dentists are able to tell if you’ve recently performed oral sex

Forty-three percent of Americans shopping online experienced package theft last year, up from 36 percent in 2019[NY Times]

Murderers benefits from expressing guilt and deontological beliefs — Even if participants judged a person who murdered their parents or many innocent people in a terrorist plane attack.

How Much Older Do You Get When a Wrinkle Appears on Your Face?

We are now discovering that telomeres are an unreliable ageing clock

We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April — Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

We tend to not perceive information about the world around us accurately. Instead, our brains interpret new information through a host of innate and learned mechanisms that can introduce bias and distortions One of the best studied mechanisms that guide – and distort – our perception is the psychophysical Weber-Fechner law. According to this empirically derived, mathematically formulated law we tend to put more emphasis on smaller deviations in size while underestimating larger changes. Here we investigate the hypothesis that our perception of data associated with the spread of COVID-19 and similar pandemics is governed by the same psychophysical laws. We demonstrate that the Weber-Fechner law can be shown to directly affect the decision-making of officials in response to this global crisis as well as the greater public at large.

deception is perceived to be ethical, and individuals want to be deceived, when deception is perceived to prevent unnecessary harm

In all three studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk for heart failure. Drinking a cup a day or less had no effect, but two cups a day conferred a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups or more reduced risk by 29 percent. There were not enough subjects who drank more than three cups daily to know if more coffee would decrease the risk further. [NY Times]

The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, acting as a shield against the solar wind (a stream of charged particles and radiation) that flows out from the sun. But the geomagnetic field is not stable in strength and direction, and it has the ability to flip or reverse itself. Some 42,000 years ago, the poles did just that for around 800 years, before swapping back. […] the flip, along with changing solar winds, could have triggered an array of dramatic climate shifts leading to environmental change and mass extinctions. […] experts say there is currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere — which could signal another reversal is on the cards.

“Can only have been painted by a madman” — Inscription on ‘The Scream’ That Baffled Experts for Decades Was Written by Edvard Munch Himself, New Research Shows

every day the same again | February 22nd, 2021