In no particular order, here’s some interesting science!
9 - Hot Chicks Only In 2002, a group of scientists decided to do research on chickens.
Because of course, that’s one of Denmark’s biiiiigessssst priorities.The team of scientists
decided to test what chicken’s preferences were for human faces.
Seriously.
Why they needed the answer to that question, we’ll probably never know, but hey, we’re
sure someone will put the results to use!
Scientists have known for years now that chickens can recognize up to 30 other individual chickens.
But what about recognizing human faces?
The scientists trained chickens to react to either an average human male or female face.
They then showed the chickens a series of faces of different levels of attractiveness
and measured how much the chickens pecked at each face.
Surprisingly, they found that the chickens preferred the same faces as did human volunteers
who participated in the study!
The chickens pecked more times on the most symmetrical faces.
Human volunteers were asked to rate the same faces for attractiveness.
So it turns out that chickens are more shallow than we would have guessed, but hey, maybe
this suggests that the team over at Tinder whose helping us pick the best photos for
our profiles are just teams of chickens!
8 - On-off switch The eternal question, “what makes us human?”
has been paired with the mysteries of the brain for many years now.
Neuroscientists, psychologists, and doctors all over the world have tried to locate the
origin of consciousness.
So it was a giant step forward when a group of researchers at George Washington University
found what might be the on-off switch of consciousness.
The researchers tested their theory on a woman who suffered from epilepsy.
During the test, they delivered a series of high-frequency electrical impulses to the
claustrum region of her brain.
Before the electrical impulses, the woman was able to write and talk perfectly fine.
Then, during the electrical impulses, she faded out of consciousness.
She stared blankly into space and didn’t respond to what the scientists told her to
do, becoming incapable of even the most basic functions.
The moment the electrical impulses stopped, the woman regained consciousness with all
her senses intact.
She had no memory of the time during the test, feeling just like she had fallen asleep.
Now, many researchers believe this part of the brain is the key to our consciousness
and it may be the first step on reverse-engineering the brain so eventually, we can reproduce
it in AIs.
Obviously, these guys haven’t watched Terminator 2!
7 - Did it really happen?
If you like sci-fi or spy movies, this one may sound familiar.
In 2014, a team of neuroscientists discovered how to implant false memories.
Hold up, people were actually incepted?!
Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu were the first scientists ever to prove that you can trick brains into
remembering things that actually never happened!
In the experiment, they placed a rat in a small metal box with a black plastic floor
and let it take a look around.
Then, they put the rat in a completely different room and applied an electric current while
stimulating the rat’s brain to trigger memories of the box with the black floor.
Days later, they placed the rat back in the first box and watched what happened.
The rat froze in terror, because it remembered getting shocked there.
Except, it hadn’t!
The rats were associating the shock with the false memory caused by the stimulation to
their brains.
The research has ignited a lot of arguments on ethics and identity.
Up until now, no memories have been implanted in humans, but is it only a matter of time?
What do you guys think?
And when it happens, what will it say about our actual memories?
Social scientists have claimed for a long time that memory is identity.
We are what we have experienced, and what we remember.
If we can erase a bad memory, or create a good one, how can we ever know who we are?
We’ll find out in the future!
6 - Rum flavored alcohol in space When you think of astronomers, there’s one
thing that comes to mind right away.
Total party animals.
Oh wait, maybe that’s just us!
Also, that’s because you most likely haven’t heard this story yet.
Back In 2009, while scanning space for floating amino-acids, which are the building blocks
of life, a group of astronomers found out that the heart of our galaxy smells like raspberries…...and
rum.
Somehow, the Milky Way is more “boozy” than “milky”!
Astronomers were sifting through signals coming from Sagittarius B2, a dust cloud close to
our galaxy’s center.
They found ethyl formate, a chemical that gives raspberries their flavor, and rum its
scent.
Scientists actually hope that this is the first of many of the sought-after amino acids
they’re looking for in space.
Astrobiologists claim that finding amino-acids would probably mean there are proteins out
there, and proteins mean life.
Do you guys think that aliens exist out there?
Be sure to leave a comment on what you think!
Aside from the strong smell of rum, astronomers also found evidence of propyl cyanide, a highly
lethal gas.
So, yeah, that area isn’t exactly party central quite just yet, but maybe one day
it will be with all those amino acids floating around!
5 - Fear Factor It seems like there’s a phobia for everything:
spiders, snakes, clowns, storms, lightning, oceans, small places…...the list goes on
and on.
The part of our brain responsible for fear is the amygdala, an almond-shaped region in
our brain.
However, there are some people whose amygdalas don’t function properly.
These people supposedly just don’t get scared about anything.
Rare illnesses such as Urbach-Wiethe disease can change people’s amygdalas so they don’t
perceive fear the same way everyone else does.
So scientists began to wonder if all we had to fear was really the amygdala itself.
A team of psychologists decided to see if there’s any way to induce fear in people
that are supposedly fearless.
They did this by testing people suffering from Urbach-Wiethe disease.
One situation in which the amygdala triggers fear is when the body detects unusually high
concentrations of carbon dioxide.
The psychologists predicted that patients with damaged amygdalas wouldn’t feel fear
after inhaling CO2.
However, to their surprise, they found out that their test subjects actually began feeling
fear for the first time in a long time!
The findings suggests that our brain has more than one way to process and experience terror,
in areas of our brain other than just the amygdala!
4 - Fear Factor 2 Since we’re on the subject of fear, let’s
continue talking about it!
Fear and anxiety, as well as phobias, are extremely common.
Psychologists have known for a long time that anxiety and fear are rooted in emotional memory.
So a supposedly harmless situation can look very dangerous to someone who’s been in
a similar situation before.
Fear also has as much to do with imagination as memory, so many people fear things they’ve
never experienced.
Research suggests that it may be possible to completely get rid of fear!
Merel Kindt, a psychology professor in Amsterdam, may have found a way for people to get rid
of their phobias.
Back in 2015, She worked on people with arachnophobia, or the fear of spiders.
She compared three groups made up of 45 subjects in total.
One group was exposed to a tarantula in a glass jar for two minutes, and then given
a beta-blocker called propranolol, which is commonly prescribed to patients with anxiety.
One group was exposed to the tarantula and given a placebo.
The last group was just given propranolol without being shown the spider, to rule out
the possibility that propranolol by itself could decrease spider fear.
The group who got the propranolol alone and those who got the placebo had no improvement
in their anxiety.
But the arachnophobes who were exposed to the spider AND given the drug were able to
touch the tarantula within days!
In fact, by the end of the study, many test subjects were comfortable enough holding the
spider with their bare hands!
These studies suggest that someday, a single dose of a drug, combined with exposure to
the person’s fear at the right moment, could free that person of that fear forever.
How effective can this be?
Only time can tell!
3 - Color effect
As crazy as it may sound, people have been taking some form of pills for thousands of
years.
Ancient Egyptians mixed medicinal ingredients with white clay and packed them into little
round balls.
However, during that time, pills stayed white up until the 20th century.
Obviously, technology has made our lives better.
Sometimes, it’s in ways we don’t always notice, and colored pills are one of those
ways.
Starting in the 60s, pharmaceutical products started appearing in every color of the rainbow.
Now, there are more than 80,000 color combinations available for tinted pills and gel caps.
But of all the problems to solve, why waste time making medicine look better?
Well, scientists found out that we associate a drug’s color with its effects.
Basically, color tricks our brains into believing that pills are working, even though the color
has nothing to do with the active ingredient.
So, really, big pharma kinda invented the Placebo Effect!
Researchers have shown that people will choose red and pink pills before any other.
The color blue often makes people sleepy, so blue sleeping pills could enhance the effect.
Red and orange act like stimulants, making people want to get up and move.
Bright yellow is the perfect color for antidepressants, because it reminds people of the sun, and
green reduces anxiety because it’s the color of nature.
2 - Clear As Day Back in 2016, the internet was amazed over the discovery of a freaky
new frog species.
According to The Daily Mail, a team of Russian scientists found mutant frogs with see-through
skin and pink bones!
And when we say see-through, we mean completely transparent.
The article had photos of the animals and said that the Russians had discovered a medium-sized
population of the ghostly amphibians, and had even collected a few samples.
Wellllllll, it turns out, IT’S FAKE NEWS!
The frogs looked nothing like in the pictures when they were alive.
It turns out that the photos used by The Daily Mail were frogs that had been diaphonized,
or, in layman’s terms, “cleared and stained”.
This process turns the soft tissues of an animal completely transparent, while turning
the bones into a bright neon hue.
This allows researchers to look at the inside of an animal without dissecting it.
Unfortunately, this means there aren’t any see-through frogs walking around, but we do
have to say that diaphonized animals are still extremely cool to look at.
1 - Too Much Drip Many of us don’t know anything about the
real-life inventors that make our lives easier.
Daniel Perlman is one of those people.
With more than 100 patents to his name, he has created everything from specialized lab
equipment to the “healthy fats” in Smart Balance margarine, to a miniaturized radon
detector for use in homes.
But his latest invention may just be the best one yet for OCD people: the drip-free wine
bottle.
Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but drips are the bane of every wine drinker’s existence.
When wine is poured into a glass, drops will run down the neck of the bottle.
He designed a bottle with a small incision, just 2 millimeters wide, below the lip.
When a drop hits the groove, it won’t be able to get past it.
Bam, no more spilled wine!
Now, Perlman is speaking to bottle manufacturers all over the world to change the design of
their bottles.
Here’s what’s next!