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Take a second and try to talk about a person without mentioning gender.
If English is your native tongue, odds are you failed. But if you had been born in Indonesia, you might have succeeded.
Lera Boroditsky, who studies language and cognition at the University of California, San Diego, recalled a conversation with a colleague from the Southeast Asian country. He was asking her about someone she knew back in the states, and gender didn’t pop up until questi ...read more
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Walking and chewing gum, at various points in this nation’s history, has served as a benchmark to gauge one’s competence as a leader.
Democratic vice presidential-nominee John Edwards in 2004 assured Americans that a president must possess the ability to walk and chew gum. During that same campaign, Sen. Jim Bunning boasted to Kentuckians that he could indeed walk and chew gum. Last year, Rep. Paul Ryan promised citizens that Republicans in the Hou ...read more
A kind word or gesture from a friend can give you the warm fuzzies. But a warm, fuzzy friend can give a macaque a better chance of surviving the winter. After following dozens of macaques through snowy woods for months, scientists found that friendlier monkeys earned themselves more cuddle buddies on cold nights.
Earlier studies in macaques, baboons and even wild horses have shown that animals who are more social may live longer and have more offspring. In other w ...read more
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The stick insect may have something else in common with plants besides its stem-like looks.
Plants use wildlife to spread seeds, and, similarly, the stick insect might use wildlife to spread its eggs, a study in the journal Ecology reported this week.
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Most of a stick insect’s life is spent in a circle of trees and bushes, even for those species with wings. The insect would have an evolutionary advantage if it could disper ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
