Grant Gochnauer: Awesome Humans — Issue #194
Awesome Human
How to Be Lucky — getpocket.com
“Belief in good luck goes hand in hand with feelings of control, optimism, and low anxiety. If you believe you’re lucky and show up for a date feeling confident, relaxed, and positive, you’ll be more attractive to your date. Feeling lucky can lead you to work harder and plan better.”
131 Actionable Ideas from Ten Books I Wish I Had Read Ages Ago — medium.com
“I highly recommend you read these books and form your own takes. But if you only have 45–90 seconds time blocks, here is a list of times to go through the actionable ideas from each book. Find Your Element by Ken Robinson (60 seconds read) Start With Why by Simon Sinek (45 seconds read) Purple Cow by Seth Godin (30 seconds read) Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (30 seconds read) Getting Things Done by David Allen (45 seconds read) The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (60 seconds read) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (90 seconds read) The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (60 seconds read) The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (45 seconds read) Zero to One by Peter Thiel (60 seconds read)”
The forgotten part of memory — www.nature.com
“Long thought to be a glitch of memory, researchers are coming to realize that the ability to forget is crucial to how the brain works.”
Healthy Human
New cause of cell aging discovered: Findings have huge implications for cancer and age-related health conditions — www.sciencedaily.com
“New research could be key to our understanding of how the aging process works. The findings potentially pave the way for better cancer treatments and revolutionary new drugs that could vastly improve human health in the twilight years.”
Intrigued by Fasting? Here’s the Latest Science on Four of the Primary Health Benefits — medium.com
“Autophagy can be conceived of as a process of cell purification and cleansing. It is an adaptive mechanism to stress in which defunct and potentially harmful cells are consumed by their healthier counterparts, thereby serving to prevent and repair molecular damage.
Autophagy has been recognized as a crucial defense mechanism against cancer malignancy and neurodegenerative diseases. More recently, autophagy has also been observed to limit the replication of viral infection.”
A Landmark Study on the Origins of Alcoholism — getpocket.com
“By studying rats in a smarter way, scientists are finally learning something useful about why some drinkers become addicted and others don’t…. GABA is a molecular red light: Certain neurons make and release it to stop their neighbors from firing. Once that’s done, the GABA-making neurons use an enzyme called GAT3 to pump the molecule back into themselves, so they can reuse it. But in the amygdala of alcohol-preferring rats, the gene that makes GAT3 is much less active, and makes just half the usual levels of the pump. GABA accumulates around the neighboring neurons, making them abnormally inactive.”
Human Builders
Employee happiness and business success are linked
“A new study (PDF) by Christian Krekel, George Ward and Jan-Emmanuael de Neve finds a link between employee happiness and business success. “The study, based on data compiled by Gallup, a polliging organization, covers nearly 1.9 million employees across 230 separate organizations in 73 countries,” reports The Economist. From the report: The authors studied four potential measures of corporate performance: customer loyalty, employee productivity, profitability and staff turnover. They found that employee satisfaction had a substantial positive correlation with customer loyalty and a negative link with staff turnover. Furthermore, worker satisfaction was correlated with higher productivity and profitability. Of course, correlation does not prove causality. It could be that working for a successful firm makes employees more contented, rather than the other way round. However, the authors cite studies of changes within individual firms and organizations which seem to show that improvements in employee morale precede gains in productivity, rather than the other way round.”
The Hidden Patterns of Great Startup Ideas — www.nfx.com
“5 frameworks to help Founders coming up with a new startup idea that is the most likely to lead to a transformative company… It’s often said that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In other words, 1% of success comes from the idea and 99% comes from execution.
We disagree.
This might be true at later stages, but at the initial stage of a startup, the core idea makes a huge difference. Small changes in your initial idea/direction will make a big difference to where you end up. “
Future Humans
DeepMind touts predictive healthcare AI ‘breakthrough’ trained on heavily skewed data — techcrunch.com
“In a blog post trumpeting the research, DeepMind couches it as a breakthrough — saying the paper demonstrates artificial intelligence can predict “one of the leading causes of avoidable patient harm” up to two days before it happens. “This is our team’s biggest healthcare research breakthrough to date,” it adds, “demonstrating the ability to not only spot deterioration more effectively, but actually predict it before it happens.”
An algorithm that evolved killer Starcraft bots is training self-driving cars — www.technologyreview.com
“DeepMind and Waymo are teaming up to make smarter self-driving cars
Scientists are making human-monkey hybrids in China — www.technologyreview.com
“In a controversial first, a team of researchers have been creating embryos that are part human and part monkey, reports the Spanish daily El País.Daring biologist: According to the newspaper, the Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who operates a lab at the Salk Institute in California, has been working working with monkey researchers in China to perform the disturbing research.Their objective is to create “human-animal chimeras,” in this case monkey embryos to which human cells are added.”
One More Thing
Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost — www.sfgate.com
“Researchers in a warming Arctic are discovering organisms, frozen and presumed dead for millennia, that can bear life anew,” reports the Washington Post:
These ice age zombies range from simple bacteria to multicellular animals, and their endurance is prompting scientists to revise their understanding of what it means to survive… Mosses have forged a tougher path. They desiccate when temperatures plummet, sidestepping the potential hazard of ice forming in their tissues. And if parts of the plant do sustain damage, certain cells can divide and differentiate into all the various tissue types that comprise a complete moss, similar to stem cells in human embryos”
