Despite being about as familiar and as commonplace as you can get, we still don’t have a clear understanding of why humans yawn.
We know we start yawning early. We know we yawn when we’re tired. We know we yawn when we’re bored. And we know that yawning can sometimes be contagious. But the function, the why, has been elusive.
A new paper by Giganti and Zilli ties together a couple of yawning’s features: that the amount people yawn varies throughout the day, and that yawns can be contagious. But does the contagiousness of yawns vary throughout the day? (…)
They tested their subjects several times on a single day. (…) Yawns are most contagious at 7:30 pm. (…)
The paper suggests there are at least two kinds of yawns, a spontaneous yawn and a yawn in a social setting. Maybe the reason yawns have thwarted our efforts to understand them is that a single explanation for yawns you make alone completely fail when you try to apply it to yawns you make around other people.
For many people, the holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year. For University of Minnesota economist Joel Waldfogel, it’s the most wasteful. The problem is in the gift-giving, says Waldfogel, who highlights the fact that gifts frequently “leave recipients less than satisfied, creating what economists call a ‘deadweight loss,’” (defined as: a loss to one party that is not offset by a benefit to another). In other words, from the standpoint of economic theory, gifts are often poorly matched with the recipient’s preferences, so holiday gift-giving results in what Waldfogel calls “an orgy of value destruction.”
Did you know the Office of National Drug Control Policy has a publicly-accessible database of “street terms” for drugs? It’s like the feds’ own Urban Dictionary. But with even less accountability and oversight! (…)
Author: Doctor who writes illegal prescriptions Boo boo bama: Marijuana Dream gun: Opium Gangster pills: Depressants Oyster stew: Cocaine Raspberry: Female who trades sex for crack or money to buy crack Strawberry: LSD; female who trades sex for crack or money to buy crack Toucher: User of crack who wants affection before, during, or after smoking crack Twin towers: Heroin (after September 11) Zoomer: Individual who sells fake crack and then flees
The nominal price rigidity you describe is remarkable and unusual. If the price of weed had increased in line with US consumer price inflation, you’d be paying $20–$25 a gramme now. So I agree, it is a puzzle.
My guess is that the illegality of the market gives a push towards the price stickiness you have encountered. Buying and selling cannabis is hazardous and there must be a benefit to a situation where nobody haggles over the price.
Still, the nominal price wouldn’t stick like that unless supply and demand were at least roughly in balance at $10 a gramme. And I confess, I am perplexed. My own research, which has been purely academic, suggests that prices vary between £20 and £250 an ounce in the UK, roughly £1 to £10 a gramme. Since the price stability you describe is not matched in other markets, could it be purely fortuitous?
Natural selection acts by winnowing the individuals of each generation, sometimes clumsily, as old parts and genes are co-opted for new roles. As a result, all species inhabit bodies imperfect for the lives they live. Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day. Here are ten. (…)
2. Hiccups
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away. (…)
6. We’re awfully cold in winter
Fur is a warm hug on a cold day, useful and nearly ubiquitous among mammals. But we and a few other species, such as naked mole rats, lost it when we lived in tropical environments. Debate remains as to why this happened, but the most plausible explanation is that when modern humans began to live in larger groups, our hair filled with more and more ticks and lice. Individuals with less hair were perhaps less likely to get parasite-borne diseases. Being hairless in Africa was not so bad, but once we moved into Arctic lands, it had real drawbacks.
7. Goosebumps don’t really help
When our ancestors were covered in fur, muscles in their skin called “arrector pili” contracted when they were upset or cold, making their fur stand on end. When an angry or frightened dog barks at you, these are the muscles that raise its bristling hair. The same muscles puff up the feathers of birds and the fur of mammals on cold days to help keep them warm. Although we no longer have fur, we still have fur muscles just beneath our skin. They flex each time we are scared by a bristling dog or chilled by a wind, and in doing so give us goose bumps that make our thin hair stand uselessly on end.
8. Our brains squeeze our teeth
A genetic mutation in our recent ancestors caused their descendants to have roomy skulls that accommodated larger brains. This may seem like pure success—brilliance, or its antecedent anyway. But the gene that made way for a larger brain did so by diverting bone away from our jaws, which caused them to become thinner and smaller. With smaller jaws, we could not eat tough food as easily as our thicker-jawed ancestors, but we could think our way out of that problem with the use of fire and stone tools. Yet because our teeth are roughly the same size as they have long been, our shrinking jaws don’t leave enough room for them in our mouths. Our wisdom teeth need to be pulled because our brains are too big.
4. Metaflex Future Camouflage
Scientists in Scotland are working on advancing camouflage by creating a material called Metaflex. This material acts as a Harry Potter-esque invisible cloak. The wearer appears invisible because the Metaflex material bends light as it hits its surface. The “invisibility cloaks” are being tested this year and could potentially be used as a defense weapon. (…)
9. Hybrid Insect MEMS
The HI-MEMS is part insect, part machine. First, a micro-mechanical system is placed inside the insect during early stages of metamorphosis. The bugs operate similarly to a remote control car — the goal is to be able to control the bugs movement and location through the implanted microsystem. HI-MEMS will be used for gathering information using its sensors, such as a microphone or a gas detector. Debut date unknown.
10. DREAD Silent Weapon System
The DREAD Silent Weapon System has the ability to shoot off 120,000 rounds per minute. The gun runs fully on electrical energy, not gunpowder, which means no recoil, no sound, and no heat. Debut date unknown.
Women are getting as good as they’re giving. By ages 25-29, 88 percent say they’ve received oral sex from a man, and 72 percent say they’ve received it in the last year. (…)
In 1992, 16 percent of women aged 18-24 said they’d tried anal sex. Now 20 percent of women aged 18-19 say they’ve done it, and by ages 20-24, the number is 40 percent. In 1992, the highest percentage of women in any age group who admitted to anal sex was 33. In 2002, it was 35. Now it’s 46. (…)
Among women who had vaginal sex in their last encounter, the percentage who said they reached orgasm was 65. Among those who received oral sex, it was 81. But among those who had anal sex, it was 94. Anal sex outscored cunnilingus.
Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.
Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.
Study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems. The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower.
There is also evidence from a study with animals in zoos in Japan that elephants have considerable numerical skills.
Elephants have proved adept at recognising the difference between two quantities of objects as they were placed into buckets. It is a test which has also been done with a range of primates, including human children.
According to Professor Byrne, elephants outperformed all those other species. “Their abilities didn’t seem to be limited in quite the same way as monkeys, apes and children would be.”
Because of accelerating technological progress, humankind may be rapidly approaching a critical phase in its career. In addition to well-known threats such as nuclear holocaust, the prospects of radically transforming technologies like nanotech systems and machine intelligence present us with unprecedented opportunities and risks. Our future, and whether we will have a future at all, may well be determined by how we deal with these challenges. (…)
An existential risk is one where humankind as a whole is imperiled. (…)
We shall use the following four categories to classify existential risks:
Bangs – Earth-originating intelligent life goes extinct in relatively sudden disaster resulting from either an accident or a deliberate act of destruction.
Crunches – The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form.
Shrieks – Some form of posthumanity is attained but it is an extremely narrow band of what is possible and desirable.
Whimpers – A posthuman civilization arises but evolves in a direction that leads gradually but irrevocably to either the complete disappearance of the things we value or to a state where those things are realized to only a minuscule degree of what could have been achieved.
Armed with this taxonomy, we can begin to analyze the most likely scenarios in each category. The definitions will also be clarified as we proceed.
The name “Ukraine” literally translates as “on the edge.” It is a country on the edge of other countries, sometimes part of one, sometimes part of another and more frequently divided. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was divided between Russia, Poland and the Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century, it was divided between Russia and Austria-Hungary. And in the 20th century, save for a short period of independence after World War I, it became part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine has been on the edge of empires for centuries.
“Overeducation” is something Woody Allen seems to discern more often than the rest of us might. “I know so many people who are well-educated and super-educated,” he told an interviewer for Time recently. “Their common problem is that they have no understanding and no wisdom; without that, their education can only take them so far.” In other words they have problems with their “relationships,” they have failed to “work through” the material of their lives with a trained evaluator, they have yet to perfect the quality of their emotional consumption. Wisdom is hard to find. Happiness takes research. (…)
You could call that “overeducation,” or you could call it one more instance of “people constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,” or you could call it something else. Woody Allen often tells interviewers that his original title for Annie Hall was “Anhedonia,” which is a psychoanalytic term meaning the inability to experience pleasure.
Take a look at the periodic table and you’ll find that almost all the elements up to the atomic number 94 occur on Earth in relatively decent amounts. In addition, nuclear physicists can prepare samples of elements up to 104 because they form as by-products of the decay of other elements.
Beyond that, the so-called superheavy elements have to be made by hand, using particle accelerators to fuse nuclei together. In this way, physicists have fashioned elements with atomic numbers all the way up to 118. Atoms of these elements survive for only a fraction of a second before decaying, which is why they don’t occur naturally on Earth.
But these elements are more stable than physicists originally thought, leading to the prediction that there ought to be an “island of stability” for superheavy elements further up the periodic table.
That raises an interesting question: why don’t we see these elements on Earth? The answer, according to Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is that we do see them, but only in concentrations too small for most analytical techniques to detect.
He’s even claimed to have found the superheavy element 122 in a sample of thorium.
Today, Marinov is back with a similar claim. He says that the superheavy element 111, also known as roentgenium, is chemically similar to gold and so ought to be found in tiny quantities in any lump of gold.
Cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperature (below −150 °C, −238 °F or 123 K) and the behavior of materials at those temperatures.
The word cryogenics stems from Greek and means “the production of freezing cold”; however the term is used today as a synonym for the low-temperature state. It is not well-defined at what point on the temperature scale refrigeration ends and cryogenics begins, but most scientists assume it starts at or below -240 °F (about -150 °C or 123 K).
Quitting smoking is certainly healthy for the body, but doctors and scientists haven’t been sure whether quitting makes people happier, especially since conventional wisdom says many smokers use cigarettes to ease anxiety and depression. In a new study, researchers tracked the symptoms of depression in people who were trying to quit and found that they were never happier than when they were being successful, for however long that was.
Seek serenity to accept what you cannot change, courage to change what you can, and wisdom to know the difference. (…)
We usually have far less control over and understanding of our relations than we think. Sure we can list features we like and dislike, all else equal. And we might be mostly correct about which way those features influence our attraction. Even so, we mostly just don’t know why we like some and dislike others. Sometimes we don’t even realize who it is we like and dislike.
If we calculate that it would be in our interest to like or dislike someone more, we have only a very limited ability to actually make ourselves do this. Even when we decide we’d be better off breaking it off a relation, we can find that quite hard to actually do so. More likely we’ll break something off and then make up reasons about why that was a good idea.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think.
Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas.
