New WordPress plugin from Facebok – Facebook for WordPress

Users of blogging platform WordPress can now take advantage of greater integration with Facebook following the social network’s release of a plugin that enables features such as social publishing and mentions.

The plugin allows users of both platforms to cross-post their WordPress content to their timeline profiles and pages they manage, as well as to add the names of pages or friends to the posts.

It also allows bloggers to use these widgets:

  • Activity Feed: Displays friends’ activity, including likes and comments.
  • Recommendations: Allows users to offer readers personalized suggestions for pages, as well as a Recommendations Bar option that enables users the option to add content to their timelines as they read.
  • Customizable buttons for like, subscribe, and send.
  • Comments Box: Enables readers to comment on WordPress sites and post back to Facebook, including moderation tools and automatic search-engine-optimization support for Facebook comments visibility.

 

via All Facebook

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39 New Scientific Concepts That Everyone Should Understand

Deep time

The belief that there is much more time before us than has already elapsed. This creates a more expansive view of the world and the potential of the universe.

“Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out.”

Contingent superorganisms

“Biologists have joined with social scientists to form an altruism debunkery society” — pushing the belief that every altruistic act is done in self-interest.

But a new concept, “contingent superorganisms,” says that we live life on a few different hierarchies. The idea is that when you reach a higher level, you are willing to put the success of the group or a higher cause above one’s own. This is what drives militaries, fire departments, and rock bands.

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Americans’ heads are getting bigger

It’s not clear why—medicine? cars? supermarkets?—but the skulls of white Americans, and perhaps of other races and nationalities, have become slightly taller and roomier, according to new forensic research.

New measurements of hundreds of skulls of white Americans born between 1825 and 1985 suggest that their typical noggin height has grown by about a third of an inch (eight millimeters).

It may not sound like much, but the growth translates to roughly a tennis ball’s worth of new brain room.

Beginning with the dawn of the first Homo species, human skulls evolved to be increasingly bigger until about 30,000 years ago, when head size plateaued.

And about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, when agriculture took off in earnest, skulls began shrinking. The cause of the shrinkage is a mystery…

keep reading – National Geographic – Americans’ Heads Getting Bigger

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Shakespeare’s Restless World – fascinating new podcast from BBC Radio 4

British Museum Director Neil MacGregor presents Shakespeare’s Restless World, a new series for Radio 4. The 20-part series looks at the world through the eyes of Shakespeare’s audience by exploring objects from that turbulent period.

Examining these objects, Neil discusses how Elizabethan playgoers understood and made sense of the unstable and rapidly changing world in which they lived. Neil asks what the plays would have meant to the public when they were first performed. He uses carefully selected objects to explore the great issues of the day that preoccupied the public and helped shape the works, and considers what they can reveal about the concerns and beliefs of Shakespearean England.

Contributing to the programmes will be Shakespeare scholars, historians and experts on witchcraft and warfare, fencing and food, luxury trade and many other topics. They discuss the issues these objects raise – everything from exploration and discovery to violence, entertainment and the plague.

Shakespeare’s Restless World – (or download in iTunes)

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UCLA scientists unlock mystery of how ‘handedness’ arises

The overwhelming majority of proteins and other functional molecules in our bodies display a striking molecular characteristic: They can exist in two distinct forms that are mirror images of each other, like your right hand and left hand. Surprisingly, each of our bodies prefers only one of these molecular forms.

This mirror-image phenomenon — known as chirality or “handedness” — has captured the imagination of a UCLA research group led by Thomas G. Mason, a professor of chemistry and physics and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

“Objects like our hands are chiral, while objects like regular triangles are achiral, meaning they don’t have a handedness to them,” said Mason, the senior author of the study.

Why many of the important functional molecules in our bodies almost always occur in just one chiral form when they could potentially exist in either is a mystery that has confounded researchers for years.

Learn more about chirality – UCLA Newsroom

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World map of social networks

The most dominant social network for each country:

 

 

Facebook clearly dominates, but a few countries have other favorites:

– VKontakte and Odnoklassniki remain strong in Russian-speaking countries
– Tencent’s QZone is still king of the hill in China
– Vietnam’s most popular social network is Zing
– People in Iran seemingly prefer Cloob over Facebook
– Drauglem is the top dog in Latvia

 

Learn more – Facebook is eating the world, except for China and Russia

Life Expectancy rises 0.9 years for whites, 2 years for blacks

A recent report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, based on data from 2008, shows a few interesting changes.

  • African-americans are catching up in terms of long life, though still behind.
  • Both white men and women increased their average life expectancy by 0.9 years.
  • African-american men increased theirs by 2 years and women by 1.8 years.

See the graph below.

 

 

The strange thing for me (a white male), in that 5 year period my own life expectancy rose nearly a year. If that continues, doing a little math, I can expect to live for 85-87 years (on average). That’s pretty cool.

 

More info – Life expectancy gap narrows between blacks, whites