To find out just how your relaxed vacuuming schedule is affecting your baby's airway, researchers built a slightly frightening robotic infant.
This legless, metallic baby crawled across five wool rugs from real people's homes in Finland. (The grounded aluminum tape covering the robot helped to minimize static during its 25 crawling sessions of 20 minutes each.) Researchers had asked the people sharing their rugs not to vacuum for two weeks beforehand. As the robot crawled, advanc ...read more
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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine