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When was the last time you expe­ri­enced awe?

Per­haps you were stopped in your tracks by a beau­ti­ful vista on a recent hike, or cap­ti­vat­ed by a paint­ing at your local art muse­um, or moved to tears at a con­cert or church. Or maybe you were just sit­ting on your couch breath­less­ly watch­ing an episode of Plan­et Earth. What­ev­er it was, you prob­a­bly weren’t think­ing much about your­self or your to-do list.

What makes awe so trans­port­ing, over­whelm­ing, even mys­ti­cal at times? Researchers explored this ques­tion in a recent study pub­lished in the jour­nal Human Brain Map­ping (details below) by exam­in­ing what the brain is doing when peo­ple have an awe expe­ri­ence. Read the rest of this entry »

Mon­i­tor­ing brain­waves via dreem wer­able device (Qan­tas)

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Qan­tas’ first 19.5‑hour research flight from New York to Syd­ney takes off (Nine News):

“Qan­tas CEO Alan Joyce, who today is in New York for the research flight, told Today Show via a live cross that he will be select­ing an air­craft for the mam­moth job by the year’s end, in line with a pre­vi­ous time-line.

“The flight is going to be ground-break­ing, as you said. We’ve got 19 hours — we’ve got a lot of sci­en­tists and we’re look­ing at dif­fer­ent ways of mak­ing the oper­a­tion actu­al­ly great for our pas­sen­gers,” Joyce said. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is Ellen, a sin­gle and bright woman. When she was a stu­dent —in high school and in col­lege too— Ellen was deeply involved in envi­ron­men­tal issues, and also par­tic­i­pat­ed in social jus­tice protests.

Now it’s 2019, and Ellen is 31-year-old.

Ques­tion: Which of the fol­low­ing state­ments are more prob­a­ble regard­ing Ellen’s occu­pa­tion today, and in what order?

A) Ellen is a bank teller;

B) Ellen works as a TV reporter;

C) Ellen is a bank teller at a small com­mu­ni­ty bank; she remains active fight­ing cli­mate change.

Quick, what’s your answer? In what order would you rank those 3 options? Read the rest of this entry »

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This start­up just raised $8 mil­lion to help busy doc­tors assess the cog­ni­tive health of 50 mil­lion seniors (TechCrunch):

“…star­tups increas­ing­ly rec­og­nize oppor­tu­ni­ties to cater to this aging pop­u­la­tion. Some are devel­op­ing prod­ucts to sell to indi­vid­u­als and their fam­i­ly mem­bers direct­ly; oth­ers are com­ing up with ways to empow­er those who work direct­ly with old­er Amer­i­cans.

BrainCheck, a 20-per­son, Hous­ton-based start­up whose cog­ni­tive health­care prod­uct aims to help physi­cians assess and track the men­tal health of their patients, is among the lat­ter. Investors like what it has put togeth­er, too. Today, the start­up is announc­ing $8 mil­lion in Series A fund­ing co-led by S3 Ven­tures and Ten­sil­i­ty Ven­ture Part­ners. Read the rest of this entry »

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Bay­er inks deals with eleven star­tups under G4A Dig­i­tal Health Part­ner­ships pro­gram (press release):

“Bay­er announced today that the com­pa­ny has signed col­lab­o­ra­tion agree­ments with eleven dig­i­tal health star­tups. As part of the pro­gram, Bay­er will sup­port these start­up com­pa­nies aim­ing for longer-term col­lab­o­ra­tions to dri­ve for­ward the devel­op­ment of spe­cif­ic dig­i­tal solu­tions to improve patients’ health Read the rest of this entry »