As reported by Reuters, quoting from a statement released about a study by scientists from Poland and the Czech Republic:
From a caloric perspective, a person turns out to be an average meal ... The key problem, however, lies elsewhere: the risk of infection. Pathogens have an easier task because they end up in an organism with almost identical physiology.
To quote from one report:
The poop emoji has long been the butt of countless jokes, but it turns out the little swirl isn’t a load of crap. According to physicists, the smiling pile is surprisingly faithful to the way gravity shapes the real thing.
A new study published in Nature Communications has found that the iconic soft-serve shape of the emoji closely matches how feces naturally coil when expelled under gravity. Researchers from the University of Amsterdam, Wageningen University & Research, and CNRS concluded that the familiar tapered mound is governed not by biology alone, but by a physical principle known as elastic rope-coiling theory.
As summarized in a news report:
Canadian and Swedish researchers say guppies that were shown a video stream ended up with smaller brains than guppies that were able to interact with other fish.
Also, of note, this was the headline under which the news was reported:
Hooked on reels: Fish raised on videos have smaller brains than those with friends
A few of the winner citations:
Peace Prize
“for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.”
Nutrition Prize
“for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.”
Psychology Prize
“for investigating what happens when you tell narcissists—or anyone else—that they are intelligent.”
Engineering Design Prize
“for analyzing, from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”
One award that deserves particular mention:
Literature Prize
“for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.”
So why would this have garnered a ‘literature’ prize? As explained in the Ars Technica coverage:
If you're surprised to see a study on fingernail growth rates under the Literature category, it will all make sense once you read the flowery prose stylings of Dr. Bean [the winner]. He really did keep detailed records of how fast his fingernails grew for 35 years, claiming in his final report that “the nail provides a slowly moving keratin kymograph that measures age on the inexorable abscissa of time.” He sprinkles his observations with ponderous references to medieval astrology, James Boswell, and Moby Dick, with a dash of curmudgeonly asides bemoaning the sterile modern medical teaching methods that permeate “the teeming mass of hope and pain, technical virtuosity, and depersonalization called a ‘health center.’”
A Manchester band, Bionic and the Wired, is in the news for a performance that featured a mushroom and two plants, each equipped with bionic arms, playing together.
Getting plants to individually play musical instruments has been at the heart of their efforts for some time now. In their words, “their art explores the intelligence and responsiveness of the natural world by transforming bio-electrical signals into artistic expressions”. The latest staging was, as they put it, “the largest ensemble of fungi and flora ever to perform live” using their bionic technology.
That’s according to a study published this week in the Journal of Health Psychology. To quote from a Popular Science report:
A team from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology recently conducted two experiments on a total of over 1,000 volunteers. The results, published on March 12 in the Journal of Health Psychology, suggest adding bad sleep quality on top of existing issues like depression can make people more susceptible to patently untrue conspiracies. The odds for adopting such beliefs may especially increase if tired people are exposed to conspiratorial content from outside sources as opposed to coming to similarly false conclusions on their own.
From Belgium: the local distributor of Kodak has launched a tool to help dementia patients transform their memories into images. To quote from the website:
In short, ‘Memory Shots’ is a digital tool to help trigger dementia patients’ memories of which no photographs exist, to recollect and immortalize such preserved memories in newly generated pictures, as an innovative added part to the existing ‘Reminiscence therapy’. As such, “Memory Shots” allows to reconnect and stimulates interaction with patients suffering of dementia.
A few of the winner citations:
Peace Prize
“for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.”
Anatomy Prize
“for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the Northern Hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Medicine Prize
“for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.”
Physiology Prize
“for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.”
Biology Prize
“for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow to explore how and when cows spew their milk.”
Dubbed as ‘the most beautiful sound’, it’s described as a scientific breakthrough “that will bring hope and resilience to millions of people living with cancer”. To quote a key person behind the initiative:
There’s motion and vibration within all cells, including those with cancer. Using a Stimulated Ramen scattering technique, we measured the movement of breast and lung cells at the precise moment of cellular death, and transcribed those motions into sounds you can hear. The idea of taking something invisible and giving it sound and giving it perspective, giving it the ability to be perceived struck me as something that could be very powerful for patients in their journey fighting cancer.
It’s an app intended for patients with Parkinson’s disease, that allows them to control their social media engagement using facial expressions and, thereby, slow the progression of muscle atrophy of the face (‘facial masking’), which over time results in an appearance of expressionlessness and impacts speech.
Excerpts from a report on the University of Sussex website:
University of Sussex mathematicians have developed the first ever mathematical model of how to reach sexual climax, as revealed in a new paper.
Taking inspiration from the use of maths to analyse and improve sports performance, the Sussex researchers have combined decades of data on physiological and psychological arousal to model the optimum conditions to achieve orgasm.
The study focuses on the sexual responses of men because, compared to women, they have a simpler arousal cycle and so were a good scientific starting point. Using their findings, the Sussex mathematicians are now working on a model for female satisfaction.
The paper, titled ‘Sex, ducks and rock ‘n’ roll: mathematical model of sexual response’, is published in a special issue of the journal Chaos, one of the flagship journals of the American Institute of Physics. ‘Ducks’ is a reference to the mathematical concept of ‘canards’.
To quote from a study published this week:
The link between driving a fast sports car and having a small penis is a widespread cultural trope, discussed by academics from Freudian analysts to evolutionary theorists. For the first time, we show that it is grounded in a psychological truth. We found that experimentally manipulating men, especially older men [males over 30], to feel that they have relatively small penis caused them to increase their desire for luxury sports cars.
And this is a summary of the ‘manipulation’:
In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is, reasoning that, on average, these males will feel that relatively and subjectively their own penis was smaller; compared to those told that the average penis size was smaller than true average. We then asked them to rate how much they would like to own a sports car. These facts and questions were buried amongst other items giving information and asking for product ratings, so that our hypothesis was masked from participants.
From the findings of a recent study out of Japan:
This study suggested that lack of sexual interest is a risk factor for all-cause mortality in Japanese males but not females. These findings suggest that maintaining sexual interest might increase longevity in males.
Excerpts from a report on the Ars Technica website:
Twirling parasitic worms throw dance party in man’s scrotum
When parasitic worms make it into a scrotum, they have a ball—and dance like nobody's watching.
But in a hospital in New Delhi, India, doctors were watching. And they caught the dangling disco on film, down to their lymphatic limbo line, according to a short report appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.
The thread-like parasite's penchant for pirouetting is well-established. In medical terms, ultrasound imaging of their scrotal soirées is referred to as the "filarial dance sign." As the authors of the NEJM report explain: "The dance sign represents the undulations of live worms that have migrated into lymphatic channels, causing dilation and dysfunction of the channels." (The report includes video but is behind a paywall. A similar example of the filarial dance sign can be seen here.)
In the NEJM report, the authors, Amit Sahu and Bharat Aggarwal of the Max Super Specialty Hospital in New Delhi, spied the festering festivities in a 26-year-old man, who had a one-month history of scrotal pain and swelling, as well as low-grade fevers. An ultrasound examination quickly caught the ballsy revelers responsible. Blood testing confirmed the diagnosis, and examination of the young worms identified them as Wuchereria bancrofti microfilariae.
The man was given a three-week course of the antiparasitic drug diethylcarbamazine, which can kill microfilariae and some adult worms. After that, his symptoms resolved and there were no more signs of parasitic partying.
To quote from a paper/ design proposal presented at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics:
The practice of marking territory with urine is repulsive to most people; ironically, about half of the world's population (males) inadvertently marks bathroom floors, and themselves, through unintentional urinal splash back. This problem has persisted since the invention of the urinal over a century ago. We found that when a liquid jet or droplet train impacts a rigid surface below a certain critical impinging angle, almost no splatter is generated. Thus, a surface designed to always intersect the urine stream equal to or smaller than the critical angle prevents splash back. Inspired by nautilus shells and dog urination, we designed urinal surface geometries that effectively eliminate splatter by satisfying the splash-suppressing intersect criteria.
To quote from one report of the presentation:
It’s unclear whether people using the new urinals will still somehow find a way to make a mess.
A new study on what makes some people “mosquito magnets” is making news. The study indicates that it may have to do with skin odour differences, and the level of carboxylic acid on one’s skin. The importance of that aside, the reporting makes for interesting reading.
Here’s a thought from the coverage in Scientific American:
If you find yourself covered in more bites than all of your friends, you can take solace in the idea that mosquitoes love your scent profile because it’s so distinctly human.
Here are a couple of statements attributed to one of the authors of the study:
This property of being a mosquito magnet sticks with you for your whole life—which is either good news or bad news, depending on who you are.
Mosquitoes are resilient. They have many backup plans to be able to find us and bite us.
Lest you wonder, that’s from research done on “monogamous albatrosses”- a subject that evidently some scientists consider worth studying. According to their findings, “the probability of divorce was directly affected by the environment, increasing in years with warm sea surface temperature anomalies.”
From Colombia: a portable device that provides electrical power using only salt water. As explained here:
As well as functioning as a portable lamp – half a litre of salt water placed in the device provides an incredible 45 days of light – WaterLight is also capable of charging small appliances such as a cell phone or a radio via a USB port. Perfectly suited to seawater, the device also responds to fresh water mixed with salt and even – in emergency situations – urine.
