Quartz: What makes us human? Scientists just found a defining feature of the human brain in monkeys

It’s no surprise that humans and many types of monkeys have a lot in common; we’re both social creatures and share about 93% of our DNA. But when scientists from The Rockefeller University peeked inside four rhesus monkeys’ brains with an fMRI machine, they were still surprised to find something they’ve only ever encountered in humans: A unique choreography of brain activity, which activates when the monkeys are processing social interactions.

In humans, researchers have long believed this system is the mental network that underlies humans’ most defining feature: The ability to go farther than merely identifying other people’s behavior, to actually interpreting what they’re thinking. This “theory of mind” is the basis for how humans read situations and choose to act themselves. And it’s the bedrock of complex human society.

Finding an almost identical pathway in monkeys is remarkable, because it means that our ability to read thoughts has deep evolutionary roots. By studying the homologous network in monkeys, scientists may be able to figure out exactly how this important human ability developed.

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CityLab: Fortress Britain's Coming Crackdown

It’s unusual, and alarming, to see soldiers in key sites such as London’s Downing Street. But their presence on Britain’s streets will probably not be the most striking aspect of the U.K. government’s post-Manchester security crackdown. What will likely have a far greater long-term effect is the acceleration of proposed laws to give British security forces unprecedented access to monitor citizens’ internet use—above all, their use of encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp. It is believed that the Manchester attacker sent a WhatsApp message shortly before Tuesday’s attack. On Tuesday, government sources told the Sun newspaper that, in the event of a Conservative Party victory in Britain’s June 8 election, they would push through powers granting security services the right to hack encrypted messages within weeks.

The attack has certainly stepped up calls to tighten digital surveillance, but Britain’s current government has had end-to-end encryption in its sights for a while. Last year, Theresa May, then Britain’s Home Secretary, introduced the controversial Investigatory Powers Act, which grants government agencies the right to amass large quantities of personal data, including medical and tax records, on a level unknown elsewhere in Europe. As revelations from Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed, British security services had in fact been collecting and retaining this kind of data illegally for some time. The Investigatory Powers Act made this data collection legal, a move that Britain’s Open Rights Group damned as “more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy,” Snowden himself called it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.” [...]

There’s no clear evidence, however, that the transformation of Britain into a vast surveillance post would necessarily thwart further attacks. Terrorists are nothing if not adaptable. As numerous security experts have noted, they could easily switch to other communication systems, or revert to ones already used in the past. The perpetrators of the 2015 Paris attacks communicated via unencrypted SMS messages. Security forces failed to prevent the assault not because the attackers’ communications were inaccessible, but because Belgian security officials short on highly trained staff failed to communicate with their colleagues.

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Motherboard: Dubai Wants to Use Data to Become the 'Happiest City on Earth'

Dubai doesn't ever do anything halfway. They've got the tallest skyscrapers in the world, police that drive Lamborghinis, resorts on man made islands, and profound income inequality. In that spirit, city officials are now working on connecting and digitizing all aspects of urban life into a single platform. The goal is to make Dubai the most efficient and "happiest" city on Earth. Her Excellency Dr. Aisha Butti Bin Bishr, the director general of Smart Dubai—the office overseeing this grand plan—sat down with Motherboard at the Smart Cities NYC 2017 conference to explain it all. [...]

Yes, it is called the Dubai Now Application, or the Dubai Now Platform and anybody can download it and use it for services like health, driving, residency visas, businesses, housing, education, security and justice, transportation—people can manage their day to day aspects and become more mindful about what's going on in the city around them. [...]

But when it comes to cognitive and deeper needs, we don't fully understand them. We want to discover these needs and hopefully change our policies, our systems, our services to fulfill these needs. The Happiness Meter is not the end of our story when it comes to happiness. We have an agenda to make sure everything we design and build in our city is around making people happier.

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Land of Maps: How do Americans deal with their dead? Here are the Burial vs. Cremation rates for 2015

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The Guardian: Brexit is entrenching some dangerous myths about ‘British’ culture

While the empire was founded on racist beliefs about the supposed inferiority of the people it subjugated, humanitarianism was its proudly flaunted justification. This was manifested perfectly in Winston Churchill, who was able to boast of killing “savages” in Sudan, while also playing a leading role in creating the international humanitarian norms that many consider one of the great accomplishments of the 20th century. It’s only a matter of time before Britain’s membership of the Council of Europe – along with the rest of the European institutions developed by patriotic Brits who are keen to avoid a repeat of war – faces the same fate as our membership of the EU. [...]

But in Britain something specific is happening. The survey found that more than half of British people feel hostile not just to refugees, but to ethnic minorities – many of them British people themselves – already living here. This can be put down to various perceived economic and social threats – a quarter think immigrants take away jobs, and a third that they remove more from society than they contribute. But more sinister is its generality. More than half of the British people surveyed felt that people from ethnic minorities threatened their “culture”. [...]

It was also the reason why, according to an Opinium poll, ethnic minority British people are now less likely to identify as British since the EU referendum. Instead, many are more likely to claim the identity of their ethnic minority heritage. British people who are not white feel less British now because that hostility is palpable, because there is an agenda of regressing to a time, before the European Union, that many remember not for the joys of complete sovereignty, but for the absence of protection from racism in the workplace, or at the hands of the police, or for being openly chased in the streets by white racists.

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