Kaylin Quinn

Ultralight backpacking kitchen - Kaylin Quinn

Sweet Penny stove - Kaylin Quinn

"all you really need to survive and feel rested is the REM phase." He writes at his blog that the way to force your brain into this state is to trick it into thinking you're only going to have a tiny window of time to get your sleep on. going the polyphasic sleep route, a method that essentially trains the brain to enter REM for short periods of time via 20-minute naps, rather than through one long night of sleep. The post breaks down five polyphasic sleep options, the simplest of which is the "Siesta" method. This involves "just one nap in the day and then a huge chunk of sleep at night," which should shave one hour and 40 minutes off your total sleep requirements. Each method increases the number of total naps—"The Uberman" requires six 20-minute naps, for example—but each requires fairly strict adherence to the routine. - Kaylin Quinn

While it is true that the youngest infants don't distinguish colors as well as older infants, by two months of age, most babies can tell the difference between most colors and white. Do they prefer particular colors? In 1975, M.H. Bornstein exposed infants to eight different pure colors of the same luminance and found that they looked longer at red and blue, and less at greenish colors like blue-green and especially yellow-green. This study may have been the inspiration for the yellow-green "Mr. Yuck" stickers intended to discourage toddlers from playing with poisonous substances. But there are some problems with Bornstein's study... - Kaylin Quinn

some researchers have found that bilinguals are better at certain tasks than non-bilinguals. One example is the Simon task, where two objects are flashed on the screen side-by-side. Respondents might press a button on the left when one of the objects is red and a button on the right when one of the objects is green. Bilinguals are better at the task than monolinguals when the object in question is on the opposite side of the button they have to push (for example, the green object is on the left but you have to press the right-hand button to indicate "green"). This makes some sense -- after all, a person who speaks both English and Spanish has had a lot of practice not speaking the wrong language, which may be similar to not pressing the wrong button. But if it's possible for bilinguals to have better performance at some tasks, it's also possible that they might be worse at some things too. - Kaylin Quinn