Fire: these days, starting one is as easy as flicking the switch on a gas stove. But if you’ve ever been on a camping trip, you know first-hand how elusive a good fire can be. Especially when deprived of our modern tools, fire-starting can be quite an ordeal, leaving the would-be masters of the element scrambling to their smartphones for tips. Ancient humans, of course, didn’t have access to wifi. Much as we take it for granted these days, simply realizing that fire could be

Do you have an addictive personality? No. No, you don’t. How can we be so certain? Well, as it turns out that technically speaking, there’s no such thing. “The idea of an addictive personality is more pop-psychology than scientific,” writes Stephen Bright in The Conversation. In other words, the notion of addictive personality is about as about as scientifically rigorous as the Meyers-Briggs. For one thing, talking about the likelihood of someone succumbing to addiction in te

Got an important decision to make? If you’re feeling hungry, new research suggests you should probably have a snack or a meal before you commit to a choice. Those are the findings from Dr. Benjamin Vincent of the University of Dundee’s Psychology department. Dr. Vincent’s study recruited 50 volunteers, polling them about their willingness to wait longer for better long-term outcomes when it came to food, money, and other rewards. Then the volunteers were polled again—after th