The Ed's Up #128
Corruption Corrupts
"Corruption deprives citizens of more than money. It’s also tied to a shortfall in honesty. In a new study, Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz from the University of Nottingham asked volunteers from 23 countries to play the same simple game. The duo found that participants were more likely to bend the game’s rules for personal gain if they lived in more corrupt societies. “Corruption and fraud are things going on in the social environment all the time, and it’s plausible that it shapes people’s psychology, what they can get away with,” says Gächter. “It’s okay! Everybody does it around here.” In other words, corruption corrupts." (Image: Ruben Sprich / Reuters)
Babies Know When They Know
"When we take a test, we have some idea of how well we’re going to do. When we start a task, we can predict how long it’ll take us to finish it. When we field a question, we can judge whether we need to consult the oracle of Google. We can do all of this because of a skill called metacognition—the ability to reflect upon our own minds, to monitor their degree of certainty, to have knowledge about our knowledge. Now, a new study from Louise Goupil, Margaux Romand-Monnier, and Sid Kouider at Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University suggests that we have this ability from a very early age. Even twenty-month-old infants have some sense of how well they remember the location of a hidden toy, and they’ll ask for help if they’re uncertain." (Image: Philippe Put) 
This Animal Tears Its Face Off to Open Its Mouth
"There’s a small, tentacled freshwater animal called a hydra, whose mouth disappears every time it closes. I really mean that: it disappears. When your mouth closes, the two halves are still distinct. No matter how tightly you purse your lips together, they’re still separate bits of flesh. The same is true for the enormous mouths of whales and the tiny ones of mice, the beaks of birds and the expandable jaws of snakes. But not a hydra—its closed mouth fuses shut to form a continuous, sealed sheet. In the words of one scientist, “when a hydra closes its mouth, it obliterates it.” Which means that whenever a hydra opens its mouth, it must tear itself apart."
More good reads
- “We’re looking back 13.4 billion years, through 97 percent of all time, to the galaxy when it was forming." By Nadia Drake.
- Welcome to the CRISPR zoo. A look to the future, from Sara Reardon.
- A New 50-Trillion-Pixel Image of Earth, Every Day. By Robinson Meyer
- Ego depletion, another prominent psychological theory, may just have been debunked. Great coverage by Dan Engber.
- 1 Across: Passing someone else's work or ideas as one's own (10). By Jessie Guy-Ryan
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And that's it! Thanks for reading.
-Ed