If you’ve ever been around a preschooler, you’re familiar with their incessant questions. It can be tempting to brush them off with a “Because I said so,” but new research shows that can hurt your credibility.

Five-year-olds and even three-year-olds can tell the difference between poor explanations and those that provide new information. Not only do they prefer the explanations with new information, they also use explanation quality to decide who is a good source of information later, according to research by Kathleen Corriveau and Katelyn Kurkul of Boston University. “It shows not only that they can tell that an explanation is kind of bogus, but they can also tell: this guy gives bogus explanations and I’m not going to listen to him in the future,” says Hugo Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the University of Neuchatel who was not involved in the study. Full Article »

You may have heard of New York City’s MoMA, an icon of modernity synonymous with art and culture’s bleeding edge. But there’s another MoMA you should know about: a small-town, redbrick museum in southwestern Virginia that lays claim to 15,000 years of North American history by virtue of that classic of tableside condiments: salt.

Located in Saltville, Virginia, a town of 2,000 tucked away in southwestern Virginia’s Appalachians, the Museum of the Middle Appalachians (MoMA) is a many-layered paean to good ol’ sodium chloride, which exists in mind-boggling concentrations underneath the local valley. The story of that salt—and the tiny town that mined it—provides the museum with “a staggering story from the Ice Age to the Space Age,” says Harry Haynes, the museum’s longtime manager, a story that’s forced several expansions over the last 15 years and a recent overhaul of the exhibit spaces.

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