understorey:

Will Martian cuisine have a terrifying secret?

Mars One has launched a project to put humans on Mars by cutting out one of the biggest costs of the mission. Putting a human into space is easy. A lot of expense is cut out if you don’t plan to bring them back alive.

Google Is Prepping A Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office 365

Smartphones Have Bridged The Digital Divide

The Digital Divide has now been bridged by smartphones - the most advanced personal computing devices ever. While personal computers were disproportionally used by the rich, the white and the male, smartphones are more likely to be used by Blacks and Hispanics than Whites, and by girls as equally as boys.

How students use social media for study

Students behave in different ways when it comes to using social media for academic purposes. This is the suggestion of new research from the University of Leicester, which found that while some people use this medium in much the same way as they do when talking to friends on Facebook, others only use it in order to get the information they need.

Published in the journal Learning, Media and Technology, the study included 257 undergraduate students from the university’s School of Biological Sciences, who were asked to use Google+ as they worked through a key IT and numeracy skills module.

Led by Fiona Wright, a graduate of the school, the research demonstrated some individuals were more targeted in their use of online tools, while their peers used social networking to share course information with fellow students without any qualms.

These different types were found to have ‘visitor’ and ‘resident’ characteristics and Ms Wright added students “often spend a large amount of their free time using social media, so if this tool could be used effectively for academic purposes it would be a great resource”.

Would you trust Yahoo with Tumblr? Relax, it’s not going to happen. 

My review of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. 

Markets Erode Morals 

That’s the disturbing — but sadly not all that shocking — conclusion of a recent experiment by two German economists, who found that people were more willing to let laboratory mice be killed in exchange for small sums of money if they were involved in financial markets where the mice’s lives were bought and sold. The more people in the market, the cheaper the lives of the mice were. Markets eroded the morals of the people involved.