Participating in the Coursera online courses is keeping me busier than I’d first thought, but I still had time to read up on science-related stuff.

• Ever wondered while on a journey why the return trip always feels like it passes more quickly than going there? According to this article in The Irish Times, this is due to how our psychological perception of time differs according to circumstances. The article calls this an act of retrospective timing. That is we try to estimate how much time an event took after it has already passed from memory. However, this is done by recalling the information we stored during the event, and the more information we stored, the longer the duration we perceive it to have taken. This means that when we’re first traveling to a new place, we have all sorts of new data to absorb and store, but during the return trip, most of it will have become familiar already. Hence we perceive the outbound trip to have taken longer than the return trip.
• Along with video-gaming nerds, comic books fans have long been relegated to the depths of otaku social outcasts. But this article from The Pacific Standard talks about closely identifying with a superhero may have measurable positive effect on their bodies. A study invited undergraduates, male ones only, to state how familiar they were with Batman or Spiderman and went on to query the students about how they felt about their bodies. Those who did identify with one of the superheroes not only felt better about their bodies, they were also able to demonstrate measurably greater strength, especially when they were shown pictures of a more muscular version of the superhero in question.
• This next link seems to be down frequently but it’s such an interesting article that I just had to link to it. It appears on the Psychology Today website and talks about the Baining, an indigenous group of Papua New Guinea, who have the distinction of being known as one of the dullest people on Earth. They apparently have nothing in the way of the usual cultural accoutrements such religious rites, myths, festivals etc. and discourage playful of any kind, even among their children. The only thing they have going for them is work and they value all products and activities that are associated with useful work.
• Finally an article about the Curiosity rover currently on Mars. It’s from The Atlantic and it reveals how the engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory built in a little Easter Egg. Specifically the vehicle’s treads are designed to spell out in Morse code the initials J-P-L as the robot slowly makes its way across the red Martian soil. That is such a geeky thing to do I just had to include it here.