It's my life, you're just along for the ride!

Most of us go days without writing anything by hand, and when we finally need to jot something down, it looks like the writing of a third grader. Writing by hand in the digital age feels almost antiquated, but there are plenty of reasons to maintain the quality of your penmanship, or (gasp) even improve it.

Writing by Hand Can Lead to Better Learning

There are cognitive reasons that you might want to revisit your penmanship and start writing again. As you might’ve heard before, taking notes by hand can actually help you retain more information, as you’re essentially forced to reframe the information you’re hearing instead of transcribing it directly. There’s science to back it up too.

There’s even research on children that demonstrates writing by hand can cause people not only retain more information, but to also have more ideas. Typing and writing are associated with different brain patterns, says psychologist Virginia Bernigner. The children in her study who wrote by hand actually produced more words and ideas than their typing counterparts. The children with better handwriting also expressed “greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory.” Actively engaging in the physical act of forming letters and words can stir your creative juices by sparking areas of your brain that you otherwise wouldn’t be using. Click below for more…

via Bring Back Handwriting.

Most of us are pretty terrible at sleeping. Whether it’s hitting the snooze button too much or using screens before bed, you’re probably doing something that’s not great for your sleep. This video explains all the ways you’re sleeping wrong, and what to do instead.

The video, from YouTube channel You’re Doing It Wrong, offers examples of many things we do wrong while we’re sleeping (like sleeping on your stomach). It also offers some tips on how to sleep better. These include sleeping without clothes (to help reduce your body temperature), sleep on your back (to prevent damage to your spine), and skipping the alcohol before bed (to make sure you stay asleep). Not everything in this video is new information, but it deals with a lot of the problems with how we sleep in a simple six-minute package.

via This Video Explains All the Ways You’re Sleeping Wrong.

Unlike a certain companion animal that will go unnamed, dogs lose their minds when reunited with their owners. But it’s not immediately obvious why our canine companions should grant us such an over-the-top greeting—especially considering the power imbalance that exists between the two species. We spoke to the experts to find out why.

via Why Are Dogs So Insanely Happy to See Us When We Get Home?.

Since we launched Internet.org, it’s been our mission to find ways to provide internet connectivity to the more than 4 billion people who are not yet online. Many of these people live within range of at least a 3G wireless signal, and our work in the last year with mobile operators across 17 countries has provided more than a billion people with access to relevant basic internet services. But 10 percent of the world’s population lives in remote locations with no internet infrastructure, and the kinds of infrastructure technologies used everywhere else — things like fiber-optic cable, microwave repeaters and cell towers — may be a challenge to deploy cost-effectively in these regions.

That’s where the Connectivity Lab comes in. Our goal is to accelerate the development of a new set of technologies that can drastically change the economics of deploying internet infrastructure. We are exploring a number of different approaches to this challenge, including aircraft, satellites and terrestrial solutions. Our intention is not to build networks and then operate them ourselves, but rather to quickly advance the state of these technologies to the point that they become viable solutions for operators and other partners to deploy.

via New Milestones in Connectivity Lab’s Aircraft and Laser Programs | Facebook Newsroom.

NASA researchers working with the Spitzer Space Telescope announced on Thursday that they had indeed found the closest rocky exoplanet to our own. It’s a tiny burg called HD 219134b that’s just 21 light years from Earth in the Cassiopeia constellation, near the North Star. It was first spotted with the 3.6-meter Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands before being confirmed with the Spitzer. Even though the planet is larger than Earth, researchers only noticed it as it transited across the face of its parent star (astronomers look for the star to dim then brighten again as evidence of an orbiting planet). Unfortunately, there’s basically zero chance that we’ll find aliens there as 134b orbits far too close to sustain life.

via NASA space telescope discovers Earth’s closest rocky neighbor.