99 Percent Invisible: Plat of Zion

The urban grid of Salt Lake City, Utah is designed to tell you exactly where you are in relation to Temple Square, one of the holiest sites for Mormons.

Addresses can read like sets of coordinates. “300 South 2100 East,” for example, means three blocks south and 21 blocks east of Temple Square. But the most striking thing about Salt Lake’s grid is the scale. Blocks are 660 feet on each side. That means walking the length of two football fields from one intersection to the next. By comparison, nine Portland, Oregon city blocks can fit inside one Salt Lake block.

Created by Mormon settlers, the grid of Salt Lake was part of an effort to create a spiritual utopia. Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, began this plan with a document called the Plat of Zion. The plat provided details as to the measurements of roads, how lots would be arranged, how many people would live there. The original document can be found on display in the Church History Museum in Temple Square.

listen to the podcast or read the article

Vox: The biggest corruption scandal in Latin America’s history

In 2014, the largest corruption scandal in Latin America’s history erupted in Brazil. It involved bribes between Petrobras, the largest state-owned oil company on the continent, and dozens of engineering firms. It also involved politicians, including three Brazilian presidents, Lula, Dilma Rousseff, and Michel Temer, as well as almost a third of Brazil’s congress.

Politicians all over Latin America were found guilty of taking bribes and profiting immensely from infrastructure and energy projects all over the continent. The scandal hit places like Itaborai especially hard. The companies involved were fined billions of dollars and laid off hundreds of thousands of workers as their projects abruptly stopped. Four years later, Brazil is still dealing with the fallout.

IFLScience: There Aren't Enough Fruit And Vegetables To Give The World A Healthy Diet, Claims Study

"We simply can't all adopt a healthy diet under the current global agriculture system," Professor Evan Fraser from the University of Guelph, a co-author on the study, said in a statement.

Professor Fraser added that while we are currently overproducing grains, fats, and sugars, production of fruits and vegetables are “not sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of the current population.”[...]

One reason for this might be that developing countries tend to focus on carbohydrates, which are easier to produce. These countries have also spent more money researching and developing such crops, rather than fruits or vegetables.

read the article

IFLScience: Scientists Invent Algorithm That Can Predict Depression Diagnosis From Your Facebook Updates

It turns out your Instagram filter can be a surprisingly good indicator of whether or not you are depressed, and now computer scientists at Stony Brook University and the University of Pennsylvania have invented an algorithm that uses Facebook language to predict a user's diagnosis of depression. [...]

The algorithm, described in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, was built using 524,292 Facebook updates, some of which were from individuals who were later diagnosed with depression. Researchers singled out the words and phrases most frequently used and categorized them into 200 topics to identify so-called "depression-associated language markers". The language of the depressed group could then be compared to that of the control group to spot patterns between the two.[...]

Language markers associated with emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal processes (including hostility, loneliness, rumination, and sadness) could all help predict depression up to three months before an official diagnosis. As previous research has shown, the algorithm found that people with depression were more likely to use first-person singular pronouns like I, my, and me. They were also more likely to use words associated with depressed moods (tears, cry, pain), loneliness (miss, much, baby), hostility (hate, ugh, fuckin), anxiety (scared, upset, worry), and rumination (mind, alot).

read the article

Quartzy: Research suggests that vegans really are more judgmental than vegetarians

A recent Gallup poll found that about 8% of Americans identified as either vegetarian (no meat) or vegan (no animal products including dairy, eggs, sometimes honey, and even avocados). Among people younger than age 50, that ratio jumps to 10%. And that doesn’t take into account conscientious eaters who regularly observe meatless Mondays or food writer Mark Bittman’s “part-time vegan” lifestyle.[...]

While vegetarians and vegans self-reported similar levels of dietary strictness—how likely they were to stray from their chosen diet—the two groups differed significantly in other areas. Vegans derived a greater sense of identity from their diet than vegetarians, felt more strongly aligned with other vegans, and both felt more judged by others for their dietary choices and had lower regard for omnivores than vegetarians did.[...]

Daniel Rosenfeld, the study’s author, points out that it isn’t just limited in size, but also scope. His research looks at how important vegetarians and vegans believe diet is to their identities. It doesn’t investigate why or how that came to be.

read the article