yawning? If it’s so evolutionarily old, it must be doing something important to have survived.

What Does Sound Look Like?

NPR's Science Tumblr Skunk Bear uses a a clever photographic trick so you can actually see sound waves as they travel through the air.

Larry Page talks about the future with Charlie Rose at TED2014

Onstage at TED2014, Charlie Rose interviews Google CEO Larry Page about his far-off vision for the company. It includes aerial bikeways and internet balloons ... and then it gets even more interesting, as Page talks through the company's recent acquisition of Deep Mind, an AI that is learning some surprising things.

Why Making Technology Easier to Use Isn't Always Good

Tim Wu for The New Yorker's blog Elements:

In 1964, Life magazine, in an article about “Too Much Leisure,” asserted that “there will certainly be a sharp decline in the average work week” and that “some prophets of what automation is doing to our economy think we are on the verge of a 30-hour week; others as low as 25 or 20.” Obviously, we blew it. Our technologies may have made us prosthetic gods, yet they have somehow failed to deliver on the central promise of free time. The problem is that, as every individual task becomes easier, we demand much more of both ourselves and others. Instead of fewer difficult tasks (writing several long letters) we are left with a larger volume of small tasks (writing hundreds of e-mails). We have become plagued by a tyranny of tiny tasks, individually simple but collectively oppressive. And, when every task in life is easy, there remains just one profession left: multitasking.

Holiday Travel, In China

Kevin Kelly shares this amazing fact in a Google+ post: 

The largest human migration these days takes place every year around this time: Chinese Lunar New Year. Hundreds of millions of humans take every possible avenue to return to their home villages from the cities they now live in. In a space of about one week to 10 days, 3.6 billion passenger miles will be clocked on trains, buses, and cars. The Chinese search engine company Baidu (Google equivalent) created a heat map of these trips gathered from the locations provided by the smartphones of their 200 million subscribers. The three densest nexus you see here are Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong/Shenzhen.