

Salience Bias, or Why it's Okay to Eat the Apple
Apples: they’re full of fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins. And yet, if your young child scored a homemade candy apple while Trick-or-Treating, there’s a chance you’d be telling them to discard that fruit at first opportunity. After all, remember that news story about malevolent weirdos hiding razor blades in their Halloween apples? Surely that’s important to keep in mind here. Salience bias is the human tendency to evaluate situations based on the information available to us,

Remembering Hermann Ebbinghaus
Read this shopping list, and then cover it with your hand: Bread
Milk
Oranges
Peanut Butter
Yogurt
Pickles
Turkey
Folders
Tissue
Gum Now, how many of the items can you remember without peeking? Give yourself a moment to recall as many of them as you can. (We’ll wait.) If you left out an item (or several), chances are good it wasn’t the bread or the gum, but rather something in the middle. And if that’s the case, congratulations, you have something in common with 19th


The Ostrich Effect
First things first: despite any cartoons you might’ve seen, ostriches don’t try to hide from danger by burying their heads in the sand. For one thing, they don’t need to: your average ostrich can run forty miles an hour—that’s faster than Usain Bolt (28 mph)—and they don’t use that speed to win footraces. The tall, gangly creatures do sometimes stick their heads in the sand, but that’s not a fear behavior; that’s the bird using its beak to gently rearrange its eggs, tucked aw


Poking at the Omega 3 Mystery
As the first week of the year draws to a close, you may find yourself reassessing those New Year’s resolutions. Is this really the year you write that novel? Will you seriously watch every Oscar nominated movie before Oscar season this time? Here, however, is one resolution that might be both doable and hugely beneficial, if you’re not doing it already: eat more fish. If you follow nutrition news at all, this will likely not be a bombshell. Scientists have long acknowledged t