Romantic attraction is complex and hard for humans to quantify. That's why these scientists turned to machine learning to see if computers can do a better job. They asked participants to fill out a questionnaire with "more than 100 self-report measures about traits and preferences that past researchers have identified as being relevant to mate selection," and used those to train the computer models. They then had the participants speed-date each other for 4 minutes at a time and had the mode ...read more
Shine an ultraviolet light on a chameleon in the dark, and it will light up with an eerie blue glow. It's not their color-changing skin at play here, either. It's their bones.
It's long been known that bones fluoresce under ultraviolet light, some researchers have even used the property to find fossils, but our bones are usually all covered up. To let the light out, chameleons have evolved rows of small bony outgrowths along their skeletons that sit just beneath the skin, making it thin e ...read more
Around 100 million adults in the United States are affected by chronic pain – pain that lasts for months or years on end. It is one of the country’s most underestimated health problems. The annual cost of managing pain is greater than that of heart disease, cancer and diabetes, and the cost to the economy through decreased productivity reaches hundreds of billions of dollars. Chronic pain’s unremitting presence can lead to a variety of mental-health issues, depression above all ...read more
You know you've seen it before: you hear we're going to have a "supermoon" and someone out there on the internet is claiming they know that we'll have big earthquakes because the moon will be full and closer to Earth. Clearly, it will cause faults all over the world to start moving and it will be utter destruction.
Yet, here we are. I've written before about the obsession for some to try to crack the supposed code for timing of earthquakes, whether it be some believed link with the moon's ...read more
Most people don’t enjoy going to the dentist. There’s just something off-putting about having your mouth wide open while someone’s scratching and scraping your precious chompers. But at least dentists can give you Novocain to make your mouth go numb for the more intense procedures.
You were born in the best of times, because for the majority of the human timeline, our ancestors didn’t have it so easy.
Cavities really started wreaking havoc when humans started farming abou ...read more
Oftentimes, throwing a punch at something (or someone) ends up hurting the hand behind it more than anything else. Bruised skin, sore knuckles and even cracked wrists can result from an ill-fated punch, and that's just with human-level strength. Just imagine what it's like to be a mantis shrimp.
One-punch Crustacean
Mantis shrimp might just be the best boxers in the world. They smash apart shellfish with oversized, teardrop-shaped forelimbs that can snap out with more acceler ...read more
Supermassive black holes reside at the center of most, if not all, massive (and possibly low-mass) galaxies. They range in size from millions to billions of solar masses, and they can eat voraciously or not at all, depending on their surroundings. But one thing is clear: Black holes don’t have very good table manners, as a team led by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder confirmed last week at the 231st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
The ...read more
Your nose, mouth, skin pores and…other…body holes each serve their unique functions. But most of them also double as biological exhaust pipes, spewing gaseous byproducts of the myriad internal chemical reactions keeping you alive.
And, just as we measure emissions form our internal-combustion vehicles, advances in medical technology make it easier to analyze the gases you leak into the atmosphere.
Scientists at RMIT University in Australia developed a pill-sized sensor that measu ...read more
I just learned about a truly remarkable case in which a doctor apparently wrote a paper about a serial killer who murdered her five children - without realizing what had happened. It's an old case, but it doesn't seem to be widely known today.
The paper is called Prolonged apnea and the sudden infant death syndrome: clinical and laboratory observations and it was written in 1972 by Dr Alfred Steinschneider of Syracuse, New York. In this paper, Steinschneider described the case of a woman, "Mr ...read more
