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It might not excite as many as 150 million people, but the 500px update for iOS 7 could make a lot of its avid users’ weekends. To keep up with the crowd, the photo-sharing network has refreshed its app’s looks, getting rid of its unsightly black bezel for an edge-to-edge design accented with …

Launch Chrome in Windows 8 and you won’t see much that’s different compared to other desktop releases, even in the Metro-like mode. That may change soon. Google’s has posted a Dev Channel version of its browser whose Windows 8 interface mimics Chrome OS, right down to the app tray and multi-window …

Fifty Shades of Grey may be a fun read, but it’s not going to help you probe the minds of others the way War and Peace might. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that, compared with mainstream fiction, high-brow literary works do more to improve our ability to understand the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of those around us.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the lead author of the new study, David Kidd, came to social psychology by way of Russian literature. Now a Ph.D. student at the New School in New York City, he is versed in arguments from literary theorists that divide fiction into two categories. When we read a thrilling-but-predictable bestseller, “the text sort of grabs us and takes us on a roller-coaster ride,” he says, “and we all sort of experience the same thing.” Literature, on the other hand, gives the reader a lot more responsibility. Its imaginary worlds are full of characters with confusing or unexplained motivations. There are no reliable instructions about whom to trust or how to feel.

Kidd and his adviser, social psychologist Emanuele Castano, suspected that the skills we use to navigate these ambiguous fictional worlds serve us well in real life. In particular, the duo surmised that they enhance our so-called theory of mind. That’s the ability to intuit someone else’s mental state—to know, for example, that when someone raises their hand toward us, they’re trying to give us a high-five rather than slap us. It’s closely related to empathy, the ability to recognize and share the feelings of others. Increasing evidence supports the relationship between reading fiction and theory of mind. But much of this evidence is based on correlations: Self-reported avid readers or those familiar with fiction also tend to perform better on certain tests of empathy, for example.

To measure the immediate cognitive effects of two types of fiction, Castano and Kidd designed five related experiments. In each, they asked subjects to read 10 to 15 pages of either literary or popular writing. Literary excerpts included short stories by Anton Chekhov and Don DeLillo, as well as recent winners of the PEN/O. Henry Prize and the National Book Award. For more “mainstream” selections, they looked to Amazon.com top-sellers such as Danielle Steel’s The Sins of the Mother and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and to anthologies of genre fiction, including a sci-fi story by Robert Heinlein.

When participants finished their excerpts, they took tests designed to measure theory of mind. In one test, the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy 2—Adult Faces (DANVA2-AF) test, they looked at a face for 2 seconds and decided whether the person appeared happy, angry, afraid, or sad. In the more nuanced Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), they saw only a small slice of a face and picked from four complex emotions such as “contemplative” and “skeptical.”

On average, both groups did slightly better on these tests than control subjects who read either a nonfiction article or nothing at all. This fits with previous research showing a positive relationship between fiction and theory of mind. But among the fiction readers, those who read “literary” works scored significantly higher on the theory of mind tests than those who read popular selections, Kidd and Castano report online today in Science. The absolute differences in scores were hardly dramatic: On average, the literary group outperformed the popular group by about two questions (out of 36) on the RMET test, and missed one fewer question (out of 18) on the DANVA2-AF. But psychologist Raymond Mar of York University in Toronto, Canada, notes that even very small effects could be meaningful, provided they translate into real-world consequences—reducing the likelihood that social misunderstandings could create grudges or leave someone in tears.

Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto, agrees that any evidence of literature’s effect based on this experimental approach is “big news.” “I’m quite impressed that they managed to find results with these tests.”

Still, the “literariness” argument needs hammering out. Castano believes these results show that fiction’s power doesn’t hinge on exposing readers to foreign viewpoints or offering a persuasive, empathetic message. “For us, it’s not about the content,” he says. “It was about the process.” But Mar points out that there are probably many ways to improve theory of mind, and “different things might work for different people.” Some may find that stories with a moral of acceptance and empathy increase their theory of mind skills, for example, while others might benefit more from the practice of filling in the emotional gaps in an ambiguous story.

Cognitive neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese of the University of Parma in Italy, who is also exploring how the brain responds to works of art, finds the new link between real and fictional worlds exciting, but is skeptical of the distinction between literary and mainstream fiction. “This is a very slippery ground,” he says, because historical tastes often move the boundary between “high” and “low” art. For example, he says, Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy was released in serial form as a work of “popular” fiction, but has since attained the status of a classic.

ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science

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More on Emotional Intelligence

This ain’t no lie: The Pinocchio lizard was thought to be extinct for 50 years, but has been rediscovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador.

After searching for the long-nosed animal for three years, a team of photographers and researchers found the lizard recently in a stretch of pristine cloud forest in the northwest part of the country, said Alejandro Arteaga, a co-founder of the educational and ecotourism company Tropical Herping, which conducted the search for the lizard.

Also called the Pinocchio anole (an anole is a type of lizard), the animal is named after a certain dishonest wooden puppet and was first discovered in 1953, Arteaga said. But wasn’t seen between the 1960s and 2005, when an ornithologist saw one crossing a road in the same remote area in northwest Ecuador. This is only the third time scientists have spotted it since 2005, Arteaga added. [Album: Bizarre Frogs, Lizards and Salamanders]

Scientists typically look for lizards at night when most of the animals sleep, and when their coloring becomes paler and they are less likely to scurry away, Arteaga told LiveScience’s OurAmazingPlanet. One of his colleagues found a single male Pinocchio anole clinging to a branch over a stream in January. The team then kept it overnight before photographing it in the morning in its natural habitat.

“After looking for so long … It was very thrilling to find this strange lizard,” Arteaga said. The team then let the animal go.

Arteaga and his colleagues were searching for the Pinocchio anole because it was the last lizard they needed to complete their book, “The Amphibians and Reptiles of Mindo,” a rural region a two-hour drive north of Quito, Ecuador’s capital. The book was published this summer.

Pinocchio anoles (Anolis proboscis) are an endangered species and have been found in only four locations, mostly along a single stretch of road, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global environmental group. They have one of the smallest ranges of any lizard in the world, Arteaga said.

The lizard’s noselike appendage is a sexually selected trait that likely serves no functional purpose but to advertise a male’s good genes; females of the species have no such “noses.” Other examples of sexually selected traits include the peacock’s brilliant tail-feathers. Extensive research has shown that these traits communicate to the opposite sex that the animals are fit and will sire high-quality offspring.

Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience’s OurAmazingPlanet.

• 5 Strange Sightings in the Peruvian Amazon
• Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures
• Camera Trapped: Wonderful and Weird Wildlife Around the World

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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SALT LAKE CITY — SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — On a day when the Mormon church announced its membership has hit 15 million — a three-fold increase from three decades ago — the ongoing debate about the role of women within the faith raged on.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ president Thomas S. Monson kicked off the two-day conference that brings 100,000 members to Salt Lake City by announcing the latest membership milestone from one of the fastest-growing churches in the world.

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