Get off my lawn, teenagers! A new study out from San Diego State University and Knox College has found that today’s teens actually seem to be more materialistic and less motivated than past generations, prompting possible moral weakness and lower perceptions in older adults. Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the authors show that there’s a gap between the desire to work hard, and the desire for material goods in today’s youth. Straight from the mouths of the study authors: “Compared to previous generations, recent high school graduates are more likely to want lots of money and nice things, but less likely to say they’re willing to work hard to earn them… That type of ‘fantasy gap’ is...

As it turns out, an English study done jointly between the Universities of Sheffield, Durham, and Bristol has found that the use of emotionally-charged words in books has steadily decreased throughout the last century. Additionally, the study found that while emotional words decreased across all English-speaking genres and areas of literature, emotional text had decreased at a faster pace in Britain than it has in the United States. The study, published in PLOS ONE, examined how “mood” words were used in more than five million books made digital by Google; the emotions were divided into six categories (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise), to detect and analyze how contemporary authors marked emotion in literature. The analysis found that,...

A smuggler in Thailand was just charged with smuggling out, well, more than 10% of an entire species after being detained at the Bangkok airport this week. The species, a ploughshare tortoise, is native to Madagascar and happens to be one of the most critically endangered species on the planet. The smuggler had been attempting to smuggle in a bag of 54 ploughshare tortoises to Thailand from Madagascar. That may seem like a big enough deal as it is (that’s a lot of turtles!) but more than that, it accounts for roughly one tenth of the remaining ploughshare tortoises alive in the wild. Period. Most likely, the tortoises were bound to be sold on the black market as exotic pets to people in Thailand and elsewhere, though this will change as they have been found...

If you’re like me, you’d assume that good sports gamblers are the ones who know the teams and the sports, right? After all, if you know statistics, trends, schedules, opponents, and team strengths and weaknesses, you can pretty much determine winners and losers with some sort of consistent success. And there are professional sports gamblers in the world; surely, somebody has figured it all out? Well… maybe not. Research published in the journal Psychopathology, from a university in Israel, found that prior knowledge of a sport or game turned out to be no predictor of success in correctly betting the outcome of games and contests. From the study: The researchers focused on the field of soccer betting… They recruited three groups of...

On Monday, Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda surrendered – out of the blue – to the United States embassy in Kigali, Rwanda. Ntaganda was a major player in the ongoing insurgency and civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern, densely forested region near the border with Rwanda, Uganda, and other nations in Africa’s Great Lakes region. Ntaganda’s surrender is a major surprise to the US Embassy in Rwanda, considering he’s been persona non grata in the region for the better part of the last two decades. More surprising, he has specifically asked to be transferred to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, for prosecution. His motives and desire to quickly and permanently leave the region and...

File this under cool; a 600 year-old Chinese coin from the Ming Dynasty has been found on the Kenyan island of Manda. The discovery is pretty self-explanatory in terms of trade patterns of the 15th century – that is, we now better understand that the Chinese and Kenyans (or, at the very least, an intermediary) had been using the Indian Ocean as a trading highway. The interesting thing, though, is that the Chinese emperor for whom the coin is inscribed reigned from 1403-1425. That means this coin somehow made its way to Kenya from China sometime at least several decades before Columbus and other Europeans set out for the new world and on other voyages around the world, and that Asians, Kenyans, and/or other people around the eastern Hemisphere had long been...