Image: Flickr/Rick Harris
Do you know what you like? That may sound like a dumb question, but disentangling all the different reasons for loving one thing and hating another can be tricky. Take bananas, for instance. Many people pronounce a clear preference for a certain level of ripeness when it comes to their bananas. But is this preference related to the actual taste of bananas of different ripeness, or is due to other cues, such as the shelf life of the banana? Well, here comes the sc ...read more
Every Schizophyllum commune you see is likely a new gender. (Credit: wasanajai/Shutterstock)
Gender isn’t really a fungal construct.
Where we have two traditionally recognized genders, male and female, some species of fungi can have thousands. It sounds confusing, but it’s actually helpful — with so many variations, the fungi can mate with nearly every individual of their species they meet. It must make for a wild singles night.
Sexy Fun Guys
One species of fungi, Schizophyll ...read more
I recently decided to revisit a 2014 case that regular readers might remember.
Back in 2014, I posted about a terrible piece of statistical ‘spin’ that somehow made it into the peer-reviewed Journal of Psychiatric Research. The offending authors, led by Swedish psychiatrist Lars H. Thorell, had run a study to determine whether an electrodermal hyporeactivity test was able to predict suicide and suicidal behaviour in depressed inpatients.
Now, the standard way to evaluate the perfor ...read more
Glance at the news lately and you might see these headlines that would make Kent “ACTION NEWS” Brockman proud:
A snapshot at Google News from the weekend.
Let’s set some thing straight. No, we’re not around the corner from VOLCANIC APOCALYPSE
A volcano can show many signs that an eruption might be brewing. These include, but aren’t limited to:
Inflation – As magma rises, it takes up space, so the volcano inflates. Sometimes that inflation is subtle ...read more
Have you ever seen a face on a football?
In a new paper, neuroscientists Gerwin Schalk et al. report that brain stimulation caused a man to experience strange hallucinations. The patient saw faces in everyday objects, including an orange soccer ball and a featureless box. The researchers coined the word “facephenes” to refer to these face-like perceptions.
Schalk et al. studied a 26 year old Japanese man suffering from intractable epilepsy. The patient was implanted with a large num ...read more
Laika before her flight. via Wikipedia.
“Dog in Second Satellite Alive; May be Recovered, Soviet Hints; While House is Calm Over Feat” The headline blared across the front page of the New York Times on November 4, 1957. The story continued on page 8 with followup articles on pages 9 and 10. The space age was only a month old and the satellite both excited and terrified Americans who feared bombs would start dropping from space.
But one US Air Force flight surgeon was fasci ...read more
The Mars 2020 rover. (Credit: NASA)
NASA must be big fans of Douglas Quaid in Total Recall. “Get your ass to Mars,” he says, and NASA listened, sending 24 probes, landers and rovers over the past five decades. It’s just too tempting a target: The closest, easiest planetary neighbor for us to explore, which may or may not prove habitable, also tells scientists more about the solar system’s history.
We’re steadily learning more and more about the next Mars rover, cu ...read more
CERN, which houses the Large Hadron Collider. (Credit: Dominionart/Shutterstock)
When hydrogen atoms fuse together, they release a vast amount of energy. That’s the principle that makes hydrogen bombs so frighteningly powerful, and it’s part of what powers our sun as well. Now, researchers from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they’ve uncovered a kind of theoretical particle fusion that’s almost eight times more energetic than the fusion of two hydrogen atoms.
T ...read more
An artist’s impression of the dust belts around Proxima Centauri. (Credit: ESO)
Our nearest neighboring star just got a whole lot richer as a system—and a whole lot weirder.
In research published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers from the European Southern Observatory announced … quite a few things, really. The biggest and brightest—literally—of their discoveries is a ring of icy dust around our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, that’s s ...read more
