engineeringisawesome:

Scientists said Wednesday they had unraveled the mystery of how spider webs can withstand multiple tears and even hurricane-force winds without collapsing.

The findings should be of keen interest to engineers searching for shock-resistant structural designs, they said.

The silk-like threads with which arachnids spin their traps are famously stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar, but this alone does not explain how webs withstand, say, a gash from a fallen branch.

Once ripped, what keeps the whole web from falling apart?

(Source: engineeringisawesome)

futuramb:

The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again.

This might be a more important question for the future than we think. When children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later the number of people behaving in a way we used to ascribe to teenagers increase dramatically we are increasingly living in a world where those who shape it are behaving like teenagers… Can this effect have even more impact than e g an aging Western society will? Meaning more teenage logic??

(via emergentfutures)

Subjects who sat in the box performed as well on the test as those who never saw the box at all.

—When Psychologists Take Things Too Literally (via outofcontextscience)