Month: October 2016

The Scariest Movie Monsters. With video evidence, if you really want to watch them.
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The World’s Last Great Wilderness. Preserving Antarctica will depend on international cooperation.
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Find the Most Hipster Neighborhood In Every State, In Case You Were Wondering. You probably haven’t heard of them.
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Will sitcoms ever stop shaming single people? It’s not a personal failure, just the latest fashionable group to make fun of.  
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Research May Show Why Acne Today Means Younger-looking Skin Tomorrow. One bright spot in a few miserable years.
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People of Earth: Inspired by the Truth and Empathy of Aliens. It’s a sitcom that actually has a lot to say.
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The pioneering paranoia of America’s preppers. They’re ready for disaster, or even an apocalypse.
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9 Halloween Pumpkin Projects. Just in case you want to do something besides a traditional jack-o-lantern.

Is a dead shark in a tank really worth millions of dollars? Art, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder—but Damien Hirst’s infamous 1991 work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, fetched a reported $12 million for reasons aside from its creative merit. In the video above, Vox breaks down the economics behind high-profile art market sales, and explains why an art dealer’s reputation is sometimes just as important (if not more so) than a work’s creator.

[h/t Vox]

Banner image: iStock

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We’re all constantly bombarded with health advice, from advertisements to Facebook postings to warnings from Grandma. Unfortunately, much of that advice is unreliable, unproven, and downright harmful. It can be very hard to separate medical fact from fiction, but that’s exactly what scientists are teaching elementary-school kids in Uganda to do.

Andy Oxman is research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. He’s been working in Uganda since 2012 on the Supporting the Use of Research Evidence (SURE) program, which aims to improve both access to health care and patients’ ability to make better-informed health decisions. The program brought Oxman into conversations with politicians, who struggled with the same fact-or-fiction issues as the rest of us. But educating them was an uphill battle.

“Working with policymakers made it clear most adults don’t have time to learn, and they have to unlearn a lot of stuff.” But kids, he thought—kids might catch on pretty quickly, Oxman told Vox.

The best-known primer on evidence-based health education is a book called Testing Treatments (available for free here [PDF]). The book breaks down the basics of scientific literacy and teaches readers to cast a careful eye at health claims and medical research. “You don’t need to be a scientist to think critically and ask good questions,” co-author Iain Chalmers told Vox.

After the latest edition of the book came out in 2012, Oxman approached Chalmers with his big idea: to teach its contents to children. “You’re mad,” Chalmers said. But Oxman was serious. Why shouldn’t kids be given the tools to evaluate what they’re told?

Oxman and Chalmers enlisted other scientists from Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Norway, and the UK to help identify the most important lessons a health literacy program should teach when considering the value of different medical treatments. They arrived at a list of 32 concepts, highlighting the need to be wary of things like small clinical trials, dramatic results, and a bias toward newer or more expensive treatments.

Next, they collaborated with schoolteachers in Uganda to translate those concepts into lesson plans, a teacher guide, and workbooks and readings illustrated with cartoons.

Because evidence and data are kind of their thing, the researchers decided to test the program’s efficacy as they implemented it. They set up a randomized controlled trial (the gold standard for scientific studies) involving more than 15,000 fifth-graders. From June to September of one school year, half of the students trained in BS detection, while the others went about their education as usual.

When the school term ended, the researchers tested all the kids to see if they’d become savvier consumers of health information. They’re currently crunching the numbers, but expect to find that their program did the students some good.

“My hope,” Oxman told Vox, “is that these resources get used in curricula in schools around the world, and that we end up with the children … who become science-literate citizens and who can participate in sensible discussion about policy and our health.”

[h/t Vox]

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In the Mojave Desert you’ll find California City, a city famous for dreaming big. A huge chunk of it is gridded roads—complete with names, speed limits, and GPS driving directions—with nothing built on the vast majority of those plots.

Incorporated in 1965, California City is a living contradiction. Today it’s a working community with roughly 15,000 residents. But it’s simultaneously enormous, having been planned at a scale to rival Los Angeles. The city has over 200 square miles of land, planned by Nat Mendelsohn as a model city.

In this mini-documentary, Tom Scott visits California City and interviews various city officials. He digs into the city’s storied past, and shows us both what is there and what is not. The city is physically enormous, so it’s certainly possible that one day it will grow to meet its original plan. It might just take a few centuries.

Have a look at the third-largest city in California (by land area, anyway):

Related is this behind-the-scenes video in which Scott explains why he’s interested in California City:

Even the Peruvian Amazon isn’t safe from politics during an election cycle. Earlier this fall, while on a jungle excursion, nature shutterbug Jeff Cremer photographed a furry yellow critter perched on a tree branch. Scientists call it the Megalopyge opercularis, or the flannel moth caterpillar—but since the insect’s gravity-defying neon hair bears a striking resemblance to Donald Trump’s notorious coif, Cremer re-christened it the Donald Trump caterpillar.

In some ways, the Amazon jungle and the Washington, D.C. political scene are a lot alike. But unlike politicians, animals typically don’t want to attract attention, since they want to avoid predators. In the video below, PBS “It’s Okay to Be Smart” host Jon Hanson explains how the Trump caterpillar’s garish fuzz actually scares other critters away—and why other organisms have evolved to mimic its appearance.

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Here’s a riddle. Ten band members have had their musical instruments placed randomly in boxes. Each band member gets five shots at opening boxes, trying to find their own instrument. (Thus, a 50% chance of each individual finding the desired instrument.) They’re not allowed to communicate about what they find. If the entire band fails to find their instruments, they’re all fired…and the odds of them all finding their instruments via random guessing is 1 in 1,024. But the drummer has an idea that will radically increase their odds of success. What’s the big idea?

This puzzle is based on the 100 Prisoners Problem, though it has been simplified just a bit, and lightened up to be about a band (in the original 100 Prisoners Problem scenario, the punishment is death rather than loss of a job). Here’s what the TED-Ed video gives us as the rules:

1. Instruments have been randomly placed in 10 boxes.

2. The pictures on the boxes don’t necessarily correspond to the instruments inside.

3. Each musician can open up to 5 boxes. They have to close all of the boxes they open.

4. All 10 musicians must find their own instruments.

5. The musicians can’t in any way communicate to each other what they find.

Given all this, it seems rather hopeless. But think on it. What could you do if you talked it through beforehand, as this puzzle allows? Watch this video for the setup, and then pause it when it tells you to, in order to have a good long think. I’d like to think I could come up with a solution like this, were my band (or band of prisoners) in a similar situation. Enjoy:

For more on the original 100 Prisoners Problem, check out this nice writeup. There’s also more info from TED-Ed (check the “Dig Deeper” bit for useful links).

While you’re probably familiar with upcoming presidential debate co-anchor Anderson Cooper, you may not know as much about his October 9 broadcast partner, Martha Raddatz, an ABC News veteran who seems eager to press both candidates on issues that went unexplored during their first face-off in September.

Before the fireworks start, we’ve unpacked some facts about Raddatz, from her seat on a bombing mission to being mortified at a very un-presidential ringtone going off in the White House briefing room.

1. SHE WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL WITH ROSEANNE BARR.

Born in Idaho Falls, Idaho in 1953, Martha Raddatz attended East Lake High in Salt Lake City, Utah and attended class with Roseanne Barr. While Raddatz earned her diploma in 1971, Barr opted out of further education to pursue a career in comedy.

2. SHE’S A COLLEGE DROPOUT.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Raddatz attended the University of Utah near her childhood home in Salt Lake without much of an idea of what she wanted to do for a living. When a job position opened up at nearby television affiliate KTVX, Raddatz opted to drop out of college during her senior year. While she later described the decision as “stupid,” Raddatz was able to move up from menial tasks to shooting her own stories, eventually becoming an on-camera presence by the age of 24.

3. SHE’S BEEN TO IRAQ MORE THAN 20 TIMES.

Raddatz worked her way up to positions at an ABC affiliate in Boston and at National Public Radio before becoming ABC’s chief White House correspondent in 2005. Uncomfortable remaining in the press corps in Washington, Raddatz insisted on traveling to Iraq multiple times in order to gain a better understanding of how the war was affecting the area. Military officials cited her determination to return to those troubled hot spots as one reason they respected her reporting; Raddatz later compiled some of her experiences in Iraq into a book, The Long Road Home.

4. SHE TOOK PART IN A BOMB-DROPPING MISSION.

Eager to experience the rigors of combat firsthand, Raddatz spent years trying to convince the U.S. military to allow her to fly along on a bombing raid. She finally got her wish: Raddatz was inside an F-15E when it was loaded with explosive devices weighing more than 500 pounds each.

5. BUT THAT WASN’T THE MOST DANGEROUS THING.

Crossing a river in Jalalabad near Afghanistan, Raddatz hitched a ride on a makeshift inflatable raft steered by an eight-year-old local. It was the only path that would get her near an area that was once home to Osama bin Laden.

6. SHE TOLD HER SON ONE OF HISTORY’S BIGGEST SECRETS.

Raddatz’s globetrotting has had one undesirable side effect: it has proven worrisome to her kids, including her son Jake, who grew concerned for her mother’s safety whenever she was about to travel. In 2011, Raddatz was headed for Kabul when she received word that the U.S. government had located and killed Osama bin Laden. Calling Jake to tell him she wouldn’t be making the trip, she then had to tell him why: he was sworn to secrecy until the president announced it on television later that day.

7. SHE USED CHAMILLIONAIRE’S “RIDIN’ DIRTY” AS A RINGTONE.

During her time as a White House correspondent, Raddatz often had trouble hearing incoming calls or messages on her cell phone—press gatherings are frequently busy, crowded, and noisy. To allow her to acknowledge important incoming calls, she asked Jake to program a loud ringtone into her cell. He chose Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty.” In a 2007 White House briefing, it went off in her purse, and she had to scramble to turn it off.

When Chamillionaire heard the story, he was pleased, “Can’t lie,” he tweeted. “That just made my night. Appreciate it. @MarthaRaddatz Keep it gangsta.”