Silicon Canals

Retirees who move overseas often report being happy with their new lives while also feeling lonelier — because paradise cannot automatically replace the relationships l…

A retirement move can succeed on nearly every term used to justify it. The home may cost less, the weather may be kinder and ...
Silicon Canals

The hardest part of a long marriage isn't always the arguments or the boredom — sometimes it's the strange grief of watching the person you married slowly become …

Long marriages ask something almost no one warns you about: the quiet grief of watching your partner slowly become someone ...
Silicon Canals

The gut-sleep axis: how microbial diversity in the colon shapes how rested you feel, according to a 2019 PLOS ONE study of 40 men

A 2019 PLOS ONE study of 40 men in Nova Scotia found that the diversity of bacteria in the colon correlated with total sleep ...
Silicon Canals

Apple just banned home services, crypto ATMs and bail bonds from Maps ads before the product even launched — and the exclusions reveal a bet against Google's entir…

Apple has published the rulebook for its forthcoming Maps advertising product, and the document reveals a deliberately ...
Silicon Canals

Most of what you do all day runs on habit, not choice — but a new study found the habits are usually working for you, not against you

Researchers tracked 105 people six times a day for a week. About two-thirds of what they did was triggered by habit, and ...
Silicon Canals

Eye Security, founded by former Dutch intelligence-service employees, raised €60 million to build a “sovereign” European cyber defense — and two of its backers are …

A cybersecurity firm built by former employees of the Dutch intelligence services raised €60 million to sell “sovereign” ...
Silicon Canals

Before it was named Ceratothoa famosa, Nico Smit’s photograph of the parasite staring from a fish’s mouth had already gone viral

Cymothoa exigua is a parasitic isopod that enters a fish through the gills, drinks the blood out of its tongue until the ...
Silicon Canals

In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones ran a five-day classroom experiment called 'The Third Wave' — and by day four, 200 students had joined a m…

In five days in April 1967, a 25-year-old history teacher in Palo Alto turned a classroom question about Nazi Germany into a ...
Silicon Canals

Two men are each called the inventor of email: one chose the @ sign between two computers in 1971, the other wrote a program he named EMAIL as a 14-year-old in …

In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson wheeled his chair between two PDP-10 mainframes at BBN in Cambridge and sent the first message ...
Silicon Canals

Psychology suggests we don't reason toward truth so much as defend what we already believe: we seek out the facts that confirm us and quietly wave away the res…

In 1998, a Tufts psychologist named Raymond Nickerson published a long review article pulling together decades of scattered ...
Silicon Canals

The Atacama Desert in Chile has regions where no rainfall has ever been recorded in human history, yet a fog called camanchaca rolls in from the Pacific and feeds liche…

In the hyperarid core of Chile's Atacama Desert, weather stations have gone decades without recording a single drop of rain — ...
Silicon Canals

Chasing happiness can be the thing that scares it off: research suggests those who prize being happy above all else often end up lonelier and less content

What follows is reading and reflection on published psychology research, not advice. We are writers, not psychologists or ...