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labs that are also churches. to me

Rules: share the first lines of ten of your latest fanfics (or less if you have fewer) and then tag others.

Sleep Mode: When we first left the torus, I was watching the scanners, alert to any pursuit.

Fever: So I found out that I can turn my body temperature up, but I can't turn it down.

Honeymoon: I'd been looking forward to the cargo run with ART because dealing with the humans was even more exhausting after the whole fever incident.

Reproduction: My first voyage on ART that included non-crew students ended with a party.

A Day to Forget: So, we'd wrapped up our mission on the planet.

Rogue Rumors: "Reading between the lines, they're saying a rogue SecUnit escaped from Port FreeCommerce," says Nefret.

Security Threat: Santa Claus: ART got bored one day and decided to sort through my media library.

It Has Been 01 Missions Since SecUnit Ended up in Medical: Status, ART demanded as we ran toward the shuttle.

Monsters: We were 91% certain before setting foot on the planet that all of the colonists were dead.

Fairest of Them All: Once there was a wealthy and powerful man known as Lord Terrence, and he had a magic mirror.

Bricks in the Wall, chapter 141 (it's a collection of Heroes one-shots, started well before I understood how 'series' worked on AO3): Peter surveyed the bed – empty at the moment. The sound of running water in the bathroom let him know that Sylar was cleaning up to an unusual degree.

Agonal Stage: The human died in my arms. At first, the slackening of the muscles might have been unconsciousness (understandable, given the lacerations and punctures Hostile One had inflicted on her before I'd managed to extract her from its mouth).

Agape: I think I was in love with humans. Like Charleh said, it was the only explanation.

Cold Hands, Warm Hearts: Amena paused in munching the nuts that topped her breakfast of uji. Her interface was showing her an alarming notification for the weather forecast on the west coast of the southern continent.

A Weird, Fucked Up Way: My proximity and attention were required for this. My participation aside from that was not.

First Impressions: I was wadded up in the usual transport box when I woke for my new assignment. I was supposed to immediately reference the client list, project scope, location, and that sort of thing.

The Expected Order: The Target snarls at my Client, "Tell it to shut down or I blow your brains out!" I run some quick calculations.

Bodyswapped: I woke in a flesh prison, memory limited, no media storage. I hurt all over and my pain control didn’t even exist.

You Construct Intricate Rituals: I sat on his thighs, my lower leg tucked under his ankles. He floundered on the bed, or would have if he could.

Knot Today: The thing about a knot is that it depends on the omega to hold the fucker in there. An alpha might think they’re hot stuff, knot so big that no amount of struggle on the omega’s part would allow escape from the breeding.

Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.

My partner and I fake it by simply saying we're married. Medical personnel don't ask for a marriage license or other proof. We say we're married; they allow access like we are.

Rocky hums. “Close. Skip first note.”

“Why? You always include that.”

“This means… of Rocky, possessive. Of the speaker.”

“My.”

“Correct. But only for names.”

“So you’re calling me…?”

Rocky repeats the word: “My Grace. Yes.” 

And I consider it romantic.

Not sexual. Not a mate. But life-partners.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Down the Rabbit Hole [Podfic]

Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries

Pairing: Dr.Gurathin/Murderbot

Rating: T

Length: 00:21:22

Summary: How far will Murderbot go to save its least favorite (augmented) human?

Original Work by @gamebird

Coverart by @mistchievous

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Additional Tags: Meta, reference, Spoilers for Book 8: Platform Decay (Murderbot Diaries) Series: Part 17 of TMBD Metas and Headcanons Summary:

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