Society & Psychology
When you decided to read the Science & Tech section of the Daily Nexus today, was it really a choice? Or is this action, and every action you have ever taken, predetermined? Hard determinists woul...
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Curiosity, the trait concerning an individual’s propensity to seek new information, is highly variable. How does it shape the lifelong journey of learning? Is it university students' best learning a...
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“I think, therefore I am.” Many of us are familiar with the Cartesian notion of the thinking nature of consciousness. René Descartes, it turns out, was wrong. That's according to António Damás...
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Cynthia Kenyon, vice president of aging research at Calico Life Sciences and director of University of California, San Francisco’s Larry L. Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging, presented her ...
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For UC Santa Barbara students struggling to make and maintain meaningful connections, a recent study examining the link between social networks and psychological well-being may provide some much-neede...
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Timeline: 1864: Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. She later writes one of the earliest medical books published by an African Ame...
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Elizabeth Quinn-Jensen, a graduate student and researcher in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, and colleagues recently published a paper exploring how strong feelings...
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When data itself is skewed, how do the findings themselves — or even policies and outcomes — get affected by such biases?
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Emily Jacobs gave a lecture last week in the library entitled, “The Uncharted Mind — The Scientific Body of Knowledge: Whose Body Does it Serve?”
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The Harirud flows west from the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush. From this origin, the river traverses Afghanistan, Iran and Turkmenistan.
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How do pseudoscientific beliefs, as they are called, spread and come to be accepted by many as fact?
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One of the most devastating impacts to arise from the Spanish colonial system emerged in the form of disease.
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Researchers discovered that not even high levels of social support insulated SGM Latinx immigrants from developing symptoms.
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Kim and her collaborators carried out a meta-analysis on 22 studies evaluating collective intelligence in 1,356 groups and 5,279 individuals.
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Julia Fine worked alongside an array of collaborators to better understand how UCSB students relate to the climate crisis.
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Forgetting to take off the ratty AF1’s at the potluck (most Asian households don’t take kindly to shoes in the house!)
Wearing your only red t-shirt to every final (Red is a lucky color in many cultures, especially Chinese cultures)
Putting spiders in your friend’s wedding dress for good luck (Has its origins in old english folklore, and represents abundance for the couple)
Accidentally summoned a ghost by leaving their chopsticks straight up (A superstition that has Chinese origins because the chopsticks are reminiscent of funeral incense)
Didn’t like your friends significant other so they gifted them an umbrella (The word for umbrella ‘san’ sounds like the word for divorce in Chinese)
Believing in horoscopes (The modern western zodiac actually came from Babylonian astrology)
Walked backwards in Portugal to live out the Faust fantasy (In Portugal, walking backwards allows the devil to know exactly where you are)
Stole a raven from the tower of london as reparations (According to UK superstition, if there aren’t 6 ravens in the tower, the kingdom will fall)
Breaks a knuckle knocking on wood for good scores on finals (Knocking on wood may have originated from the Celts and their love for tree spirits)
Drunkenly rearranging their apartment for the feng shui at 3 AM (A Chinese cultural practice that harmonizes a person with the energies of the environment around them)
Left out their middle name on their taxes because the Fae run the IRS (Giving the Fae your full name gives them power over you, and the IRS has too much)
Hit by a car but the license plate had an angel number (Beyond just blowing up on TikTok, angel numbers were invented by... Pythagoras)
