Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. What's wrong with these darn institutions, and why does nobody trust them? That's the question lurking behind every postmortem about why Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election and what they could do to start winning future ones. The thinking goes like this: Donald Trump, as a political figure, represents blowing up the status quo; Trump won and the incumbent vice president lost; ergo, a majority of voters are unhappy with the people and groups responsible for the status quo. But the evidence that residents of the United States don't trust their institutions goes beyond election results.

Robots or advanced artificial intelligences that "wake up" and become conscious are a staple of thought experiments and science fiction. Whether or not this is actually possible remains a matter of great debate. All of this uncertainty puts us in an unfortunate position: we do not know how to make conscious machines, and (given current measurement techniques) we won't know if we have created one. At the same time, this issue is of great importance, because the existence of conscious machines would have dramatic ethical consequences. We cannot directly detect consciousness in computers and the software that runs on them, any more than we can in frogs and insects.

Whether it's getting your partner to do more housework or making your colleagues back your latest idea, we all end up spending a considerable amount of time trying to persuade or even manipulate others. So can science offer any clever tricks to get people to do what we want, without resorting to bullying them? In an article for The Conversation, Dr Harriet Dempsey-Jones, a postdoctoral researcher in Cognitive Neurosciences at University of Oxford explains the methods worth trying. Whether it's getting your partner to do more housework or making your colleagues back your latest idea, we all end up spending a considerable amount of time trying to persuade or even manipulate others (stock image) 'Misattribution of arousal' is a popular theory in social psychology that suggests people sometimes mislabel feelings from their body. It involves manipulating individuals into thinking they are experiencing particular emotions, such as believing they are attracted when they're actually scared, Somewhat counter-intuitively, if you want to get something from someone – you should give them something yourself.

A new study just confirmed that makeup does in fact make you feel smarter and can lead to better grades too. Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Chieti, Italy put the'lipstick effect' to the test and discovered that female students who wear makeup cognitively benefit from the psychological phenomenon in which wearing cosmetics can make an individual feel a sense of overall enhancement in self-esteem, attitude, and personality. The effect of makeup even proved to be a better predictor for higher grades than mood boosters like listening to positive music. It's well-documented that wearers feels more physically attractive and consequently revel in a higher sense of self-esteem while wearing makeup, but the effect of cosmetics on cognitive abilities hadn't previously been determined Researchers sorted 186 female undergraduate students into groups. Each was tasked with a different'mood-influencing task': listening to a positive music, coloring a drawing of a human face or applying makeup.

According to medieval medicine, laziness is caused by a build-up of phlegm in the body. Phlegm is a viscous substance. Its oozing motion is analogous to a sluggish disposition. The phlegm theory has more problems than just a few factual errors. After all, suppose you had a beaker of phlegm and injected it into a person.