(Credit: Javier Lazaro)
Creating shrunken heads—small, severed human heads that are widely associated with Voodoo and tribal rituals—is a gruesome process, apparently much more than what’s shown in Beetlejuice. But leave it to the animal kingdom to prove there’s a natural, less sinister way to shrink a head.
Red-toothed shrews’ heads seasonally reverse sizes once they’re adults, something called the Dehnel phenomenon, which was first discovered in 1949. ...read more
A few weeks ago I blogged about the idea that high-IQ people suffer from an inability to communicate with less gifted folk. Now, a new paper claims that very intelligent people are more prone to mental illnesses and allergies.
However, I don’t think the paper is very smart.
Researchers Ruth I. Karpinski and colleagues surveyed the members of American Mensa, a society for people in the top 2% of IQ (IQ 130+). 3,715 Mensans responded to the survey, which asked them whether they were current ...read more
(Credit: Universal Robots)
Robots toiling day and night assembling widgets and thingamabobs in pitch-black warehouses isn’t some mustache-twirling industrialist tycoon’s fantasy. It’s here, it’s the future of manufacturing, and it’s not just the multinational conglomerates that stand to benefit from the robot labor revolution. Main Street will, too.
Voodoo Manufacturing, a small 3D printing farm in Brooklyn—OK, so not quite mom and pop “Main Street&rdq ...read more
By Sharon Karasick
Girl Scouts are encouraged to try all sorts of new things in their scouting experience, a commitment reflected in their new motto: ”When she’s a Girl Scout, she’s also a G.I.R.L. (Go-getter, Innovator, Risk-taker, Leader)™. While many troops still embrace the traditional three c’s of crafts, camping, and cookies, Girl Scouts are also exploring new civic engagement opportunities through innovative STEM programming.
On the surface, civic engag ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
“Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes?” so sayeth Indiana Jones, and so, apparently, say babies too.
In a study published Wednesday in Frontiers in Psychology, European neuroscientists determined that our instinctive fears of snakes and spiders are so primal, even babies become alarmed at the sight of them. How’d they figured it out? Well, they scared some babies. For science! [embedded content]Primal Fear
Though not everyone is frightened of the tw ...read more
In November 2013, a four-year-old captive beluga whale moved to a new home. She had been living in a facility with other belugas. But in her new pool, the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea, her only companions were dolphins. The whale adapted quickly: she started imitating the unique whistles of the dolphins, and stopped making a signature beluga call altogether.
“The first appearance of the beluga in the dolphinarium caused a fright in the dolphins,” write Elena ...read more
Anthropologist Teresea Fernandez-Crespo examined megaliths, or stone burial sites, in north-central Spain to learn more about how farmers lived in the Late Neolithic. (Teresea Fernandez-Crespo)
We’ve heard how great times used to be, and I don’t mean in 1950s America.
For eons, our hunter-gatherer ancestors shared their spoils with one another, didn’t own much and had very little social hierarchy. Sure, it wasn’t all kumbaya and high-fives. But the fact that individuals ...read more
A New Zealand tui (Credit: Auckland Photo News)
Birds are territorial creatures, and they’ll passionately defend their chosen area from unwanted intrusions. For some songbirds, it doesn’t even take a physical breach to draw their ire — if you’re a lovely singer, they’ll attack.
New Zealand’s tui songbirds certainly aren’t doing the “jealous performer” stereotype any good. Males of the species will fend off rival males encroac ...read more
Back in May I discussed a paper published in PNAS which, I claimed, was using scientific terminology in a sloppy way. The authors, Pearce et al., used the word “neuropeptides” to refer to six molecules, but three of them weren’t neuropeptides at all. The authors acknowledged this minor error and issued a correction.
Now, it emerges that there may be more serious problems with the PNAS paper. In a letter published last week, researchers Patrick Jern and colleagues say that the ...read more
