Recommended Links of the Week (No. 643)

Google and the Dunning-Kruger effect, the triumph of science fiction, your dog watching you defecate and the attraction gap. If any of the above premises caught your interest, you'll love the rest of the Recommended Links of the Week. Promise! And enjoy!

Is Google perpetuating the Dunning-Kruger effect?: "Opinion is free, and we know full well how much humans like to use what doesn't cost anything. Perhaps that explains the strange relationship between our fervent opinion about something and how much we actually know about that subject. Have you ever jumped in and given your 'humble' opinion about Picasso's blue period, the poaching of vicuñas in Peru, or the latest budgets without having much idea about the matter? Don't worry. You're not alone."

Google radically changes the way drugs are created: "Alphabet, the company that owns Google, has just announced the creation of Isomorphic Labs. A new company that aims to capitalize on the advances of its artificial intelligence and use it to discover new drugs and better understand the biological mechanisms of life. Alphabet, the company that owns Google, has just announced the creation of Isomorphic Labs. A new company that aims to capitalize on the advances of its artificial intelligence and use it to discover new drugs and better understand the biological mechanisms of life."

Richard Morgan, "Science fiction has won": "After so many years, I'm having a blast. Science fiction is everything now. When someone still laments that the genre should receive respect, I ask them if they've been to the movies or played a video game lately -says Morgan-. Within literary fiction, they're also writing science fiction. Sometimes badly, sometimes they haven't understood how to do it, but it doesn't matter. A bunch of literary writers are writing science fiction because it's the way to describe the world we're living in, because we're in a world of science fiction."

When Britain was connected to mainland Europe: "It already happened with the discovery of the city of Troy or the famous tomb of Tutankhamun. This time the area is in the old continent and it has been discovered that thousands of years ago Britain and Ireland were part of the European continental mass. That is, there was once a land surface in what is now the North Sea. Some of the first human hunters, fishermen, and gatherers lived there. This idea arose in the 19th century, but scientific evidence was needed, and it began to appear a century later, in a fisherman's nets."

'Led Zeppelin IV': the story of the eight songs that reinvented rock: "An album without a title, without naming the artist on the cover, mysterious, esoteric. And most importantly: of seismic influence even half a century later (released on November 8, 1971). Most of it was not recorded in a studio: the band secluded themselves in an English country mansion, Headley Grange, with the Rolling Stones' mobile recording studio. In that atmosphere of isolation, Led Zeppelin (Robert Plant, vocals; Jimmy Page, guitar; John Paul Jones, bass, and John Bonham, drums) reinvented rock."

This is how Earth would look through a telescope from another galaxy: "If, right now, Earth were observed by an extraterrestrial intelligence in a galaxy 70 million light-years away, our planet would look as it did in the time of the dinosaurs. Others farther away would perhaps witness the first aquatic life or a young planet with great volcanic activity. Why is this? Past events are the only ones we can perceive. The reason is the time it takes for information about the objects around us to reach us, whether it's the light they reflect or the sound they emit."

Species that evolve quickly have a higher risk of extinction: "Researchers at the University of Bristol have discovered that species that evolve quickly are more likely to become extinct. In their new study on lizards and their relatives, Dr. Jorge Herrera-Flores, from the Faculty of Earth Sciences at Bristol, and his colleagues have discovered that 'slow and steady wins the race.' The team studied lizards, snakes, and their relatives from a group called Lepidosauria. There are currently more than 10,000 species of lepidosaurs, and much of their recent success is the result of rapid evolution under favorable circumstances."

Why does your dog look at you when it poops?: "Surely more than once you've noticed your dog staring at you while it does its business. Although it may seem a bit strange, this behavior is not casual, and there are several theories about it. One of them is the survival instinct. According to veterinary experts, this gesture is because, while in this position, they perceive themselves as defenseless against any possible threat and need to feel protected by you. This has a scientific cause."

We lie in 10% of our social interactions, but when we send emails we are more sincere: "The results are curious: it turns out that in a video call or in a traditional old-fashioned phone call, people dare to lie more than on social media, in text messages, or when sending emails. As you can see in the chart, we tell the fewest lies when we send emails. And there are more lies in a face-to-face conversation than on social media or in written messages."

Stories of warlocks for All Saints' Day. The curious case of John Godfrey (1658-1669): "So, I suppose there's nothing wrong with telling a story of warlocks - not witches - in this History newsletter, hoping this won't be considered a concession to a fashion imported from the United States that, in reality (it must be said once again), has only returned to us, commercialized, a tradition that came from Catholic Europe itself. Specifically from the Irish emigrants who hyperdeveloped the Celtic Samhain night in the United States. A tradition Christianized like many other reminiscences of that world we share between that island and this peninsula."

The attraction gap: men like 60% of women; women like 4.5% of men: "This study, published two years ago and focused on 3,600 different Tinder profiles, offers some interesting readings. The main one: there is a sexual attraction gap between men and women. A rather pronounced one. While they found 60% of the women suggested by the platform attractive, they only 'liked' 4.5% of the men they encountered. Most men liked most women. Most women only liked a very small minority of men."

Memories from Beyond: post-mortem photography in 19th-century societies: "It is from then on that the portrait became available to practically all of 19th-century industrial society due to the cheapening of the process. Over the years, photography spread rapidly throughout the world and diversified into very diverse themes. Among these we find portraits of personalities, landscapes, monuments, scientists, public and private works, celebrations, works of art, etc. And among all these types of portraits, post-mortem photographs stand out."

VIDEOS: Petting wild dacelos, the danger of locust plagues, Super Mario Lvl. 9999, Doom Eternal on the smallest screen, Dale Zelda, Hitler's poison taster, amphibious cars, Kuwait: the country that heat could make uninhabitable, the first animated cartoon in history, turning thoughts into letters, Jetson One (the single-person drone), inside Chernobyl, movie intros acapella, Halloween in Shibuya, 10 years of Skyrim, Punch Out in real life, Brazilian party in Japan, we cannot negotiate with ice and the shorts: Good Job (animated), Louis Shoes (animated), Monsters Inc (silent film style), Malice In Wonderland, Blue Curry and a rock-stacking simulator that isn't a video but is fun.

GALLERIES: Winners of Foto AAP, Perez on medicine, environmental photo winners, dogs in cartoons, Russia out of context, virtual reality of the past, the Buddhist hell, the monsters of Valery Slauk (1947), puppies and onigiri animals, World War I posters, street photo winners, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week.

Thanks for reading! ♥