Long before anyone knows what we'll really look like, we're given the label we will probably carry for the rest of our lives — our name. But what if your appearance, particularly your face, somehow reflected the name you were given at birth?

A new study suggests that each person's face, insanely enough, could actually be shaped by his or her name.

So that would mean, yes, that Sarah really does look like a Sarah, and that Fred really does look like a Fred. Basically, the new findings could finally give some credence to all those weird, usually seemingly baseless assumptions you might have the first time you hear a new name, as NPR reports.

"We Look Like Our Names: The Manifestation of Name Stereotypes in Facial Appearance" is the name of the the psychology experiment led by researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers found that when a person was shown a stranger's face, they picked the right name out of five choices about 35 percent of the time. And aside from picking the right name over a third of the time, the study's participants continued to keep matching up faces with the right names through a series of other experiments with varying conditions, according to lead author, Yonat Zwebner.

"We ran more than a dozen studies, and each time we had this feeling like, 'Oh boy, maybe this time it won't work,'" Zwebner, a social psychologist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told NPR. "And each time, it worked. That was really surprising."

Drawing those connections led the study's researchers to believe there is a real tie between your name and what you look like. "Together, these studies suggest that facial appearance represents social expectations of how a person with a specific name should look," the study's authors write. "In this way, a social tag may influence one’s facial appearance."

But how exactly are our names shaping our faces? Well, there are a few possibilities according to the study. 

For one, an individuals's personality — influenced by the stereotypes of their name and how people have treated them as a result — may actually help shape that person's face. This has happened when, for instance, short-tempered people develop more tense facial muscles than other more relaxed people. This can lead to a particular development of the jaw, and as a result, a certain sort of face, as the study explains.

Other may include genetic influence from a person's parents or how a person styles their hair — "one of the facial features that humans control most," the study states.

Incredibly, people taking part in the study seemed to match up the right names and faces along cultural lines. For example, Israeli and French participants were better able to match up names and faces within their own cultural group, rather than in each other's.

Those findings, along with a computer algorithm that also matched faces and names better than chance probabilities, all go toward the research team's hypothesis that a face might really be a reflection of a name. Or, as the study explains, "...we posit that our facial features may change over the years to eventually represent the expectations of how we should look."

Some psychologists remain somewhat skeptical. Cathy Mondloch, from Canada's Brock University, told NPR that she wanted to see further research to be convinced that other factors, such as other name options being unpopular, aren't at play.

Either way, it might give parents pause before choosing a bizarre moniker for their newborns.

We are not yet 40 days into the Donald Trump presidency and Kellyanne Conway may have instigated the absolutely dumbest controversy of the young administration thus far, which is saying something for the woman who coined the phrase "alternative facts."

Yes, I'm speaking of #Couchgate, in which Conway was photographed with her feet on the Oval Office couch during a photo opp, incurring so much misguided wrath. 

And the fact that it 1) has a hashtag and 2) includes the requisite, scandal-tagging "-gate" suffix tells you right away this dumb. Dumb dumb dumb dumb.

But, unlike that particular incident of doublespeak or her bizarre tip-toeing of ethics rules by endorsing Ivanka Trump's fashion brand on a national news channel, Conway seems to be innocent, this time. 

What the hell happened?

A photo made the rounds last night of Kellyanne Conway crouched, feet up, on the couch while President Trump was meeting with leaders of historically black colleges. That hasn't kept the internet from growing very angry about something dumb, though. 

The backlash was swift and fierce as critics hammered Conway for showing a lack of decorum in the Oval Office. 

Buuuuuuuuut here's the thing: The single photo doesn't tell the whole story. 

As usual.

A subsequent photo shows what's really going on: Conway is getting in position to take a photo of a roomful of HBCU representatives and President Trump. Sure, it's a weird angle — why not just stand further back in the room? — but it's pretty clear Conway has no ill intent here. 

So, is this the hill that opponents of Trump should choose to die on?

No. The answer is no. Unequivocally no way. 

Bigger things to worry over

Far more important is that the HBCU reps shown in the photos came away pretty nonplussed about the whole event. Apparently, the university presidents were hoping for a more substantial meeting with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other federal officials to talk about Pell Grants, according to Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Dillard University. 

"That all blew up when the decision was made to take the presidents to the Oval Office to see the president," he wrote on Medium. "I’m still processing that entire experience. But needless to say that threw the day off and there was very little listening to HBCU presidents today ... "

While the photo-op/non-meeting was going on, the Justice Department dropped its Obama-era objection to a controversial voter ID law in Texas that could greatly affect access to voting for many minority voters, a controversy that deserves far more attention than where Kellyanne's feet are.

Plus, Trump is preparing to speak before Congress for the first time on Tuesday night and announce major cuts to just about everything in the federal budget while funneling a veritable shit-ton of money into the defense budget.

Stay focused on things that have real impact, not on Oval Office decorum, especially when we all know the worst part of Trump's White House are those garish gold curtains. 

Backlash to the backlash

Indeed, there's already a backlash to the backlash from folks like from Chris Clizza at the Washington Post. Says Clizza, "We have reached a point in our politics — and Trump was the agitator if not the originator of this latest flash of polarization — in which even the most mundane of events is somehow invested with nefarious symbolism." 

He's right, too. 

If you want to attack Conway for defending lies and showing no regards for ethics, go right ahead. But this is no different than the stupid outcry that circulated when President Obama was photographed with his feet on his Oval Office desk. 

It was something Obama did frequently, as did other presidents before him. That controversy was dumb then and this one is dumb now. 

So stop it. Find something worthwhile to be mad about — like voter suppression! — and use your hashtivism skills for that instead.

And let Kellyanne be Kellyanne. Lord knows it won't be long before she gets herself in trouble again anyway.

Sharing information has never been easier. Tap a button or click a mouse and you can tell hundreds of your closest friends and family, or thousands of strangers, pretty much anything. 

But with a seemingly infinite amount of information and number of ways to share it at our disposal comes difficult choices regarding what to share and when.

The process of choosing what to share isn't as straightforward as it might seem. A new study suggests that our brains rapidly consider the personal and social complexities of information-sharing so that you can make that judgment call within a matter of seconds.  

The findings provide new insight into why people feel compelled to share certain types of content online — and could help publishers, including media companies (such as this one, ahem), develop strategies for maximizing viral potential.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan people's brains while they looked at dozens of New York Times headlines and abstracts. The researchers observed the neural activity in certain regions of the brain and also asked the participants whether they would share each story. 

Articles that triggered stronger activity in areas of the brain associated with value and reward were shared more frequently by Times readers, the study found. People's brains appeared to be gauging the headlines and abstracts of each article to determine how sharing them might create positive personal and social outcomes for them. 

"When people decide whether to share or not, they make a calculation about the value of sharing." 

In other words, when a story more effectively tapped into people's desire for others to see them favorably, and presented an opportunity to relate to others positively, they were more likely to share it — and possibly make it go viral. 

"When people decide whether to share or not, they make a calculation about the value of sharing, and that value calculation seems to be common enough across people that we can predict what articles get shared around the world based on brain activity in 40 people in Philadelphia," Emily Falk, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said via email.

The researchers first conducted the study on a group of 41 college students and then replicated the findings in a second group of 39 students. 

Scientists are often skeptical of fMRI research because it can be easy to incorrectly interpret the association between brain activity and psychological processes. 

Falk, however, said the technique can help researchers better understand human behavior. She and her research team also combined fMRI results with participants' self-reported sharing intentions to strengthen their statistical model and improve the accuracy of their predictions. 

Falk and her five co-authors think the results represent something they call "value-based virality," a hypothesis that explains the process of information-sharing in a connected world. Basically, the brain combines two types of inputs — self-related outcomes and the social impact of sharing — to compute the value of sharing a piece of information widely. 

People may have different individual goals for sharing, like making someone laugh, appearing well-informed or improving their social relationships by engaging others. Regardless of their specific aims, the brain is able to quickly assess the overarching value of sharing particular content. 

For this study, the researchers selected 80 Times articles about health and fitness, a topic that made it easier for them to control for article characteristics like novelty or contentiousness. The stories covered subjects such as healthy school meals and tips on how to run better. Participants reviewed only the headlines and abstracts, in a similar way to how someone might consider content on social media networks. 

"Humans are hard-wired to want to be part of positive social relationships and have a positive image of ourselves."

The researchers used internal sharing data from the Times to see how frequently readers posted each story to a social media platform. Other means of distribution, like links posted directly to Facebook and Twitter instead of through the Times' sharing tools, could not be counted. The 80 stories were shared a total of 117,611 times. 

Christin Scholz, the study's lead author and a doctoral student in Falk's lab at the University of Pennsylvania, said that while both brain activity and self-reports predicted virality, brain activity uniquely helped to explain variances in how frequently articles were shared. 

People, for example, might report they don't want to share an article whereas their brain activity suggests otherwise. Scholz said that may happen because people don't want to admit their interest in sharing something or don't realize it because the calculation is happening unconsciously in the brain. 

The study does have some caveats, however. For example, the articles used, from a period between July 2012 and February 2013, may predate more recent headline-writing trends that use emotional and declarative phrasing to appeal to readers. 

The researchers also couldn't see the total page views each story received compared to its shares, which could have given them a clearer picture of whether or not an article truly went viral. Scholz said she and her co-authors weren't looking for virality in terms of sheer volume but rather differences in sharing patterns between articles. 

"We’re really targeting very basic processes and motivations," Scholz said. 

"Humans are hard-wired to want to be part of positive social relationships and have a positive image of ourselves. Those are basic human traits that should be active across articles." 

Scholz and her co-authors are exploring how these findings could lead to strategies that improve an article's viral chances. While they haven't tested specific interventions yet, Scholz thinks subtle suggestions to the reader might be effective, like hinting that sharing might make you look smart or make someone you know laugh. Using more words that linguists consider "social" in an article may also prompt readers to think about sharing it. 

So the next time you click to share a story and it feels like second nature to you, just remember your brain may have calculated that you'd gain from sharing it.

A new donation platform helps people turn a moment of rage into charitable giving, simply by replying to an infuriating tweet. 

Trigger, an amazingly passive-aggressive Twitter-based app, lets you react to hostile social media posts in a positive, productive way. Creator Isaac Alfton said the app provides social media users with a sort of agency whenever they're "triggered" online.

The company calls it "retaliatory giving," inspired by Alfton's own frustrations with his feed as it overflowed with offensive and angering posts. After seeing so many 140-character social and political hot takes, he wished there were an easy way to give to charity as a spiteful response.

"The world of donations to nonprofits is kind of sunshine and unicorns — and sometimes you don't feel like that."

"That way, the person would know 100 percent that what they said caused a donation, and that would probably anger them even more," he said.

So Alfton, who has a background in ecommerce startups, started to build it himself — and he rushed to complete the tool after the 2016 U.S. election drastically shifted the political climate in America.

To use Trigger, you simply need to reply to a tweet with a dollar amount, the handle of a U.S. nonprofit and the hashtag #TriggerGive.

To add a bit of insult to the giving, you can also add a regular reply, making sure the response really gets your message across. 

"It's a really empowering tool," Alfton said. "It's simple, and it also engages other people and raises awareness of wherever you are donating to."

Though there are similar tools, like Goodworld and tinyGive, Alfton said the edgy nature of Trigger makes the app stand out.

"The world of donations to nonprofits is kind of sunshine and unicorns — and sometimes you don't feel like that," he said. "You get triggered, and you're pissed off. That's where we come in."

As soon as you send your retaliatory tweet, Trigger will start processing your donation. But what happens if you get a little too generous in the heat of the moment? Or what if your finger twitches on the "0" key, turning your $10 donation into a $100 donation? Don't worry — you can edit donations for up to 24 hours by contacting the Trigger team.

Users need to create an account through Trigger, which logs their Twitter handle and credit card. To operate efficiently and seamlessly, Trigger stores the credit card information of users to facilitate donations. Alfton said security is a top priority for the startup, with security compared to ordering from Amazon and paying with Paypal. 

"Why not make something positive out of your anger?"

"You have to get it right," Alfton said regarding site security. "With people's information and online payments, you get one shot."

A drawback of the service is a monthly service fee of $1.59, which funds Trigger's servers — even if you don't use it during a given month. The company uses PayPal to process donations, which takes 30 cents plus 2.9 percent. Trigger, however, never takes any portion of the donation you send. 

To receive donations, Trigger allows nonprofits to sign up, or prompts them to do so when they receive their first donation. Then, the service simply delivers collected donations to a verified nonprofit every seven days, with no further engagement required. Currently, any verified U.S. nonprofit with a Twitter account — tax-exempt or not — can receive donations through Trigger. 

Aside from those restrictions, where you send your money in social media-induced anger is up to you.

"I don't feel right telling anyone where to send their money," Alfton said. "It's your money. It's your right. It's your anger. It's your donation — so it's up to you."

However, being "triggered," Alfton stressed, doesn't always have to be negative. He said users can also give when they're positively inspired by a tweet. 

Trigger's mission to transform anger into social good may be especially welcomed in 2017.

"Sometimes you're angry after reading these posts and want to donate — and that's OK," Alfton says. "Why not make something positive out of your anger?"

"It is true, it's not fake," said Moonlight director Barry Jenkins during his jaw-dropping acceptance speech, which followed a roller coaster of events that led to his movie being named best picture on Sunday night. 

In the moments before Jenkins spoke those words, actor Warren Beatty and actress Faye Dunaway took the stage and declared La La Land the winner. The cast and crew of La La Land walked on stage. Producer Jordan Horowitz gave his acceptance speech ... then realized the winning card said Moonlight.

This was maybe the easiest pitch for anyone looking to tee up "fake news" jokes (who hasn't been sitting on a stash of these lately?), and those watching the Oscars with Twitter open got right to the task. 

You can thank Oscars 2017 for taking us one more step in the slow death march of the term "fake news." 

A 20-year-old student from Delhi University (DU) has been receiving rape threats on social media, according to reports.

Gurmehar Kaur, a student of Lady Shri Ram College, has been viciously attacked by right-wingers for starting an online campaign against ABVP, the student wing of India's ruling political party, which clashed with students and journalists in a city college on Wednesday.

Kaur took a stand against the issue and came under the face of attack. “I have been getting a lot of threats on social media. I think it is very scary when people threaten you with violence or with rape,” she told a local television station. 

It all began when Kaur, who's also the daughter of a martyred Indian soldier, put up this post on Facebook. Her placard read: “I am a student from Delhi University. I am not afraid of ABVP. I am not alone. Every student of India is with me. #StudentsAgainstABVP”. 

"The stones that you pelt hit our bodies, but fail to bruise our ideas. This profile picture is my way of protesting against the tyranny of fear," she wrote in the status.

The campaign went viral in no time with several students putting up similar posts and calling out the threat posed by ABVP. 

Another of Kaur's posts read: "The brutal attack on innocent students by ABVP is very disturbing and should be stopped. It was not an attack on protesters, but an attack on every notion of democracy that is held dear in every Indian's heart. It is an attack on ideals, morals, freedom and rights of every person born to this nation." 

She also put up a series of placards with the #StudentsAgainstABVP hashtag.

One came under particular attention. It read: Pakistan did not kill my Dad. War killed him. (A reference to the 1998 Indo-Pak war in Kargil in which her father Captain Mandeep Singh lost his life.)

Kaur came under a facetious attack from former India cricketer Virender Sehwag, who's become some kind of a Twitter star of late, as well as a Bollywood actor who called her a "political pawn". 

Twitter erupted. Lot of support poured in for Kaur and she was lauded for being "strong".

Kaur herself objected to being called a pawn. She said: "I can think."

And clarified that people needn't call her a martyr's daughter.

More sadly, she even admitted to liking the aforementioned actor's film.

A wave of anti-ABVP protests has swept DU colleges.