LONDON — Rudeness and throwing insults are cutting online friendships short with a survey on Wednesday showing people are getting ruder on social media and two in five users have ended contact after a virtual altercation.

As social media usage surges, the survey found so has incivility with 78 percent of 2,698 people reporting an increase in rudeness online with people having no qualms about being less polite virtually than in person.

One in five people have reduced their face-to-face contact with someone they know in real life after an online run-in.

Joseph Grenny, co-chairman of corporate training firm VitalSmarts that conducted the survey, said online rows now often spill into real life with 19 percent of people blocking, unsubscribing or ‘unfriending’ someone over a virtual argument.

‘The world has changed and a significant proportion of relationships happen online but manners haven’t caught up with technology,’ Grenny told Reuters on the release of the online survey conducted over three weeks in February.

‘What really is surprising is that so many people disapprove of this behaviour but people are still doing it. Why would you name call online but never to that person’s face?’

Figures from the Pew Research Center show that 67 percent of online adults […]

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Carbon-dating of an ancient beam from a Guatemalan temple may help end a century-long debate about the Mayan calendar, anthropologists said on Thursday.

Experts have long wrangled over how the Mayan calendar - which leapt to global prominence last year when the superstitious said it predicted the end of the world - correlates to the European calendar.

Texts and carvings from this now-extinct culture describe rulers and great events and attribute the dates according to a complex system denoted by dots and bars, known as the Long Count.

The Long Count consists of five time units: Bak’tun (144,000 days); K’atun (7,200 days), Tun (360 days), Winal (20 days) and K’in (one day).

The time is counted from a mythical starting point.

But the date of this starting point is unknown. Spanish colonisers did their utmost to wipe out traces of the Mayan civilisation, destroying evidence that could have provided a clue.

An example of the confusion this has caused is the date of a decisive battle that shaped the course of Mayan civilisation.

It occurred at nine Bak’tuns, 13 K’atuns, three Tuns, seven Winals and 18 K’ins - or 1,390,838 days from the start of the count. Attempts to transcribe this into the European calendar have given […]

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A lightning bolt is one of nature’s most over-the-top phenomena, rarely failing to elicit at least a ping of awe no matter how many times a person has witnessed one. With his iconic kite-and-key experiments in the mid-18th century, Benjamin Franklin showed that lightning is an electrical phenomenon, and since then the general view has been that lightning bolts are big honking sparks no different in kind from the little ones generated by walking in socks across a carpeted room.

But scientists recently discovered something mind-bending about lightning: Sometimes its flashes are invisible, just sudden pulses of unexpectedly powerful radiation. It’s what Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology, has termed dark lightning.

Unknown to Franklin but now clear to a growing roster of lightning researchers and astronomers is that along with bright thunderbolts, thunderstorms unleash sprays of X-rays and even intense bursts of gamma rays, a form of radiation normally associated with such cosmic spectacles as collapsing stars. The radiation in these invisible blasts can carry a million times as much energy as the radiation in visible lightning, but that energy dissipates quickly in all directions rather than remaining in a stiletto-like lightning bolt.

Dark lightning appears sometimes […]

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As wrangling over the outcome of gun safety legislation in the Senate reaches a fever pitch, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D) has been quiet on where she stands. Her home state, though, exemplifies the real risk weak gun laws pose-not only to residents, but also to the men and women charged with protecting them.

Gun laws in Louisiana prevent the state’s law enforcement officers from doing their jobs, and put them at a much greater risk of gun violence. Last November, the state passed an NRA-backed ballot initiative that enshrined gun ownership in the constitution and removed provisions that prohibited certain individuals, such as domestic abusers and the seriously mentally ill, from carrying a concealed weapon. In March, a judge ruled that the amendment outlawed a ‘state statute forbidding certain felons from possessing firearms,

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Fed up with flying, complaints from travelers have soared according to a new study. The annual Airline Quality Rankings by Wichita State University and Purdue University show carriers bumping more passengers from oversold flights and delivering service that often leaves customers frustrated.

‘Overall, airline travel is still a hassle for most people,’ said Dean Headley of Wichita State University. ‘If it’s an uneventful experience that’s about the best you can hope for.’

Headley believes lackluster, sometimes poor service by airlines is leaving many of the more than 700 million people who fly each year with diminished expectations. ‘Basically, people flying are saying to themselves, just get me there and I’ll be happy with that,’ said Headley.

The Airline Quality Rankings are based on data compiled by the Department of Transportation for its monthly Air Travel Consumer Report. Categories include on-time arrival records, baggage handling complaints, and the number of passengers who are bumped from oversold flights.

2012 Airline Rankings

Virgin America
JetBlue
Air Tran
Delta
Hawaiian
Alaska
Frontier
Southwest
[…]

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