Ernie Chambers isn’t crazy. He just had something to say about religion and the court system. — Ernie Chambers has spent most of his life fighting for disenfranchised groups. In 1980, he played a role in ending South African apartheid by pushing American organizations to divest from South Africa, namely by selling their Kruggerrands; in 1986, he promoted the idea of making university athletes state employees to…

In the last century, nearly half the American population has been exposed to toxic levels of lead, collectively reducing our IQ by 824 million points. — Way back in 1921, famous General Motors inventor Charles Kettering was searching for a solution to his ‘knocking’ problem. The inventor of the starter motor a decade before, Kettering needed to find a new fuel mixture to reduce engine knocking, a destructive phenomenon in which fuel ignition happens at suboptimal…

Researchers from Dartmouth can now use AI to analyze a person’s social media history to determine the likelihood of having an emotional disorder. — All of our insightful, angry, funny and/or pointless social media comments are public information, easily obtained, and in the hands of artificial intelligence, can paint a sorely needed picture of our mental health. 3 researchers from Dartmouth College developed a new AI model that can aggregate, label, analyze, and find…

A majority of pro-life Americans are willing to help friends and family get an abortion, while opposing it for others. — A new study published in the journal Science Advances demonstrates glaring hypocrisy among American conservatives. On one hand, they’ve made access to abortions more difficult, demonized those that get or perform abortions, and are working hard to reverse the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. …

Scientists can now measure gravity’s effect on quantum particles, helping to reconcile Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. — Since the beginning of the 20th century, physics has had a major problem: it’s two theories of explaining the universe, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, refuse to get along. These two monoliths have achieved unbelievable accuracy explaining everything from planets, stars, and galaxies to quarks, atoms, and molecules, yet they’re…

German scientists can now store the Sun’s energy in a jar and release it when needed as clean-burning hydrogen gas. — Join Medium with my referral link - The Happy Neuron As a Medium member, a portion of your membership fee goes to writers you read, and you get full access to every story…thehappyneuron.medium.com Solar energy has a big problem: we can’t control the Sun. It obviously doesn’t shine at night and the amount of its energy reaching the Earth’s surface is affected by the weather and time of year. So energy generated through solar farms, residential solar installations, etc. is unable to provide…

Modern science is slowly rediscovering how psychedelic substances can treat an array of mental illnesses. — About 1000 years ago, a shaman was buried in a southern-Bolivian cave with a ritualistic pouch full of psychoactive substances. Made of 3 fox snouts, this pouch had chemical signatures of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), cocaine, benzoylecgonine (BZE), and psilocin, a compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms. The international team of archeologists that…

Solar is growing rapidly, but producers are running out of aluminum, a not so carbon-friendly material. — The solar industry has 2 big problems. First, aluminum is a key material in creating solar panels and the infrastructure necessary to get them up and running, but aluminum production is unlikely to keep pace with the growth of the industry. Second, mining and smelting aluminum have a huge carbon…

Where someone is on the political spectrum has a lot to do with their psychological profile. — During the 2020 US presidential primaries, Womick and King rekindled an old debate among social psychologists. It had already been demonstrated that conservatism was correlated with having less interpersonal warmth and a less open mind, but some in this field believed this was true for liberals as well. That is…