So it’s like this: everything you see is a little late. It takes about one-tenth of a second for the stuff we see with our eyes to reach the brain. By then what we think we “see” in real time is actually one-tenth of a second in the past. The human brain compensates by calculating, [...]
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a study suggesting that people who quit smoking tend to influence their friends and relatives into quitting as well. They studied over 12,000 participants over 32 years. The same group of scientists also did another study that found similar social links to obesity. You can read more [...]
What has four legs, is a cross between a frog and a salamander, and lived 290 million years ago? Gerobatrachus hottoni, of course! The amphibious missing link, whose name means “elderly frog”, was first discovered in the ’90s. It’s just taken that long for scientists to confirm its missing link status. Hopefully those caecilian paleontologist [...]
Above is an artist’s representation of the Mopsitta tanta, nicknamed ‘Danish Blue Parrot’ after the monty python comedy sketch. Fossil remains of the Mopsitta tanta were recently found in Scandinavia and are dated as being 55 million years old. Previously, the oldest parrot fossils found in the Southern Hemisphere were only about 15 million years [...]
Nadezhda, whose name in Russian means Hope, was a cockroach. She was taken up into space on an orbiting laboratory with the appropriately sci-fi-sounding name of Foton-M, where she conceived last September. Her little baby roach-onauts were the first roaches conceived in outer space. They were said to have matured at a faster rate than [...]
A group of researchers published an article in the scientific journal Perception that sought to answer the question, “which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” Of course the answer is that they weight exactly the same, but the study noted that a majority of blindfolded volunteers lifting two identical boxes–one [...]
A report published in Singapore revealed a sharp increase in consumption of shark’s fins over the past year. More than 470 tons of shark’s fins (just the fins, mind you) were eaten in Singapore in 2007, compared with only 182 tons in 2006. This increase was directly linked by the report to higher incomes and [...]
Thousands of bats have been dying since March of this year due to a mysterious outbreak known only by the telltale white substance on the heads and wings of the bat carcasses. “White-nose syndrome” was first observed February last year, and has continued to attack bat colonies and mystify scientists. Other symptoms seen in the [...]
Three-year-old Rhett Lamb from St. Petersburg, Florida has something called a “chiari malformation”, a rare protrusion of brain tissue in the spinal canal. Part of the skull is also smaller than usual. This combination puts pressure on his brain. One of the effects of Rhett’s condition is that he’s stayed completely awake for all of [...]
A recent study published in the scientific journal Cell Metabolism suggests that having subcutaneous fat around your hips and bottom might actually be good for you, acting as a kind of protection from diabetes. The study by Dr. Ronald Kahn of Boston’s Harvard Medical School found that subcutaneous fat had positive metabolic effects when transplanted [...]