You Have No Choice But To Look Up To These 17 Tech Execs

Mark Zuckerberg

If you're familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink", then you're aware of the Warren Harding Effect, which suggests most powerful people are tall, which gives them an advantage in business.

Gladwell found that most male CEOs were a shade under six feet.

That means most male bosses about three inches on other men; the average height of men in the US is 5'9".

Though women executives aren't as well studied, American women are 5'4" on average.

"Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature," Gladwell says. "We have a sense, in our minds, of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations."

Now, in the tech world, CEOs come in all shapes and sizes. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is 5' 9".

But there are a handful of powerful people in tech who meet or surpass Gladwell's perfect CEO height. They're the kind of people that command your presence the moment they walk in the room, aided by the fact that they tower over everyone else.

Arianna Huffington, for example, is 5' 10". That's a good half-foot taller than the average. A few tech CEOs are 6' 3" or taller, which is extremely rare. Only about 2% of the U.S. population is that tall.

After a few personal encounters with surprisingly tall executives, we were curious how Gladwell's tall theory held up in tech. So we took their measure—on Google, Twitter, and Quora.

Marissa Mayer is model height at 5' 8"

Source: Google

Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, is 5' 8" too

Source: Google

Arianna Huffington is 5' 10"

Source: Huffington Post

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24 Awesome Science Pictures From November

Quasar Blackhole Space

From a black hole bonanza to the devastating hurricane Sandy,  November's been full of amazing stories — take a glace through our favorite stories and images from the month to see what you missed.

Combining 20 years of research and multiple techniques researchers found the most accurate measurements of ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antarctica.

FACT: Antarctica And Greenland Are Melting

Cassini caught this massive swirling storm on the pole of Saturn.

This Stunning Picture Of Saturn's Pole Shows Its Swirling Storm In Exquisite Detail

Hurricane Sandy caused massive damage along its path.

BEFORE AND AFTER: Aerial Pictures Show Sandy's Catastrophic Damage

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What Mercury's Ice Means For Alien Life In Our Solar System

mercury

The discovery of huge amounts of water ice and possible organic compounds on the heat-blasted planet Mercury suggests that the raw materials necessary for life as we know it may be common throughout the solar system, researchers say.

Mercury likely harbors between 100 billion and 1 trillion metric tons of water ice in permanently shadowed areas near its poles, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Messenger spacecraft announced Thursday (Nov. 29).

Life on sun-scorched Mercury remains an extreme longshot, the researchers stressed, but the new results should still put a spring in the step of astrobiologists around the world.

"The more we examine the solar system, the more we realize it's a soggy place," Jim Green, the director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said during a press conference today.

"And that's really quite exciting, because that means the amount of water that we have here on Earth — that was not only inherent when it was originally formed but probably brought here — that water and other volatiles were brought to many other places in the solar system," Green added. "So it really bodes well for us to continue on the exploration, following the water and its signs throughout the solar system." [Latest Mercury Photos from Messenger]

Organics, too?

The observations by Messenger, which has been orbiting Mercury since March 2011, provide compelling evidence that reflective patches first spotted near the planet's poles by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico two decades ago are indeed water ice, researchers said.

In the coldest parts of Mercury — permanently shadowed regions where temperatures drop to perhaps minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 223 degrees Celsius) — this ice can lie bare and exposed. But Messenger's data also show that much more frozen water is found in slightly warmer areas, buried beneath a strange dark material that acts as an insulator.

This dark stuff is likely a mixture of complex organic compounds, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it, researchers said during Thursday's news conference.

"This organic material may be the same type of organic material that ultimately gave rise to life on Earth," said Messenger participating scientist David Paige of UCLA.

Helping scientists read the book of life

Mercury probably acquired much of its water and organic material the same way Earth did, researchers said — via comet impacts and asteroid strikes. Ice and organics are common on the frigid bodies in the solar system's outer reaches.

"There's a lot of water out there, as there is a lot of water around other stars, but at substantial distance," said Messenger principal investigator Sean Solomon, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

With its ultra-thin atmosphere and proximity to the sun, Mercury is probably not a good bet to host life as we know it. But finding ice and organics there should still inform the hunt for organisms beyond Earth and aid scientists' quest to learn more about how life took root on our planet.

"The history of life begins with the delivery to some home object of water and of the building blocks, the organic building blocks, that must undergo some kind of chemistry, which we still don't understand on our own planet," Solomon said.

"And so Mercury is becoming an object of astrobiological interest, where it wasn't much of one before," Solomon added. "That's not say to say that we expect to find any lifeforms — I don't think anybody on this table does — but in terms of the book of life, there are some early chapters, and Mercury may indeed inform us about what's in those chapters."

SEE ALSO: ICE FOUND ON MERCURY

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