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Archive | Science and Such

Spring Equinox

So it’s here! Today the sun appears to drift directly over the equator. The day is roughly as long as the night in both the southern and northern hemispheres. And after today, until late June, each day in the Northern hemisphere will be a little longer than the previous day. (In the Southern hemisphere: Darkness […]

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Benford's Law

I’ve been listening to the Radiolab podcast (which is excellent). I recently listened to their issue about numbers. Some cool stuff in there, like how and when babies start to understand quantities (logarithmically and very young). The thing that interested me the most was Benford’s law. Here’s my succinct definition. BENFORD’S LAW The world prefers […]

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Genetically Modify Your Meat

I always figured that the (far) future of meat-eating would be nanotechnology. Cows are basically made of grass and water, right? I mean, they’re machines in which grass and water go in, and muscle and eyeballs and hair come out. And a blade of grass is a machine in which dirt and water and light […]

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Inflammation = Bad

Every time I turn around, I hear about inflammation. I think that inflammation is the scourge of humanity. I’m not joking. I once attended a bunch of lectures given by lots of different doctors on different subjects. The lectures were not linked by content, but practically every doctor said two things: 1. In my field, […]

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Frown Less, Feel Happier

This study showed that people who were physically unable to frown (due to botox injections) took longer to understand sad or angry statements than they did when they were frownable. Apparently, it’s not a new idea that body and facial movement helps cognition, but this is more pinpointed than other studies. The article goes on […]

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No-Sex Pregnancy

This is amazing, and I’m just going to assume it’s true because it’s on the Discover blog. The short story: * A 15 year-old girl performs oral sex on her boyfriend. * She and her boyfriend almost immediately get into a knife fight (yes) against her previous boyfriend. She suffers a serious stab wound to […]

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Ice, Ice, Baby

I was chatting with a friend about ice. In short, we talked about how interesting it is that pressure, even without heat, can melt ice. I remember an experiment where you loop a string around a block of ice, then put a weight on the bottom part of the loop, so that the string is […]

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Follow-up from Matthew Campbell

The whole child empathy thing. I wrote to the scientist who gave the lecture and he replied: There is a study that looked at contagious yawning in children of different ages. They found that children younger than 5 did not show it, so your observation fits in with this. I’m a little surprised by this […]

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