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Lucas Franki is an associate editor for MDedge News, and has been with the company since 2014. He has a BA in English from Penn State University and is an Eagle Scout.
The neurological super powers of grandma are real
Deer, COVID, how?
Usually humans cannot get close enough to a deer to really be face-to-face, so it’s easy to question how on Earth deer are contracting COVID-19. Well, stranger things have happened, and honestly, we’ve just stopped questioning most of them.
Exhibit A comes to us from a Penn State University study: Eighty percent of deer sampled in Iowa in December 2020 and January 2021 – as part of the state’s chronic wasting disease surveillance program – were found to be positive for COVID-19.
A statement from the university said that “white-tailed deer may be a reservoir for the virus to continually circulate and raise concerns about the emergence of new strains that may prove a threat to wildlife and, possibly, to humans.” The investigators also suggested that deer probably caught the virus from humans and then transmitted it to other deer.
If you or someone you know is a hunter or a white-tailed deer, it’s best to proceed with caution. There’s no evidence that COVID-19 has jumped from deer to humans, but hunters should wear masks and gloves while working with deer, worrying not just about the deer’s face, but also … you know, the gastrointestinal parts, Robert Salata, MD, of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, told Syracuse.com. It also shouldn’t be too risky to eat venison, he said, just make sure the meat is cooked thoroughly.
The more you know!
The neurological super powers of grandma are real
What is it about grandmothers that makes them seem almost magical at times? They somehow always know how you feel. And they can almost always tell when something is wrong. They also seem to be the biggest ally a child will have against his or her parents.
So what makes these super matriarchs? The answer is in the brain.
Apparently there’s a function in the brains of grandmothers geared toward “emotional empathy.” James Rilling, PhD, of Emory University, lead author of a recent study focused on looking at the brain function of grandmothers, suggested that they’re neurologically tapped into feeling how their grandchildren feel: “If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.”
And then there’s the cute factor. Never underestimate a child’s ability to manipulate his or her grandmother’s brain.
So how do the researchers know this? Functional MRI showed more brain activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotional empathy and movement in the participating grandmas when shown pictures of their grandchildren. Images of their own adult children lit up areas more associated with cognitive empathy. So less emotional and more mental/logical understanding.
Kids, don’t tell Mom about the secret midnight snacks with grandma. She wouldn’t get it.
Then there’s the grandmother hypothesis, which suggests that women tend to live longer to provide some kind of evolutionary benefit to their children and grandchildren. Evidence also exists that children with positive engagement from their grandmothers tend to have better social and academic outcomes, behavior, and physical health.
A lot of credit on how children turn out, of course, goes to parents, but more can be said about grandmas. Don’t let the age and freshly baked cookies fool you. They have neurologic superpowers within.
Brain cleanup on aisle 5
You’ve got your local grocery store down. You know the ins and outs; you know where everything is. Last week you did your trip in record time. This week, however, you have to stop at a different store. Same chain, but a different location. You stroll in, confidently walk toward the first aisle for your fruits and veggies, and ... it’s all ice cream. Oops.
There’s a lot we don’t understand about the brain, including how it remembers familiar environments to avoid confusion. Or why it fails to do so, as with our grocery store example. However, thanks to a study from the University of Arizona, we may have an answer.
For the experiment, a group of participants watched a video tour of three virtual cities. Those cities were very similar, being laid out in basically identical fashion. Stores could be found in the same places, but the identity of those stores varied. Some stores were in all three cities, some were in two, and some were unique. Participants were asked to memorize the layouts, and those who got things more than 80% correct ran through the test again, only this time their brain activity was monitored through MRI.
In general, brain activity was similar for the participants; after all, they were recalling similar environments. However, when asked about stores that appeared in multiple cities, brain activity varied dramatically. This indicated to the researchers that the brain was recalling shared stores as if they were more dissimilar than two completely disparate and unique stores, a concept often known to brain scientists as “repulsion.” It also indicates that the memories regarding shared environments are stored in the prefrontal cortex, not the hippocampus, which typically handles memory.
The researchers plan to apply this information to questions about diseases such as Alzheimer’s, so the next time you get turned around in a weirdly unfamiliar grocery store, just think: “It’s okay, I’m helping to solve a terrible brain disease.”
The real endgame: Friction is the winner
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen “Avengers: Infinity War” yet, we’re about to ruin it for you.
For those still with us, here’s the spoiler: Thanos would not have been able to snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.
Saad Bhamla, PhD, of Georgia Tech University’s school of chemical and biomolecular engineering, had been studying powerful and ultrafast motions in living organisms along with several colleagues before the movie came out in 2018, and when they saw the finger-snapping scene it got them wondering.
Being scientists of course, they had no choice. They got out their high-speed imaging equipment, automated image processing software, and dynamic force sensors and analyzed finger snaps, paying close attention to friction by covering fingers with “different materials, including metallic thimbles to simulate the effects of trying to snap while wearing a metallic gauntlet, much like Thanos,” according to a statement on Eurekalert.
With finger snaps, it’s all about the rotational velocity. The angular acceleration involved is the fastest ever measured in a human, with a professional baseball pitcher’s throwing arm a distant second.
Dr. Bhamla’s reaction to their work explains why scientists are the ones doing science. “When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair,” he said in the written statement.
Rotational velocities dropped dramatically when the friction-reducing thimbles were used, so there was no snap. Which means that billions and billions of fictional lives could have been saved if the filmmakers had just talked to the right scientist.
That scientist, clearly, is Dr. Bhamla, who said that “this is the only scientific project in my lab in which we could snap our fingers and get data.”
Deer, COVID, how?
Usually humans cannot get close enough to a deer to really be face-to-face, so it’s easy to question how on Earth deer are contracting COVID-19. Well, stranger things have happened, and honestly, we’ve just stopped questioning most of them.
Exhibit A comes to us from a Penn State University study: Eighty percent of deer sampled in Iowa in December 2020 and January 2021 – as part of the state’s chronic wasting disease surveillance program – were found to be positive for COVID-19.
A statement from the university said that “white-tailed deer may be a reservoir for the virus to continually circulate and raise concerns about the emergence of new strains that may prove a threat to wildlife and, possibly, to humans.” The investigators also suggested that deer probably caught the virus from humans and then transmitted it to other deer.
If you or someone you know is a hunter or a white-tailed deer, it’s best to proceed with caution. There’s no evidence that COVID-19 has jumped from deer to humans, but hunters should wear masks and gloves while working with deer, worrying not just about the deer’s face, but also … you know, the gastrointestinal parts, Robert Salata, MD, of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, told Syracuse.com. It also shouldn’t be too risky to eat venison, he said, just make sure the meat is cooked thoroughly.
The more you know!
The neurological super powers of grandma are real
What is it about grandmothers that makes them seem almost magical at times? They somehow always know how you feel. And they can almost always tell when something is wrong. They also seem to be the biggest ally a child will have against his or her parents.
So what makes these super matriarchs? The answer is in the brain.
Apparently there’s a function in the brains of grandmothers geared toward “emotional empathy.” James Rilling, PhD, of Emory University, lead author of a recent study focused on looking at the brain function of grandmothers, suggested that they’re neurologically tapped into feeling how their grandchildren feel: “If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.”
And then there’s the cute factor. Never underestimate a child’s ability to manipulate his or her grandmother’s brain.
So how do the researchers know this? Functional MRI showed more brain activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotional empathy and movement in the participating grandmas when shown pictures of their grandchildren. Images of their own adult children lit up areas more associated with cognitive empathy. So less emotional and more mental/logical understanding.
Kids, don’t tell Mom about the secret midnight snacks with grandma. She wouldn’t get it.
Then there’s the grandmother hypothesis, which suggests that women tend to live longer to provide some kind of evolutionary benefit to their children and grandchildren. Evidence also exists that children with positive engagement from their grandmothers tend to have better social and academic outcomes, behavior, and physical health.
A lot of credit on how children turn out, of course, goes to parents, but more can be said about grandmas. Don’t let the age and freshly baked cookies fool you. They have neurologic superpowers within.
Brain cleanup on aisle 5
You’ve got your local grocery store down. You know the ins and outs; you know where everything is. Last week you did your trip in record time. This week, however, you have to stop at a different store. Same chain, but a different location. You stroll in, confidently walk toward the first aisle for your fruits and veggies, and ... it’s all ice cream. Oops.
There’s a lot we don’t understand about the brain, including how it remembers familiar environments to avoid confusion. Or why it fails to do so, as with our grocery store example. However, thanks to a study from the University of Arizona, we may have an answer.
For the experiment, a group of participants watched a video tour of three virtual cities. Those cities were very similar, being laid out in basically identical fashion. Stores could be found in the same places, but the identity of those stores varied. Some stores were in all three cities, some were in two, and some were unique. Participants were asked to memorize the layouts, and those who got things more than 80% correct ran through the test again, only this time their brain activity was monitored through MRI.
In general, brain activity was similar for the participants; after all, they were recalling similar environments. However, when asked about stores that appeared in multiple cities, brain activity varied dramatically. This indicated to the researchers that the brain was recalling shared stores as if they were more dissimilar than two completely disparate and unique stores, a concept often known to brain scientists as “repulsion.” It also indicates that the memories regarding shared environments are stored in the prefrontal cortex, not the hippocampus, which typically handles memory.
The researchers plan to apply this information to questions about diseases such as Alzheimer’s, so the next time you get turned around in a weirdly unfamiliar grocery store, just think: “It’s okay, I’m helping to solve a terrible brain disease.”
The real endgame: Friction is the winner
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen “Avengers: Infinity War” yet, we’re about to ruin it for you.
For those still with us, here’s the spoiler: Thanos would not have been able to snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.
Saad Bhamla, PhD, of Georgia Tech University’s school of chemical and biomolecular engineering, had been studying powerful and ultrafast motions in living organisms along with several colleagues before the movie came out in 2018, and when they saw the finger-snapping scene it got them wondering.
Being scientists of course, they had no choice. They got out their high-speed imaging equipment, automated image processing software, and dynamic force sensors and analyzed finger snaps, paying close attention to friction by covering fingers with “different materials, including metallic thimbles to simulate the effects of trying to snap while wearing a metallic gauntlet, much like Thanos,” according to a statement on Eurekalert.
With finger snaps, it’s all about the rotational velocity. The angular acceleration involved is the fastest ever measured in a human, with a professional baseball pitcher’s throwing arm a distant second.
Dr. Bhamla’s reaction to their work explains why scientists are the ones doing science. “When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair,” he said in the written statement.
Rotational velocities dropped dramatically when the friction-reducing thimbles were used, so there was no snap. Which means that billions and billions of fictional lives could have been saved if the filmmakers had just talked to the right scientist.
That scientist, clearly, is Dr. Bhamla, who said that “this is the only scientific project in my lab in which we could snap our fingers and get data.”
Deer, COVID, how?
Usually humans cannot get close enough to a deer to really be face-to-face, so it’s easy to question how on Earth deer are contracting COVID-19. Well, stranger things have happened, and honestly, we’ve just stopped questioning most of them.
Exhibit A comes to us from a Penn State University study: Eighty percent of deer sampled in Iowa in December 2020 and January 2021 – as part of the state’s chronic wasting disease surveillance program – were found to be positive for COVID-19.
A statement from the university said that “white-tailed deer may be a reservoir for the virus to continually circulate and raise concerns about the emergence of new strains that may prove a threat to wildlife and, possibly, to humans.” The investigators also suggested that deer probably caught the virus from humans and then transmitted it to other deer.
If you or someone you know is a hunter or a white-tailed deer, it’s best to proceed with caution. There’s no evidence that COVID-19 has jumped from deer to humans, but hunters should wear masks and gloves while working with deer, worrying not just about the deer’s face, but also … you know, the gastrointestinal parts, Robert Salata, MD, of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, told Syracuse.com. It also shouldn’t be too risky to eat venison, he said, just make sure the meat is cooked thoroughly.
The more you know!
The neurological super powers of grandma are real
What is it about grandmothers that makes them seem almost magical at times? They somehow always know how you feel. And they can almost always tell when something is wrong. They also seem to be the biggest ally a child will have against his or her parents.
So what makes these super matriarchs? The answer is in the brain.
Apparently there’s a function in the brains of grandmothers geared toward “emotional empathy.” James Rilling, PhD, of Emory University, lead author of a recent study focused on looking at the brain function of grandmothers, suggested that they’re neurologically tapped into feeling how their grandchildren feel: “If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.”
And then there’s the cute factor. Never underestimate a child’s ability to manipulate his or her grandmother’s brain.
So how do the researchers know this? Functional MRI showed more brain activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotional empathy and movement in the participating grandmas when shown pictures of their grandchildren. Images of their own adult children lit up areas more associated with cognitive empathy. So less emotional and more mental/logical understanding.
Kids, don’t tell Mom about the secret midnight snacks with grandma. She wouldn’t get it.
Then there’s the grandmother hypothesis, which suggests that women tend to live longer to provide some kind of evolutionary benefit to their children and grandchildren. Evidence also exists that children with positive engagement from their grandmothers tend to have better social and academic outcomes, behavior, and physical health.
A lot of credit on how children turn out, of course, goes to parents, but more can be said about grandmas. Don’t let the age and freshly baked cookies fool you. They have neurologic superpowers within.
Brain cleanup on aisle 5
You’ve got your local grocery store down. You know the ins and outs; you know where everything is. Last week you did your trip in record time. This week, however, you have to stop at a different store. Same chain, but a different location. You stroll in, confidently walk toward the first aisle for your fruits and veggies, and ... it’s all ice cream. Oops.
There’s a lot we don’t understand about the brain, including how it remembers familiar environments to avoid confusion. Or why it fails to do so, as with our grocery store example. However, thanks to a study from the University of Arizona, we may have an answer.
For the experiment, a group of participants watched a video tour of three virtual cities. Those cities were very similar, being laid out in basically identical fashion. Stores could be found in the same places, but the identity of those stores varied. Some stores were in all three cities, some were in two, and some were unique. Participants were asked to memorize the layouts, and those who got things more than 80% correct ran through the test again, only this time their brain activity was monitored through MRI.
In general, brain activity was similar for the participants; after all, they were recalling similar environments. However, when asked about stores that appeared in multiple cities, brain activity varied dramatically. This indicated to the researchers that the brain was recalling shared stores as if they were more dissimilar than two completely disparate and unique stores, a concept often known to brain scientists as “repulsion.” It also indicates that the memories regarding shared environments are stored in the prefrontal cortex, not the hippocampus, which typically handles memory.
The researchers plan to apply this information to questions about diseases such as Alzheimer’s, so the next time you get turned around in a weirdly unfamiliar grocery store, just think: “It’s okay, I’m helping to solve a terrible brain disease.”
The real endgame: Friction is the winner
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen “Avengers: Infinity War” yet, we’re about to ruin it for you.
For those still with us, here’s the spoiler: Thanos would not have been able to snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.
Saad Bhamla, PhD, of Georgia Tech University’s school of chemical and biomolecular engineering, had been studying powerful and ultrafast motions in living organisms along with several colleagues before the movie came out in 2018, and when they saw the finger-snapping scene it got them wondering.
Being scientists of course, they had no choice. They got out their high-speed imaging equipment, automated image processing software, and dynamic force sensors and analyzed finger snaps, paying close attention to friction by covering fingers with “different materials, including metallic thimbles to simulate the effects of trying to snap while wearing a metallic gauntlet, much like Thanos,” according to a statement on Eurekalert.
With finger snaps, it’s all about the rotational velocity. The angular acceleration involved is the fastest ever measured in a human, with a professional baseball pitcher’s throwing arm a distant second.
Dr. Bhamla’s reaction to their work explains why scientists are the ones doing science. “When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair,” he said in the written statement.
Rotational velocities dropped dramatically when the friction-reducing thimbles were used, so there was no snap. Which means that billions and billions of fictional lives could have been saved if the filmmakers had just talked to the right scientist.
That scientist, clearly, is Dr. Bhamla, who said that “this is the only scientific project in my lab in which we could snap our fingers and get data.”
Step right up, folks, for a public dissection
The greatest autopsy on Earth?
The LOTME staff would like to apologize in advance. The following item contains historical facts.
P.T. Barnum is a rather controversial figure in American history. The greatest show on Earth was certainly popular in its day. However, Barnum got his start in 1835 by leasing a slave named Joyce Heth, an elderly Black woman who told vivid stories of caring for a young George Washington. He toured her around the country, advertising her as a 160-year-old woman who served as George Washington’s nanny. When Ms. Heth died the next year, Barnum sold tickets to the autopsy, charging the equivalent of $30 in today’s money.
When a doctor announced that Ms. Heth was actually 75-80 when she died, it caused great controversy in the press and ruined Barnum’s career. Wait, no, that’s not right. The opposite, actually. He weathered the storm, built his famous circus, and never again committed a hoax.
It’s difficult to quantify how wrong publicly dissecting a person and charging people to see said dissection is, but that was almost 200 years ago. At the very least, we can say that such terrible behavior is firmly in the distant past.
Oh wait.
David Saunders, a 98-year-old veteran of World War II and the Korean War, donated his body to science. His body, however, was purchased by DeathScience.org from a medical lab – with the buyer supposedly misleading the medical lab about its intentions, which was for use at the traveling Oddities and Curiosities Expo. Tickets went for up to $500 each to witness the public autopsy of Mr. Saunders’ body, which took place at a Marriott in Portland, Ore. It promised to be an exciting, all-day event from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a break for lunch, of course. You can’t have an autopsy without a catered lunch.
Another public autopsy event was scheduled in Seattle but canceled after news of the first event broke. Oh, and for that extra little kick, Mr. Saunders died from COVID-19, meaning that all those paying customers were exposed.
P.T. Barnum is probably rolling over in his grave right now. His autopsy tickets were a bargain.
Go ahead, have that soda before math
We should all know by now that sugary drinks are bad, even artificially sweetened ones. It might not always stop us from drinking them, but we know the deal. But what if sugary drinks like soda could be helpful for girls in school?
You read that right. We said girls. A soda before class might have boys bouncing off the walls, but not girls. A recent study showed that not only was girls’ behavior unaffected by having a sugary drink, their math skills even improved.
Researchers analyzed the behavior of 4- to 6-year-old children before and after having a sugary drink. The sugar rush was actually calming for girls and helped them perform better with numerical skills, but the opposite was true for boys. “Our study is the first to provide large-scale experimental evidence on the impact of sugary drinks on preschool children. The results clearly indicate a causal impact of sugary drinks on children’s behavior and test scores,” Fritz Schiltz, PhD, said in a written statement.
This probably isn’t the green light to have as many sugary drinks as you want, but it might be interesting to see how your work is affected after a soda.
Chicken nuggets and the meat paradox
Two young children are fighting over the last chicken nugget when an adult comes in to see what’s going on.
Liam: Vegetable!
Olivia: Meat!
Liam: Chicken nuggets are vegetables!
Olivia: No, dorkface! They’re meat.
Caregiver: Good news, kids. You’re both right.
Olivia: How can we both be right?
At this point, a woman enters the room. She’s wearing a white lab coat, so she must be a scientist.
Dr. Scientist: You can’t both be right, Olivia. You are being fed a serving of the meat paradox. That’s why Liam here doesn’t know that chicken nuggets are made of chicken, which is a form of meat. Sadly, he’s not the only one.
In a recent study, scientists from Furman University in Greenville, S.C., found that 38% of 176 children aged 4-7 years thought that chicken nuggets were vegetables and more than 46% identified French fries as animal based.
Olivia: Did our caregiver lie to us, Dr. Scientist?
Dr. Scientist: Yes, Olivia. The researchers I mentioned explained that “many people experience unease while eating meat. Omnivores eat foods that entail animal suffering and death while at the same time endorsing the compassionate treatment of animals.” That’s the meat paradox.
Liam: What else did they say, Dr. Scientist?
Dr. Scientist: Over 70% of those children said that cows and pigs were not edible and 5% thought that cats and horses were. The investigators wrote “that children and youth should be viewed as agents of environmental change” in the future, but suggested that parents need to bring honesty to the table.
Caregiver: How did you get in here anyway? And how do you know their names?
Dr. Scientist: I’ve been rooting through your garbage for years. All in the name of science, of course.
Bedtimes aren’t just for children
There are multiple ways to prevent heart disease, but what if it could be as easy as switching your bedtime? A recent study in European Heart Journal–Digital Health suggests that there’s a sweet spot when it comes to sleep timing.
Through smartwatch-like devices, researchers measured the sleep-onset and wake-up times for 7 days in 88,026 participants aged 43-79 years. After 5.7 years of follow-up to see if anyone had a heart attack, stroke, or any other cardiovascular event, 3.6% developed some kind of cardiovascular disease.
Those who went to bed between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. had a lower risk of developing heart disease. The risk was 25% higher for subjects who went to bed at midnight or later, 24% higher for bedtimes before 10 p.m., and 12% higher for bedtimes between 11 p.m. and midnight.
So, why can you go to bed before “The Tonight Show” and lower your cardiovascular risk but not before the nightly news? Well, it has something to do with your body’s natural clock.
“The optimum time to go to sleep is at a specific point in the body’s 24-hour cycle and deviations may be detrimental to health. The riskiest time was after midnight, potentially because it may reduce the likelihood of seeing morning light, which resets the body clock,” said study author Dr. David Plans of the University of Exeter, England.
Although a sleep schedule is preferred, it isn’t realistic all the time for those in certain occupations who might have to resort to other methods to keep their circadian clocks ticking optimally for their health. But if all it takes is prescribing a sleep time to reduce heart disease on a massive scale it would make a great “low-cost public health target.”
So bedtimes aren’t just for children.
The greatest autopsy on Earth?
The LOTME staff would like to apologize in advance. The following item contains historical facts.
P.T. Barnum is a rather controversial figure in American history. The greatest show on Earth was certainly popular in its day. However, Barnum got his start in 1835 by leasing a slave named Joyce Heth, an elderly Black woman who told vivid stories of caring for a young George Washington. He toured her around the country, advertising her as a 160-year-old woman who served as George Washington’s nanny. When Ms. Heth died the next year, Barnum sold tickets to the autopsy, charging the equivalent of $30 in today’s money.
When a doctor announced that Ms. Heth was actually 75-80 when she died, it caused great controversy in the press and ruined Barnum’s career. Wait, no, that’s not right. The opposite, actually. He weathered the storm, built his famous circus, and never again committed a hoax.
It’s difficult to quantify how wrong publicly dissecting a person and charging people to see said dissection is, but that was almost 200 years ago. At the very least, we can say that such terrible behavior is firmly in the distant past.
Oh wait.
David Saunders, a 98-year-old veteran of World War II and the Korean War, donated his body to science. His body, however, was purchased by DeathScience.org from a medical lab – with the buyer supposedly misleading the medical lab about its intentions, which was for use at the traveling Oddities and Curiosities Expo. Tickets went for up to $500 each to witness the public autopsy of Mr. Saunders’ body, which took place at a Marriott in Portland, Ore. It promised to be an exciting, all-day event from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a break for lunch, of course. You can’t have an autopsy without a catered lunch.
Another public autopsy event was scheduled in Seattle but canceled after news of the first event broke. Oh, and for that extra little kick, Mr. Saunders died from COVID-19, meaning that all those paying customers were exposed.
P.T. Barnum is probably rolling over in his grave right now. His autopsy tickets were a bargain.
Go ahead, have that soda before math
We should all know by now that sugary drinks are bad, even artificially sweetened ones. It might not always stop us from drinking them, but we know the deal. But what if sugary drinks like soda could be helpful for girls in school?
You read that right. We said girls. A soda before class might have boys bouncing off the walls, but not girls. A recent study showed that not only was girls’ behavior unaffected by having a sugary drink, their math skills even improved.
Researchers analyzed the behavior of 4- to 6-year-old children before and after having a sugary drink. The sugar rush was actually calming for girls and helped them perform better with numerical skills, but the opposite was true for boys. “Our study is the first to provide large-scale experimental evidence on the impact of sugary drinks on preschool children. The results clearly indicate a causal impact of sugary drinks on children’s behavior and test scores,” Fritz Schiltz, PhD, said in a written statement.
This probably isn’t the green light to have as many sugary drinks as you want, but it might be interesting to see how your work is affected after a soda.
Chicken nuggets and the meat paradox
Two young children are fighting over the last chicken nugget when an adult comes in to see what’s going on.
Liam: Vegetable!
Olivia: Meat!
Liam: Chicken nuggets are vegetables!
Olivia: No, dorkface! They’re meat.
Caregiver: Good news, kids. You’re both right.
Olivia: How can we both be right?
At this point, a woman enters the room. She’s wearing a white lab coat, so she must be a scientist.
Dr. Scientist: You can’t both be right, Olivia. You are being fed a serving of the meat paradox. That’s why Liam here doesn’t know that chicken nuggets are made of chicken, which is a form of meat. Sadly, he’s not the only one.
In a recent study, scientists from Furman University in Greenville, S.C., found that 38% of 176 children aged 4-7 years thought that chicken nuggets were vegetables and more than 46% identified French fries as animal based.
Olivia: Did our caregiver lie to us, Dr. Scientist?
Dr. Scientist: Yes, Olivia. The researchers I mentioned explained that “many people experience unease while eating meat. Omnivores eat foods that entail animal suffering and death while at the same time endorsing the compassionate treatment of animals.” That’s the meat paradox.
Liam: What else did they say, Dr. Scientist?
Dr. Scientist: Over 70% of those children said that cows and pigs were not edible and 5% thought that cats and horses were. The investigators wrote “that children and youth should be viewed as agents of environmental change” in the future, but suggested that parents need to bring honesty to the table.
Caregiver: How did you get in here anyway? And how do you know their names?
Dr. Scientist: I’ve been rooting through your garbage for years. All in the name of science, of course.
Bedtimes aren’t just for children
There are multiple ways to prevent heart disease, but what if it could be as easy as switching your bedtime? A recent study in European Heart Journal–Digital Health suggests that there’s a sweet spot when it comes to sleep timing.
Through smartwatch-like devices, researchers measured the sleep-onset and wake-up times for 7 days in 88,026 participants aged 43-79 years. After 5.7 years of follow-up to see if anyone had a heart attack, stroke, or any other cardiovascular event, 3.6% developed some kind of cardiovascular disease.
Those who went to bed between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. had a lower risk of developing heart disease. The risk was 25% higher for subjects who went to bed at midnight or later, 24% higher for bedtimes before 10 p.m., and 12% higher for bedtimes between 11 p.m. and midnight.
So, why can you go to bed before “The Tonight Show” and lower your cardiovascular risk but not before the nightly news? Well, it has something to do with your body’s natural clock.
“The optimum time to go to sleep is at a specific point in the body’s 24-hour cycle and deviations may be detrimental to health. The riskiest time was after midnight, potentially because it may reduce the likelihood of seeing morning light, which resets the body clock,” said study author Dr. David Plans of the University of Exeter, England.
Although a sleep schedule is preferred, it isn’t realistic all the time for those in certain occupations who might have to resort to other methods to keep their circadian clocks ticking optimally for their health. But if all it takes is prescribing a sleep time to reduce heart disease on a massive scale it would make a great “low-cost public health target.”
So bedtimes aren’t just for children.
The greatest autopsy on Earth?
The LOTME staff would like to apologize in advance. The following item contains historical facts.
P.T. Barnum is a rather controversial figure in American history. The greatest show on Earth was certainly popular in its day. However, Barnum got his start in 1835 by leasing a slave named Joyce Heth, an elderly Black woman who told vivid stories of caring for a young George Washington. He toured her around the country, advertising her as a 160-year-old woman who served as George Washington’s nanny. When Ms. Heth died the next year, Barnum sold tickets to the autopsy, charging the equivalent of $30 in today’s money.
When a doctor announced that Ms. Heth was actually 75-80 when she died, it caused great controversy in the press and ruined Barnum’s career. Wait, no, that’s not right. The opposite, actually. He weathered the storm, built his famous circus, and never again committed a hoax.
It’s difficult to quantify how wrong publicly dissecting a person and charging people to see said dissection is, but that was almost 200 years ago. At the very least, we can say that such terrible behavior is firmly in the distant past.
Oh wait.
David Saunders, a 98-year-old veteran of World War II and the Korean War, donated his body to science. His body, however, was purchased by DeathScience.org from a medical lab – with the buyer supposedly misleading the medical lab about its intentions, which was for use at the traveling Oddities and Curiosities Expo. Tickets went for up to $500 each to witness the public autopsy of Mr. Saunders’ body, which took place at a Marriott in Portland, Ore. It promised to be an exciting, all-day event from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a break for lunch, of course. You can’t have an autopsy without a catered lunch.
Another public autopsy event was scheduled in Seattle but canceled after news of the first event broke. Oh, and for that extra little kick, Mr. Saunders died from COVID-19, meaning that all those paying customers were exposed.
P.T. Barnum is probably rolling over in his grave right now. His autopsy tickets were a bargain.
Go ahead, have that soda before math
We should all know by now that sugary drinks are bad, even artificially sweetened ones. It might not always stop us from drinking them, but we know the deal. But what if sugary drinks like soda could be helpful for girls in school?
You read that right. We said girls. A soda before class might have boys bouncing off the walls, but not girls. A recent study showed that not only was girls’ behavior unaffected by having a sugary drink, their math skills even improved.
Researchers analyzed the behavior of 4- to 6-year-old children before and after having a sugary drink. The sugar rush was actually calming for girls and helped them perform better with numerical skills, but the opposite was true for boys. “Our study is the first to provide large-scale experimental evidence on the impact of sugary drinks on preschool children. The results clearly indicate a causal impact of sugary drinks on children’s behavior and test scores,” Fritz Schiltz, PhD, said in a written statement.
This probably isn’t the green light to have as many sugary drinks as you want, but it might be interesting to see how your work is affected after a soda.
Chicken nuggets and the meat paradox
Two young children are fighting over the last chicken nugget when an adult comes in to see what’s going on.
Liam: Vegetable!
Olivia: Meat!
Liam: Chicken nuggets are vegetables!
Olivia: No, dorkface! They’re meat.
Caregiver: Good news, kids. You’re both right.
Olivia: How can we both be right?
At this point, a woman enters the room. She’s wearing a white lab coat, so she must be a scientist.
Dr. Scientist: You can’t both be right, Olivia. You are being fed a serving of the meat paradox. That’s why Liam here doesn’t know that chicken nuggets are made of chicken, which is a form of meat. Sadly, he’s not the only one.
In a recent study, scientists from Furman University in Greenville, S.C., found that 38% of 176 children aged 4-7 years thought that chicken nuggets were vegetables and more than 46% identified French fries as animal based.
Olivia: Did our caregiver lie to us, Dr. Scientist?
Dr. Scientist: Yes, Olivia. The researchers I mentioned explained that “many people experience unease while eating meat. Omnivores eat foods that entail animal suffering and death while at the same time endorsing the compassionate treatment of animals.” That’s the meat paradox.
Liam: What else did they say, Dr. Scientist?
Dr. Scientist: Over 70% of those children said that cows and pigs were not edible and 5% thought that cats and horses were. The investigators wrote “that children and youth should be viewed as agents of environmental change” in the future, but suggested that parents need to bring honesty to the table.
Caregiver: How did you get in here anyway? And how do you know their names?
Dr. Scientist: I’ve been rooting through your garbage for years. All in the name of science, of course.
Bedtimes aren’t just for children
There are multiple ways to prevent heart disease, but what if it could be as easy as switching your bedtime? A recent study in European Heart Journal–Digital Health suggests that there’s a sweet spot when it comes to sleep timing.
Through smartwatch-like devices, researchers measured the sleep-onset and wake-up times for 7 days in 88,026 participants aged 43-79 years. After 5.7 years of follow-up to see if anyone had a heart attack, stroke, or any other cardiovascular event, 3.6% developed some kind of cardiovascular disease.
Those who went to bed between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. had a lower risk of developing heart disease. The risk was 25% higher for subjects who went to bed at midnight or later, 24% higher for bedtimes before 10 p.m., and 12% higher for bedtimes between 11 p.m. and midnight.
So, why can you go to bed before “The Tonight Show” and lower your cardiovascular risk but not before the nightly news? Well, it has something to do with your body’s natural clock.
“The optimum time to go to sleep is at a specific point in the body’s 24-hour cycle and deviations may be detrimental to health. The riskiest time was after midnight, potentially because it may reduce the likelihood of seeing morning light, which resets the body clock,” said study author Dr. David Plans of the University of Exeter, England.
Although a sleep schedule is preferred, it isn’t realistic all the time for those in certain occupations who might have to resort to other methods to keep their circadian clocks ticking optimally for their health. But if all it takes is prescribing a sleep time to reduce heart disease on a massive scale it would make a great “low-cost public health target.”
So bedtimes aren’t just for children.
James Bond taken down by an epidemiologist
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die
Movie watching usually requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and it’s safe to say James Bond movies require this more than most. Between the impossible gadgets and ludicrous doomsday plans, very few have ever stopped to consider the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Now, however, Bond, James Bond, has met his most formidable opponent: Wouter Graumans, a graduate student in epidemiology from the Netherlands. During a foray to Burkina Faso to study infectious diseases, Mr. Graumans came down with a case of food poisoning, which led him to wonder how 007 is able to trot across this big world of ours without contracting so much as a sinus infection.
Because Mr. Graumans is a man of science and conviction, mere speculation wasn’t enough. He and a group of coauthors wrote an entire paper on the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Doing so required watching over 3,000 minutes of numerous movies and analyzing Bond’s 86 total trips to 46 different countries based on current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice for travel to those countries. Time which, the authors state in the abstract, “could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues or forms of relaxation that are more acceptable in academic circles.”
Naturally, Mr. Bond’s line of work entails exposure to unpleasant things, such as poison, dehydration, heatstroke, and dangerous wildlife (everything from ticks to crocodiles), though oddly enough he never succumbs to any of it. He’s also curiously immune to hangovers, despite rarely drinking anything nonalcoholic. There are also less obvious risks: For one, 007 rarely washes his hands. During one movie, he handles raw chicken to lure away a pack of crocodiles but fails to wash his hands afterward, leaving him at risk for multiple food-borne illnesses.
Of course, we must address the elephant in the bedroom: Mr. Bond’s numerous, er, encounters with women. One would imagine the biggest risk to those women would be from the various STDs that likely course through Bond’s body, but of the 27% who died shortly after … encountering … him, all involved violence, with disease playing no obvious role. Who knows, maybe he’s clean? Stranger things have happened.
The timing of this article may seem a bit suspicious. Was it a PR stunt by the studio? Rest assured, the authors addressed this, noting that they received no funding for the study, and that, “given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.” We love when a punchline writes itself.
How to see Atlanta on $688.35 a day
The world is always changing, so we have to change with it. This week, LOTME becomes a travel guide, and our first stop is the Big A, the Big Peach, Dogwood City, Empire City of the South, Wakanda.
There’s lots to do in Atlanta: Celebrate a World Series win, visit the College Football Hall of Fame or the World of Coca Cola, or take the Stranger Things/Upside Down film locations tour. Serious adventurers, however, get out of the city and go to Emory Decatur Hospital in – you guessed it – Decatur (unofficial motto: “Everything is Greater in Decatur”).
Find the emergency room and ask for Taylor Davis, who will be your personal guide. She’ll show you how to check in at the desk, sit in the waiting room for 7 hours, and then leave without seeing any medical personnel or receiving any sort of attention whatsoever. All the things she did when she went there in July for a head injury.
Ms. Davis told Fox5 Atlanta: “I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all.”
But wait! There’s more! By booking your trip through LOTMEgo* and using the code “Decatur,” you’ll get the Taylor Davis special, which includes a bill/cover charge for $688.35 from the hospital. An Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee told Ms. Davis that “you get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen.”
If all this has you ready to hop in your car (really?), then check out LOTMEgo* on Twittbook and InstaTok. You’ll also find trick-or-treating tips and discounts on haunted hospital tours.
*Does not actually exist
Breaking down the hot flash
Do you ever wonder why we scramble for cold things when we’re feeling nauseous? Whether it’s the cool air that needs to hit your face in the car or a cold, damp towel on the back of your neck, scientists think it could possibly be an evolutionary mechanism at the cellular level.
Motion sickness it’s actually a battle of body temperature, according to an article from LiveScience. Capillaries in the skin dilate, allowing for more blood flow near the skin’s surface and causing core temperature to fall. Once body temperature drops, the hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, tries to do its job by raising body temperature. Thus the hot flash!
The cold compress and cool air help fight the battle by counteracting the hypothalamus, but why the drop in body temperature to begin with?
There are a few theories. Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, told LiveScience that the lack of oxygen needed in body tissue to survive at lower temperatures could be making it difficult to get oxygen to the body when a person is ill, and is “more likely an adaptive response influenced by poorly understood mechanisms at the cellular level.”
Another theory is that the nausea and body temperature shift is the body’s natural response to help people vomit.
Then there’s the theory of “defensive hypothermia,” which suggests that cold sweats are a possible mechanism to conserve energy so the body can fight off an intruder, which was supported by a 2014 study and a 2016 review.
It’s another one of the body’s many survival tricks.
Teachers were right: Pupils can do the math
Teachers liked to preach that we wouldn’t have calculators with us all the time, but that wound up not being true. Our phones have calculators at the press of a button. But maybe even calculators aren’t always needed because our pupils do more math than you think.
The pupil light reflex – constrict in light and dilate in darkness – is well known, but recent work shows that pupil size is also regulated by cognitive and perceptual factors. By presenting subjects with images of various numbers of dots and measuring pupil size, the investigators were able to show “that numerical information is intrinsically related to perception,” lead author Dr. Elisa Castaldi of Florence University noted in a written statement.
The researchers found that pupils are responsible for important survival techniques. Coauthor David Burr of the University of Sydney and the University of Florence gave an evolutionary perspective: “When we look around, we spontaneously perceive the form, size, movement and colour of a scene. Equally spontaneously, we perceive the number of items before us. This ability, shared with most other animals, is an evolutionary fundamental: It reveals immediately important quantities, such as how many apples there are on the tree, or how many enemies are attacking.”
Useful information, indeed, but our pupils seem to be more interested in the quantity of beers in the refrigerator.
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die
Movie watching usually requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and it’s safe to say James Bond movies require this more than most. Between the impossible gadgets and ludicrous doomsday plans, very few have ever stopped to consider the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Now, however, Bond, James Bond, has met his most formidable opponent: Wouter Graumans, a graduate student in epidemiology from the Netherlands. During a foray to Burkina Faso to study infectious diseases, Mr. Graumans came down with a case of food poisoning, which led him to wonder how 007 is able to trot across this big world of ours without contracting so much as a sinus infection.
Because Mr. Graumans is a man of science and conviction, mere speculation wasn’t enough. He and a group of coauthors wrote an entire paper on the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Doing so required watching over 3,000 minutes of numerous movies and analyzing Bond’s 86 total trips to 46 different countries based on current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice for travel to those countries. Time which, the authors state in the abstract, “could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues or forms of relaxation that are more acceptable in academic circles.”
Naturally, Mr. Bond’s line of work entails exposure to unpleasant things, such as poison, dehydration, heatstroke, and dangerous wildlife (everything from ticks to crocodiles), though oddly enough he never succumbs to any of it. He’s also curiously immune to hangovers, despite rarely drinking anything nonalcoholic. There are also less obvious risks: For one, 007 rarely washes his hands. During one movie, he handles raw chicken to lure away a pack of crocodiles but fails to wash his hands afterward, leaving him at risk for multiple food-borne illnesses.
Of course, we must address the elephant in the bedroom: Mr. Bond’s numerous, er, encounters with women. One would imagine the biggest risk to those women would be from the various STDs that likely course through Bond’s body, but of the 27% who died shortly after … encountering … him, all involved violence, with disease playing no obvious role. Who knows, maybe he’s clean? Stranger things have happened.
The timing of this article may seem a bit suspicious. Was it a PR stunt by the studio? Rest assured, the authors addressed this, noting that they received no funding for the study, and that, “given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.” We love when a punchline writes itself.
How to see Atlanta on $688.35 a day
The world is always changing, so we have to change with it. This week, LOTME becomes a travel guide, and our first stop is the Big A, the Big Peach, Dogwood City, Empire City of the South, Wakanda.
There’s lots to do in Atlanta: Celebrate a World Series win, visit the College Football Hall of Fame or the World of Coca Cola, or take the Stranger Things/Upside Down film locations tour. Serious adventurers, however, get out of the city and go to Emory Decatur Hospital in – you guessed it – Decatur (unofficial motto: “Everything is Greater in Decatur”).
Find the emergency room and ask for Taylor Davis, who will be your personal guide. She’ll show you how to check in at the desk, sit in the waiting room for 7 hours, and then leave without seeing any medical personnel or receiving any sort of attention whatsoever. All the things she did when she went there in July for a head injury.
Ms. Davis told Fox5 Atlanta: “I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all.”
But wait! There’s more! By booking your trip through LOTMEgo* and using the code “Decatur,” you’ll get the Taylor Davis special, which includes a bill/cover charge for $688.35 from the hospital. An Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee told Ms. Davis that “you get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen.”
If all this has you ready to hop in your car (really?), then check out LOTMEgo* on Twittbook and InstaTok. You’ll also find trick-or-treating tips and discounts on haunted hospital tours.
*Does not actually exist
Breaking down the hot flash
Do you ever wonder why we scramble for cold things when we’re feeling nauseous? Whether it’s the cool air that needs to hit your face in the car or a cold, damp towel on the back of your neck, scientists think it could possibly be an evolutionary mechanism at the cellular level.
Motion sickness it’s actually a battle of body temperature, according to an article from LiveScience. Capillaries in the skin dilate, allowing for more blood flow near the skin’s surface and causing core temperature to fall. Once body temperature drops, the hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, tries to do its job by raising body temperature. Thus the hot flash!
The cold compress and cool air help fight the battle by counteracting the hypothalamus, but why the drop in body temperature to begin with?
There are a few theories. Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, told LiveScience that the lack of oxygen needed in body tissue to survive at lower temperatures could be making it difficult to get oxygen to the body when a person is ill, and is “more likely an adaptive response influenced by poorly understood mechanisms at the cellular level.”
Another theory is that the nausea and body temperature shift is the body’s natural response to help people vomit.
Then there’s the theory of “defensive hypothermia,” which suggests that cold sweats are a possible mechanism to conserve energy so the body can fight off an intruder, which was supported by a 2014 study and a 2016 review.
It’s another one of the body’s many survival tricks.
Teachers were right: Pupils can do the math
Teachers liked to preach that we wouldn’t have calculators with us all the time, but that wound up not being true. Our phones have calculators at the press of a button. But maybe even calculators aren’t always needed because our pupils do more math than you think.
The pupil light reflex – constrict in light and dilate in darkness – is well known, but recent work shows that pupil size is also regulated by cognitive and perceptual factors. By presenting subjects with images of various numbers of dots and measuring pupil size, the investigators were able to show “that numerical information is intrinsically related to perception,” lead author Dr. Elisa Castaldi of Florence University noted in a written statement.
The researchers found that pupils are responsible for important survival techniques. Coauthor David Burr of the University of Sydney and the University of Florence gave an evolutionary perspective: “When we look around, we spontaneously perceive the form, size, movement and colour of a scene. Equally spontaneously, we perceive the number of items before us. This ability, shared with most other animals, is an evolutionary fundamental: It reveals immediately important quantities, such as how many apples there are on the tree, or how many enemies are attacking.”
Useful information, indeed, but our pupils seem to be more interested in the quantity of beers in the refrigerator.
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die
Movie watching usually requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and it’s safe to say James Bond movies require this more than most. Between the impossible gadgets and ludicrous doomsday plans, very few have ever stopped to consider the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Now, however, Bond, James Bond, has met his most formidable opponent: Wouter Graumans, a graduate student in epidemiology from the Netherlands. During a foray to Burkina Faso to study infectious diseases, Mr. Graumans came down with a case of food poisoning, which led him to wonder how 007 is able to trot across this big world of ours without contracting so much as a sinus infection.
Because Mr. Graumans is a man of science and conviction, mere speculation wasn’t enough. He and a group of coauthors wrote an entire paper on the health risks of the James Bond universe.
Doing so required watching over 3,000 minutes of numerous movies and analyzing Bond’s 86 total trips to 46 different countries based on current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice for travel to those countries. Time which, the authors state in the abstract, “could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues or forms of relaxation that are more acceptable in academic circles.”
Naturally, Mr. Bond’s line of work entails exposure to unpleasant things, such as poison, dehydration, heatstroke, and dangerous wildlife (everything from ticks to crocodiles), though oddly enough he never succumbs to any of it. He’s also curiously immune to hangovers, despite rarely drinking anything nonalcoholic. There are also less obvious risks: For one, 007 rarely washes his hands. During one movie, he handles raw chicken to lure away a pack of crocodiles but fails to wash his hands afterward, leaving him at risk for multiple food-borne illnesses.
Of course, we must address the elephant in the bedroom: Mr. Bond’s numerous, er, encounters with women. One would imagine the biggest risk to those women would be from the various STDs that likely course through Bond’s body, but of the 27% who died shortly after … encountering … him, all involved violence, with disease playing no obvious role. Who knows, maybe he’s clean? Stranger things have happened.
The timing of this article may seem a bit suspicious. Was it a PR stunt by the studio? Rest assured, the authors addressed this, noting that they received no funding for the study, and that, “given the futility of its academic value, this is deemed entirely appropriate by all authors.” We love when a punchline writes itself.
How to see Atlanta on $688.35 a day
The world is always changing, so we have to change with it. This week, LOTME becomes a travel guide, and our first stop is the Big A, the Big Peach, Dogwood City, Empire City of the South, Wakanda.
There’s lots to do in Atlanta: Celebrate a World Series win, visit the College Football Hall of Fame or the World of Coca Cola, or take the Stranger Things/Upside Down film locations tour. Serious adventurers, however, get out of the city and go to Emory Decatur Hospital in – you guessed it – Decatur (unofficial motto: “Everything is Greater in Decatur”).
Find the emergency room and ask for Taylor Davis, who will be your personal guide. She’ll show you how to check in at the desk, sit in the waiting room for 7 hours, and then leave without seeing any medical personnel or receiving any sort of attention whatsoever. All the things she did when she went there in July for a head injury.
Ms. Davis told Fox5 Atlanta: “I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all.”
But wait! There’s more! By booking your trip through LOTMEgo* and using the code “Decatur,” you’ll get the Taylor Davis special, which includes a bill/cover charge for $688.35 from the hospital. An Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee told Ms. Davis that “you get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen.”
If all this has you ready to hop in your car (really?), then check out LOTMEgo* on Twittbook and InstaTok. You’ll also find trick-or-treating tips and discounts on haunted hospital tours.
*Does not actually exist
Breaking down the hot flash
Do you ever wonder why we scramble for cold things when we’re feeling nauseous? Whether it’s the cool air that needs to hit your face in the car or a cold, damp towel on the back of your neck, scientists think it could possibly be an evolutionary mechanism at the cellular level.
Motion sickness it’s actually a battle of body temperature, according to an article from LiveScience. Capillaries in the skin dilate, allowing for more blood flow near the skin’s surface and causing core temperature to fall. Once body temperature drops, the hypothalamus, which regulates temperature, tries to do its job by raising body temperature. Thus the hot flash!
The cold compress and cool air help fight the battle by counteracting the hypothalamus, but why the drop in body temperature to begin with?
There are a few theories. Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, told LiveScience that the lack of oxygen needed in body tissue to survive at lower temperatures could be making it difficult to get oxygen to the body when a person is ill, and is “more likely an adaptive response influenced by poorly understood mechanisms at the cellular level.”
Another theory is that the nausea and body temperature shift is the body’s natural response to help people vomit.
Then there’s the theory of “defensive hypothermia,” which suggests that cold sweats are a possible mechanism to conserve energy so the body can fight off an intruder, which was supported by a 2014 study and a 2016 review.
It’s another one of the body’s many survival tricks.
Teachers were right: Pupils can do the math
Teachers liked to preach that we wouldn’t have calculators with us all the time, but that wound up not being true. Our phones have calculators at the press of a button. But maybe even calculators aren’t always needed because our pupils do more math than you think.
The pupil light reflex – constrict in light and dilate in darkness – is well known, but recent work shows that pupil size is also regulated by cognitive and perceptual factors. By presenting subjects with images of various numbers of dots and measuring pupil size, the investigators were able to show “that numerical information is intrinsically related to perception,” lead author Dr. Elisa Castaldi of Florence University noted in a written statement.
The researchers found that pupils are responsible for important survival techniques. Coauthor David Burr of the University of Sydney and the University of Florence gave an evolutionary perspective: “When we look around, we spontaneously perceive the form, size, movement and colour of a scene. Equally spontaneously, we perceive the number of items before us. This ability, shared with most other animals, is an evolutionary fundamental: It reveals immediately important quantities, such as how many apples there are on the tree, or how many enemies are attacking.”
Useful information, indeed, but our pupils seem to be more interested in the quantity of beers in the refrigerator.
The devil in the (masking) details
The Devil’s own face covering?
It’s been over a year and a half since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in the United States, and we’ve been starting to wonder what our good friend SARS-CoV-2 has left to give. The collective cynic/optimist in us figures that the insanity can’t last forever, right?
Maybe not forever, but …
A group of parents is suing the Central Bucks (Pa.) School District over school mask mandates, suggesting that the district has no legal authority to enforce such measures. Most of their arguments, Philadelphia Magazine says, are pretty standard stuff: Masks are causing depression, anxiety, and discomfort in their children; masks are a violation of their constitutional rights; and “masks are being used as a control mechanism over the population.”
There are some unusual claims, though. One of the parents, Shannon Harris, said that “wearing masks interferes with their religious duty to spread the word of God and forces them to participate in a satanic ritual,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Magazine decided to check on that “satanic ritual” claim by asking an expert, in this case a spokesperson for the Church of Satan. The Reverend Raul Antony said that “simply ‘wearing a mask’ is not a Satanic ritual, and anyone that genuinely thinks otherwise is a blithering idiot,” adding that the group’s rituals were available on its website.
COVID, you never let us down.
You’re the (hurricane) wind beneath my wings
Marriage isn’t easy. From finances to everyday stressors like work and children, maintaining a solid relationship is tough. Then a natural disaster shows up on top of everything else, and marriages actually improve, researchers found.
In a study published by Psychological Science, researchers surveyed 231 newlywed couples about the satisfaction of their marriage before and after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They found after the hurricane couples had a “significant boost” in the satisfaction of their relationship.
One would think something like this would create what researchers call a “stress spillover,” creating a decrease in relationship satisfaction. Destruction to your home or even displacement after a natural disaster seems pretty stressful. But, “a natural disaster can really put things in perspective. People realize how important their partner is to them when they are jolted out of the day-to-day stress of life,” said Hannah Williamson, PhD, the lead author of the study.
And although everyone saw an increase, the biggest jumps in relationship satisfaction belonged to the people who were most unhappy before the hurricane. Unfortunately, the researchers also found that the effects were only temporary and the dissatisfaction came back within a year.
Dr. Williamson thinks there may be something to these findings that can be beneficial from a therapy standpoint where “couples can shift their perspective in a similar way without having to go through a natural disaster.”
Let’s hope she’s right, because the alternative is to seek out a rampaging hurricane every time your relationship is on the rocks, and that just seems impractical after the second or third year.
Not-so-essential oils
Many people use essential oils as a way to unwind and relax. Stressed? Can’t sleep? There’s probably an essential oil for that. However, it seems like these days a lot of things we love and/or think are good for us have a side that’s not so.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman from Georgia died from a rare bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei. There have been three previous infections in Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas throughout 2021; two of the four infections were in children. Melioidosis, the disease caused by B. pseudomallei, is usually found in southeast Asia and isn’t obvious or easy to diagnose, especially in places like decidedly untropical Minnesota.
The Georgia case was the real break in this medical mystery, as the infection was traced back to a Walmart product called “Better Homes and Gardens Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones” (a very pithy name). The bacteria were in the lavender and chamomile scent. The CDC is investigating all other product scents, and Walmart has recalled all lots of the product.
If you’ve got that particular essential oil, it’s probably for the best that you stop using it. Don’t worry, we’re sure there’s plenty of other essential oil–infused aromatherapy room sprays with gemstones out there for your scent-based needs.
Welcome to the Ministry of Sleep-Deprived Walks
Walking is simple, right? You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’re walking out the door. Little kids can do it. Even zombies can walk, and they don’t even have brains.
Research from MIT and the University of São Paulo has shown that walking is a little trickier than we might think. One researcher in particular noticed that student volunteers tended to perform worse toward the end of semesters, as project deadlines and multiple exams crashed over their heads and they were deprived of solid sleep schedules.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, our intrepid walking researchers had a collection of students monitor their sleep patterns for 2 weeks; on average, the students got 6 hours per night, though some were able to compensate on weekends. On the final day of a 14-day period, some students pulled all-nighters while the rest were allowed to sleep as usual. Then all students performed a walking test involving keeping time with a metronome.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the students who performed all-nighters before being tested walked the worst, but between the other students, the ones who compensated for sleep deprivation on weekends did better than those who got 6 hours every night, despite getting a similar amount of sleep overall. This effect persisted even when the compensating students performed their walking tests late in the week, just before they got their weekend beauty sleep.
The moral of the story? Sleep is good, and you should get more of it. But if you can’t, sleep in on weekends. Science has given you permission. All those suburban dads looking to get their teenagers up at 8 in the morning must be sweating right now.
The Devil’s own face covering?
It’s been over a year and a half since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in the United States, and we’ve been starting to wonder what our good friend SARS-CoV-2 has left to give. The collective cynic/optimist in us figures that the insanity can’t last forever, right?
Maybe not forever, but …
A group of parents is suing the Central Bucks (Pa.) School District over school mask mandates, suggesting that the district has no legal authority to enforce such measures. Most of their arguments, Philadelphia Magazine says, are pretty standard stuff: Masks are causing depression, anxiety, and discomfort in their children; masks are a violation of their constitutional rights; and “masks are being used as a control mechanism over the population.”
There are some unusual claims, though. One of the parents, Shannon Harris, said that “wearing masks interferes with their religious duty to spread the word of God and forces them to participate in a satanic ritual,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Magazine decided to check on that “satanic ritual” claim by asking an expert, in this case a spokesperson for the Church of Satan. The Reverend Raul Antony said that “simply ‘wearing a mask’ is not a Satanic ritual, and anyone that genuinely thinks otherwise is a blithering idiot,” adding that the group’s rituals were available on its website.
COVID, you never let us down.
You’re the (hurricane) wind beneath my wings
Marriage isn’t easy. From finances to everyday stressors like work and children, maintaining a solid relationship is tough. Then a natural disaster shows up on top of everything else, and marriages actually improve, researchers found.
In a study published by Psychological Science, researchers surveyed 231 newlywed couples about the satisfaction of their marriage before and after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They found after the hurricane couples had a “significant boost” in the satisfaction of their relationship.
One would think something like this would create what researchers call a “stress spillover,” creating a decrease in relationship satisfaction. Destruction to your home or even displacement after a natural disaster seems pretty stressful. But, “a natural disaster can really put things in perspective. People realize how important their partner is to them when they are jolted out of the day-to-day stress of life,” said Hannah Williamson, PhD, the lead author of the study.
And although everyone saw an increase, the biggest jumps in relationship satisfaction belonged to the people who were most unhappy before the hurricane. Unfortunately, the researchers also found that the effects were only temporary and the dissatisfaction came back within a year.
Dr. Williamson thinks there may be something to these findings that can be beneficial from a therapy standpoint where “couples can shift their perspective in a similar way without having to go through a natural disaster.”
Let’s hope she’s right, because the alternative is to seek out a rampaging hurricane every time your relationship is on the rocks, and that just seems impractical after the second or third year.
Not-so-essential oils
Many people use essential oils as a way to unwind and relax. Stressed? Can’t sleep? There’s probably an essential oil for that. However, it seems like these days a lot of things we love and/or think are good for us have a side that’s not so.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman from Georgia died from a rare bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei. There have been three previous infections in Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas throughout 2021; two of the four infections were in children. Melioidosis, the disease caused by B. pseudomallei, is usually found in southeast Asia and isn’t obvious or easy to diagnose, especially in places like decidedly untropical Minnesota.
The Georgia case was the real break in this medical mystery, as the infection was traced back to a Walmart product called “Better Homes and Gardens Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones” (a very pithy name). The bacteria were in the lavender and chamomile scent. The CDC is investigating all other product scents, and Walmart has recalled all lots of the product.
If you’ve got that particular essential oil, it’s probably for the best that you stop using it. Don’t worry, we’re sure there’s plenty of other essential oil–infused aromatherapy room sprays with gemstones out there for your scent-based needs.
Welcome to the Ministry of Sleep-Deprived Walks
Walking is simple, right? You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’re walking out the door. Little kids can do it. Even zombies can walk, and they don’t even have brains.
Research from MIT and the University of São Paulo has shown that walking is a little trickier than we might think. One researcher in particular noticed that student volunteers tended to perform worse toward the end of semesters, as project deadlines and multiple exams crashed over their heads and they were deprived of solid sleep schedules.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, our intrepid walking researchers had a collection of students monitor their sleep patterns for 2 weeks; on average, the students got 6 hours per night, though some were able to compensate on weekends. On the final day of a 14-day period, some students pulled all-nighters while the rest were allowed to sleep as usual. Then all students performed a walking test involving keeping time with a metronome.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the students who performed all-nighters before being tested walked the worst, but between the other students, the ones who compensated for sleep deprivation on weekends did better than those who got 6 hours every night, despite getting a similar amount of sleep overall. This effect persisted even when the compensating students performed their walking tests late in the week, just before they got their weekend beauty sleep.
The moral of the story? Sleep is good, and you should get more of it. But if you can’t, sleep in on weekends. Science has given you permission. All those suburban dads looking to get their teenagers up at 8 in the morning must be sweating right now.
The Devil’s own face covering?
It’s been over a year and a half since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in the United States, and we’ve been starting to wonder what our good friend SARS-CoV-2 has left to give. The collective cynic/optimist in us figures that the insanity can’t last forever, right?
Maybe not forever, but …
A group of parents is suing the Central Bucks (Pa.) School District over school mask mandates, suggesting that the district has no legal authority to enforce such measures. Most of their arguments, Philadelphia Magazine says, are pretty standard stuff: Masks are causing depression, anxiety, and discomfort in their children; masks are a violation of their constitutional rights; and “masks are being used as a control mechanism over the population.”
There are some unusual claims, though. One of the parents, Shannon Harris, said that “wearing masks interferes with their religious duty to spread the word of God and forces them to participate in a satanic ritual,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Philadelphia Magazine decided to check on that “satanic ritual” claim by asking an expert, in this case a spokesperson for the Church of Satan. The Reverend Raul Antony said that “simply ‘wearing a mask’ is not a Satanic ritual, and anyone that genuinely thinks otherwise is a blithering idiot,” adding that the group’s rituals were available on its website.
COVID, you never let us down.
You’re the (hurricane) wind beneath my wings
Marriage isn’t easy. From finances to everyday stressors like work and children, maintaining a solid relationship is tough. Then a natural disaster shows up on top of everything else, and marriages actually improve, researchers found.
In a study published by Psychological Science, researchers surveyed 231 newlywed couples about the satisfaction of their marriage before and after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They found after the hurricane couples had a “significant boost” in the satisfaction of their relationship.
One would think something like this would create what researchers call a “stress spillover,” creating a decrease in relationship satisfaction. Destruction to your home or even displacement after a natural disaster seems pretty stressful. But, “a natural disaster can really put things in perspective. People realize how important their partner is to them when they are jolted out of the day-to-day stress of life,” said Hannah Williamson, PhD, the lead author of the study.
And although everyone saw an increase, the biggest jumps in relationship satisfaction belonged to the people who were most unhappy before the hurricane. Unfortunately, the researchers also found that the effects were only temporary and the dissatisfaction came back within a year.
Dr. Williamson thinks there may be something to these findings that can be beneficial from a therapy standpoint where “couples can shift their perspective in a similar way without having to go through a natural disaster.”
Let’s hope she’s right, because the alternative is to seek out a rampaging hurricane every time your relationship is on the rocks, and that just seems impractical after the second or third year.
Not-so-essential oils
Many people use essential oils as a way to unwind and relax. Stressed? Can’t sleep? There’s probably an essential oil for that. However, it seems like these days a lot of things we love and/or think are good for us have a side that’s not so.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a woman from Georgia died from a rare bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei. There have been three previous infections in Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas throughout 2021; two of the four infections were in children. Melioidosis, the disease caused by B. pseudomallei, is usually found in southeast Asia and isn’t obvious or easy to diagnose, especially in places like decidedly untropical Minnesota.
The Georgia case was the real break in this medical mystery, as the infection was traced back to a Walmart product called “Better Homes and Gardens Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones” (a very pithy name). The bacteria were in the lavender and chamomile scent. The CDC is investigating all other product scents, and Walmart has recalled all lots of the product.
If you’ve got that particular essential oil, it’s probably for the best that you stop using it. Don’t worry, we’re sure there’s plenty of other essential oil–infused aromatherapy room sprays with gemstones out there for your scent-based needs.
Welcome to the Ministry of Sleep-Deprived Walks
Walking is simple, right? You put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’re walking out the door. Little kids can do it. Even zombies can walk, and they don’t even have brains.
Research from MIT and the University of São Paulo has shown that walking is a little trickier than we might think. One researcher in particular noticed that student volunteers tended to perform worse toward the end of semesters, as project deadlines and multiple exams crashed over their heads and they were deprived of solid sleep schedules.
In a study published in Scientific Reports, our intrepid walking researchers had a collection of students monitor their sleep patterns for 2 weeks; on average, the students got 6 hours per night, though some were able to compensate on weekends. On the final day of a 14-day period, some students pulled all-nighters while the rest were allowed to sleep as usual. Then all students performed a walking test involving keeping time with a metronome.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the students who performed all-nighters before being tested walked the worst, but between the other students, the ones who compensated for sleep deprivation on weekends did better than those who got 6 hours every night, despite getting a similar amount of sleep overall. This effect persisted even when the compensating students performed their walking tests late in the week, just before they got their weekend beauty sleep.
The moral of the story? Sleep is good, and you should get more of it. But if you can’t, sleep in on weekends. Science has given you permission. All those suburban dads looking to get their teenagers up at 8 in the morning must be sweating right now.
The compass that points toward food
The new breakfast of champions
We love a good ranking system here at LOTME world headquarters, especially the food-based ones. Luckily for us (and our readers), a new study published in Nature Food offers a food-based ranking system.
Sadly, unlike the last food-related ranking we covered, the Food Compass doesn’t tell you how much life you gain or lose from each food you eat down to the precise minute. Instead, it favors a more simple rating system from 1 to 100, with healthier foods scoring higher, and even incorporates mixed foods, not just single ingredients. This makes it better at assessing and comparing food combinations, rather than trying to mix and match the many ingredients that go into even relatively simple recipes.
The top and bottom of the rankings contain the usual suspects. Legumes and nuts, at 78.6, had the highest average score among the broad food groups, followed by fruits and then vegetables. Rounding out the bottom were sweets and savory snacks at 16.4. Among the individual foods, there were perfect scores in both directions: 100 for raw raspberries, while instant noodle soup and nonchocolate, ready-to-eat, nonfat pudding (very specific there) each earned a 1.
There are a few surprises in between. Nonfat cappuccino received a green light from the investigators, great news for the coffee drinkers out there. A serving of sweet potato chips scored better than a simple grilled chicken breast, and a slice of pizza, loaded up with extra meat and a thick crust, is still more nutritious than a bowl of corn flakes.
Neither is good for you, of course, but we’re still going to take this as a sign that pizza is the ideal breakfast food. Add that to your morning coffee, and you’re ready to start the day. Move over Wheaties, there’s a new breakfast of champions.
COVID-19 resisters, please step forward
Some people have all the luck with good genes, both inside and out.
Genetically speaking, humans are 99.9% the same, but that 0.1% is where things get interesting. Because of that 0.1% difference, some people are more likely to contract diseases such as HIV, while others might be more resistant. These small differences in genetic code could be the key to finding treatments for COVID-19.
“The introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to a naive population, on a global scale, has provided yet another demonstration of the remarkable clinical variability between individuals in the course of infection, ranging from asymptomatic infections to life-threatening disease,” the researchers said in Nature Immunology.
The investigators have been scouring the world to find people who might be resistant to SARS-CoV-2 and have enrolled over 400 individuals in a “dedicated resistance study cohort,” according to ScienceAlert.
The investigators are looking at households in which families were infected but one member did not show severe symptoms, or for individuals who have been around the virus multiple times and haven’t contracted it. They are also looking at blood types.
Enrollment is ongoing, so if you’ve been in contact with COVID-19 multiple times and have not gotten sick, scientists would like to hear from you.
Better living through parasitization
How would you like to triple your life span, while maintaining a youthful appearance and gaining special social standing and privileges?
Sounds pretty good, right, so what’s the catch? Well, you have to be infected with a tapeworm ... and you have to be an ant.
If you are an ant, here’s the deal: Workers of the species Temnothorax nylanderi that have tapeworms live much longer than uninfected workers, and while living out those longer lives they do less work and receive gifts of food.
In a study conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, infected ants’ metabolic rates and lipid levels were similar to those of younger ants, and they appeared to remain in a permanent juvenile stage as a result of the infection, the investigators reported.
They tracked Temnothorax colonies for 3 years, at which point 95% of the uninfected workers had died but over half of the infected ants were still alive. Pretty great, right? Wrong. There was no joy in antville, for the uninfected workers had struck out. “Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free,” according to an article in the Atlantic.
Does this situation seem just a wee bit familiar? A small group lives longer, healthier lives and enjoys special privileges while the majority of that society works harder to support them? We’ll put it into the form of a chicken-and-egg argument: Which came first, the tapeworms or the one-percenters?
Laughing the pandemic stress away
Doomscrolling on social media has become one of the world’s favorite pastimes during the pandemic, but research shows that those memes about COVID-19 might combat the doom and gloom of the outside world.
A study recently published in Psychology of Popular Media showed that viewing memes, specifically those that were COVID-19 related, actually lessened the stress of the pandemic.
The researchers conducted a survey of 748 people aged 18-88 years. Each participant viewed three memes with text or three memes with text but no images. All three memes had similar cuteness levels (baby or adult), subject (animal or human), and caption (COVID-19–related or not). The participants were then asked to report on their stress levels and feelings before and after the memes.
The people who looked at memes felt less stressed and a higher humor level, especially the participants who received the COVID-19 memes. Study Finds said that they had more “pandemic-coping confidence” than those who got regular memes.
“While the World Health Organization recommended that people avoid too much COVID-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about COVID-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic,” lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, said in a written statement. “The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer and therefore better able to pay attention to the underlying messages related to health threats.”
So if you think you’ve been wasting time looking at memes during this pandemic, think again. It actually might keep you sane. Keep on scrolling!
Giving the gift of stress reduction
It’s a big week here at LOTME. You’ve just read our 100th edition, and to help celebrate that milestone – along with Count Your Buttons Day, Celebration of the Mind Day, and the International Day of the Nacho – we’re presenting an extra-special bonus feature, courtesy of Sad and Useless: The most depressive humor site on the Internet.
We hope you’ll stop your doomscrolling long enough to enjoy this stress-reducing meme. Thanks for reading!
The new breakfast of champions
We love a good ranking system here at LOTME world headquarters, especially the food-based ones. Luckily for us (and our readers), a new study published in Nature Food offers a food-based ranking system.
Sadly, unlike the last food-related ranking we covered, the Food Compass doesn’t tell you how much life you gain or lose from each food you eat down to the precise minute. Instead, it favors a more simple rating system from 1 to 100, with healthier foods scoring higher, and even incorporates mixed foods, not just single ingredients. This makes it better at assessing and comparing food combinations, rather than trying to mix and match the many ingredients that go into even relatively simple recipes.
The top and bottom of the rankings contain the usual suspects. Legumes and nuts, at 78.6, had the highest average score among the broad food groups, followed by fruits and then vegetables. Rounding out the bottom were sweets and savory snacks at 16.4. Among the individual foods, there were perfect scores in both directions: 100 for raw raspberries, while instant noodle soup and nonchocolate, ready-to-eat, nonfat pudding (very specific there) each earned a 1.
There are a few surprises in between. Nonfat cappuccino received a green light from the investigators, great news for the coffee drinkers out there. A serving of sweet potato chips scored better than a simple grilled chicken breast, and a slice of pizza, loaded up with extra meat and a thick crust, is still more nutritious than a bowl of corn flakes.
Neither is good for you, of course, but we’re still going to take this as a sign that pizza is the ideal breakfast food. Add that to your morning coffee, and you’re ready to start the day. Move over Wheaties, there’s a new breakfast of champions.
COVID-19 resisters, please step forward
Some people have all the luck with good genes, both inside and out.
Genetically speaking, humans are 99.9% the same, but that 0.1% is where things get interesting. Because of that 0.1% difference, some people are more likely to contract diseases such as HIV, while others might be more resistant. These small differences in genetic code could be the key to finding treatments for COVID-19.
“The introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to a naive population, on a global scale, has provided yet another demonstration of the remarkable clinical variability between individuals in the course of infection, ranging from asymptomatic infections to life-threatening disease,” the researchers said in Nature Immunology.
The investigators have been scouring the world to find people who might be resistant to SARS-CoV-2 and have enrolled over 400 individuals in a “dedicated resistance study cohort,” according to ScienceAlert.
The investigators are looking at households in which families were infected but one member did not show severe symptoms, or for individuals who have been around the virus multiple times and haven’t contracted it. They are also looking at blood types.
Enrollment is ongoing, so if you’ve been in contact with COVID-19 multiple times and have not gotten sick, scientists would like to hear from you.
Better living through parasitization
How would you like to triple your life span, while maintaining a youthful appearance and gaining special social standing and privileges?
Sounds pretty good, right, so what’s the catch? Well, you have to be infected with a tapeworm ... and you have to be an ant.
If you are an ant, here’s the deal: Workers of the species Temnothorax nylanderi that have tapeworms live much longer than uninfected workers, and while living out those longer lives they do less work and receive gifts of food.
In a study conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, infected ants’ metabolic rates and lipid levels were similar to those of younger ants, and they appeared to remain in a permanent juvenile stage as a result of the infection, the investigators reported.
They tracked Temnothorax colonies for 3 years, at which point 95% of the uninfected workers had died but over half of the infected ants were still alive. Pretty great, right? Wrong. There was no joy in antville, for the uninfected workers had struck out. “Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free,” according to an article in the Atlantic.
Does this situation seem just a wee bit familiar? A small group lives longer, healthier lives and enjoys special privileges while the majority of that society works harder to support them? We’ll put it into the form of a chicken-and-egg argument: Which came first, the tapeworms or the one-percenters?
Laughing the pandemic stress away
Doomscrolling on social media has become one of the world’s favorite pastimes during the pandemic, but research shows that those memes about COVID-19 might combat the doom and gloom of the outside world.
A study recently published in Psychology of Popular Media showed that viewing memes, specifically those that were COVID-19 related, actually lessened the stress of the pandemic.
The researchers conducted a survey of 748 people aged 18-88 years. Each participant viewed three memes with text or three memes with text but no images. All three memes had similar cuteness levels (baby or adult), subject (animal or human), and caption (COVID-19–related or not). The participants were then asked to report on their stress levels and feelings before and after the memes.
The people who looked at memes felt less stressed and a higher humor level, especially the participants who received the COVID-19 memes. Study Finds said that they had more “pandemic-coping confidence” than those who got regular memes.
“While the World Health Organization recommended that people avoid too much COVID-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about COVID-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic,” lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, said in a written statement. “The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer and therefore better able to pay attention to the underlying messages related to health threats.”
So if you think you’ve been wasting time looking at memes during this pandemic, think again. It actually might keep you sane. Keep on scrolling!
Giving the gift of stress reduction
It’s a big week here at LOTME. You’ve just read our 100th edition, and to help celebrate that milestone – along with Count Your Buttons Day, Celebration of the Mind Day, and the International Day of the Nacho – we’re presenting an extra-special bonus feature, courtesy of Sad and Useless: The most depressive humor site on the Internet.
We hope you’ll stop your doomscrolling long enough to enjoy this stress-reducing meme. Thanks for reading!
The new breakfast of champions
We love a good ranking system here at LOTME world headquarters, especially the food-based ones. Luckily for us (and our readers), a new study published in Nature Food offers a food-based ranking system.
Sadly, unlike the last food-related ranking we covered, the Food Compass doesn’t tell you how much life you gain or lose from each food you eat down to the precise minute. Instead, it favors a more simple rating system from 1 to 100, with healthier foods scoring higher, and even incorporates mixed foods, not just single ingredients. This makes it better at assessing and comparing food combinations, rather than trying to mix and match the many ingredients that go into even relatively simple recipes.
The top and bottom of the rankings contain the usual suspects. Legumes and nuts, at 78.6, had the highest average score among the broad food groups, followed by fruits and then vegetables. Rounding out the bottom were sweets and savory snacks at 16.4. Among the individual foods, there were perfect scores in both directions: 100 for raw raspberries, while instant noodle soup and nonchocolate, ready-to-eat, nonfat pudding (very specific there) each earned a 1.
There are a few surprises in between. Nonfat cappuccino received a green light from the investigators, great news for the coffee drinkers out there. A serving of sweet potato chips scored better than a simple grilled chicken breast, and a slice of pizza, loaded up with extra meat and a thick crust, is still more nutritious than a bowl of corn flakes.
Neither is good for you, of course, but we’re still going to take this as a sign that pizza is the ideal breakfast food. Add that to your morning coffee, and you’re ready to start the day. Move over Wheaties, there’s a new breakfast of champions.
COVID-19 resisters, please step forward
Some people have all the luck with good genes, both inside and out.
Genetically speaking, humans are 99.9% the same, but that 0.1% is where things get interesting. Because of that 0.1% difference, some people are more likely to contract diseases such as HIV, while others might be more resistant. These small differences in genetic code could be the key to finding treatments for COVID-19.
“The introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to a naive population, on a global scale, has provided yet another demonstration of the remarkable clinical variability between individuals in the course of infection, ranging from asymptomatic infections to life-threatening disease,” the researchers said in Nature Immunology.
The investigators have been scouring the world to find people who might be resistant to SARS-CoV-2 and have enrolled over 400 individuals in a “dedicated resistance study cohort,” according to ScienceAlert.
The investigators are looking at households in which families were infected but one member did not show severe symptoms, or for individuals who have been around the virus multiple times and haven’t contracted it. They are also looking at blood types.
Enrollment is ongoing, so if you’ve been in contact with COVID-19 multiple times and have not gotten sick, scientists would like to hear from you.
Better living through parasitization
How would you like to triple your life span, while maintaining a youthful appearance and gaining special social standing and privileges?
Sounds pretty good, right, so what’s the catch? Well, you have to be infected with a tapeworm ... and you have to be an ant.
If you are an ant, here’s the deal: Workers of the species Temnothorax nylanderi that have tapeworms live much longer than uninfected workers, and while living out those longer lives they do less work and receive gifts of food.
In a study conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, infected ants’ metabolic rates and lipid levels were similar to those of younger ants, and they appeared to remain in a permanent juvenile stage as a result of the infection, the investigators reported.
They tracked Temnothorax colonies for 3 years, at which point 95% of the uninfected workers had died but over half of the infected ants were still alive. Pretty great, right? Wrong. There was no joy in antville, for the uninfected workers had struck out. “Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free,” according to an article in the Atlantic.
Does this situation seem just a wee bit familiar? A small group lives longer, healthier lives and enjoys special privileges while the majority of that society works harder to support them? We’ll put it into the form of a chicken-and-egg argument: Which came first, the tapeworms or the one-percenters?
Laughing the pandemic stress away
Doomscrolling on social media has become one of the world’s favorite pastimes during the pandemic, but research shows that those memes about COVID-19 might combat the doom and gloom of the outside world.
A study recently published in Psychology of Popular Media showed that viewing memes, specifically those that were COVID-19 related, actually lessened the stress of the pandemic.
The researchers conducted a survey of 748 people aged 18-88 years. Each participant viewed three memes with text or three memes with text but no images. All three memes had similar cuteness levels (baby or adult), subject (animal or human), and caption (COVID-19–related or not). The participants were then asked to report on their stress levels and feelings before and after the memes.
The people who looked at memes felt less stressed and a higher humor level, especially the participants who received the COVID-19 memes. Study Finds said that they had more “pandemic-coping confidence” than those who got regular memes.
“While the World Health Organization recommended that people avoid too much COVID-related media for the benefit of their mental health, our research reveals that memes about COVID-19 could help people feel more confident in their ability to deal with the pandemic,” lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, said in a written statement. “The positive emotions associated with this type of content may make people feel psychologically safer and therefore better able to pay attention to the underlying messages related to health threats.”
So if you think you’ve been wasting time looking at memes during this pandemic, think again. It actually might keep you sane. Keep on scrolling!
Giving the gift of stress reduction
It’s a big week here at LOTME. You’ve just read our 100th edition, and to help celebrate that milestone – along with Count Your Buttons Day, Celebration of the Mind Day, and the International Day of the Nacho – we’re presenting an extra-special bonus feature, courtesy of Sad and Useless: The most depressive humor site on the Internet.
We hope you’ll stop your doomscrolling long enough to enjoy this stress-reducing meme. Thanks for reading!
Stay tuned for CSI: Olive oil
Cracking down on food fraud
How do you know the olive oil in your pantry is from Greece? Or that the avocados on your toast are from Mexico? The label, right? Well, maybe not. False claims of origin are a huge problem in the food industry, costing over $30 billion in economic damage annually.
Fear not, citizens, because botanists are on the job, and they’ve found a cheaper and more efficient way to expose that non-Greek olive oil.
How? Florian Cueni, PhD, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and associates developed a new model to simulate oxygen isotope ratios in plants from a specific region, based on the temperature, precipitation, growing season information, and humidity data. Previously, botanists had to collect reference data from the claimed origin country and from other regions to validate where the product actually came from.
“With minor adjustments to the parameters, our model can be used to determine all plant products,” said senior investigator Ansgar Kahmen. This can open up the door for even more plant forensics, including drug confiscations and illegal timber logging, with information that will hold up in court.
Why pay Greek-olive prices for olives from California?
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to unhelpful online reviews
And reading angry online reviews leads to hate and suffering. We may have co-opted Master Yoda’s wise words ever so slightly, but anyone who’s done any shopping online (so everyone) knows that the review section of any product can be downright villainous. Do these reviews affect what we buy?
The angry online product review was the subject of a recent study published in MIS Quarterly. In a series of experiments, participants were shown a series of realistic online reviews with varying amounts of anger but with similar amounts of information. After reading the reviews, participants rated helpfulness, their personal opinion of the product/retailer, and whether or not they would buy the product.
Participants overwhelmingly rated calmly written reviews as more helpful than angrily written ones. One would expect, then, that those unhelpful angry reviews would have little effect on the participant’s view or willingness to buy a product, but the study investigators found the opposite. Reading angry reviews made the participants more likely to reject the product, even though they didn’t think the angry review was useful. And when you think about it, it does make sense. Anger means drama, and we can’t resist a juicy bit of drama.
So while we should all aspire to be Yoda and rise above anger and hatred, in reality we seem to be channeling Emperor Palpatine. We let the hate flow through us, and in our anger, we ignore perfectly good products. On the plus side, now we can shoot lightning out of our hands, so that’s pretty cool.
Health care is heading to the hall of fame
We couldn’t be happier here at LOTME because it’s that time of year again.
No, we’re not talking about Healthcare Security and Safety Week or National Metric Week, although those are both kind of important. Hmm, maybe we should talk about health care security or the metric system. After all, in this country, medicine is one of the metric system’s biggest customers. And who doesn’t love picograms? They’re the unit-of-measurement equivalent of a koala.
So we’re doing the metric system, then? Nah.
We’re excited because the 2022 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame were just announced, and, as usual, the world of health care is well represented.
First up is the surprisingly relevant (thanks to the party guest that won’t leave, SARS-CoV-2) pair of Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, who worked together in the early 2000s to modify mRNA “so it could avoid immediate immune detection, remain active longer and efficiently instruct cells to create antigens to protect against severe disease.” Their discoveries eventually led to the use of modified mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The second, albeit posthumous, physician-inductee is Patricia Bath, MD, who was the first Black female physician to receive a U.S. patent for a medical invention. The laserphaco device and technique to remove cataracts “performed all steps of cataract removal: making the incision, destroying the lens, and vacuuming out the fractured pieces.”
Two other inductees have somewhat tenuous connections to medical care. Lonnie Johnson invented the Super Soaker, a powerful squirt gun that has been criticized by psychologists for encouraging violence, and Carl Benz invented the automobile, which sort of means he invented the ambulance, so there you go.
The induction ceremony takes place on May 5, 2022, in Washington, DC. If you’re attending the black-tie dinner at The Anthem, let us know and we’ll split an Uber. It’s our only night to be fancy.
Cracking down on food fraud
How do you know the olive oil in your pantry is from Greece? Or that the avocados on your toast are from Mexico? The label, right? Well, maybe not. False claims of origin are a huge problem in the food industry, costing over $30 billion in economic damage annually.
Fear not, citizens, because botanists are on the job, and they’ve found a cheaper and more efficient way to expose that non-Greek olive oil.
How? Florian Cueni, PhD, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and associates developed a new model to simulate oxygen isotope ratios in plants from a specific region, based on the temperature, precipitation, growing season information, and humidity data. Previously, botanists had to collect reference data from the claimed origin country and from other regions to validate where the product actually came from.
“With minor adjustments to the parameters, our model can be used to determine all plant products,” said senior investigator Ansgar Kahmen. This can open up the door for even more plant forensics, including drug confiscations and illegal timber logging, with information that will hold up in court.
Why pay Greek-olive prices for olives from California?
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to unhelpful online reviews
And reading angry online reviews leads to hate and suffering. We may have co-opted Master Yoda’s wise words ever so slightly, but anyone who’s done any shopping online (so everyone) knows that the review section of any product can be downright villainous. Do these reviews affect what we buy?
The angry online product review was the subject of a recent study published in MIS Quarterly. In a series of experiments, participants were shown a series of realistic online reviews with varying amounts of anger but with similar amounts of information. After reading the reviews, participants rated helpfulness, their personal opinion of the product/retailer, and whether or not they would buy the product.
Participants overwhelmingly rated calmly written reviews as more helpful than angrily written ones. One would expect, then, that those unhelpful angry reviews would have little effect on the participant’s view or willingness to buy a product, but the study investigators found the opposite. Reading angry reviews made the participants more likely to reject the product, even though they didn’t think the angry review was useful. And when you think about it, it does make sense. Anger means drama, and we can’t resist a juicy bit of drama.
So while we should all aspire to be Yoda and rise above anger and hatred, in reality we seem to be channeling Emperor Palpatine. We let the hate flow through us, and in our anger, we ignore perfectly good products. On the plus side, now we can shoot lightning out of our hands, so that’s pretty cool.
Health care is heading to the hall of fame
We couldn’t be happier here at LOTME because it’s that time of year again.
No, we’re not talking about Healthcare Security and Safety Week or National Metric Week, although those are both kind of important. Hmm, maybe we should talk about health care security or the metric system. After all, in this country, medicine is one of the metric system’s biggest customers. And who doesn’t love picograms? They’re the unit-of-measurement equivalent of a koala.
So we’re doing the metric system, then? Nah.
We’re excited because the 2022 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame were just announced, and, as usual, the world of health care is well represented.
First up is the surprisingly relevant (thanks to the party guest that won’t leave, SARS-CoV-2) pair of Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, who worked together in the early 2000s to modify mRNA “so it could avoid immediate immune detection, remain active longer and efficiently instruct cells to create antigens to protect against severe disease.” Their discoveries eventually led to the use of modified mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The second, albeit posthumous, physician-inductee is Patricia Bath, MD, who was the first Black female physician to receive a U.S. patent for a medical invention. The laserphaco device and technique to remove cataracts “performed all steps of cataract removal: making the incision, destroying the lens, and vacuuming out the fractured pieces.”
Two other inductees have somewhat tenuous connections to medical care. Lonnie Johnson invented the Super Soaker, a powerful squirt gun that has been criticized by psychologists for encouraging violence, and Carl Benz invented the automobile, which sort of means he invented the ambulance, so there you go.
The induction ceremony takes place on May 5, 2022, in Washington, DC. If you’re attending the black-tie dinner at The Anthem, let us know and we’ll split an Uber. It’s our only night to be fancy.
Cracking down on food fraud
How do you know the olive oil in your pantry is from Greece? Or that the avocados on your toast are from Mexico? The label, right? Well, maybe not. False claims of origin are a huge problem in the food industry, costing over $30 billion in economic damage annually.
Fear not, citizens, because botanists are on the job, and they’ve found a cheaper and more efficient way to expose that non-Greek olive oil.
How? Florian Cueni, PhD, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and associates developed a new model to simulate oxygen isotope ratios in plants from a specific region, based on the temperature, precipitation, growing season information, and humidity data. Previously, botanists had to collect reference data from the claimed origin country and from other regions to validate where the product actually came from.
“With minor adjustments to the parameters, our model can be used to determine all plant products,” said senior investigator Ansgar Kahmen. This can open up the door for even more plant forensics, including drug confiscations and illegal timber logging, with information that will hold up in court.
Why pay Greek-olive prices for olives from California?
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to unhelpful online reviews
And reading angry online reviews leads to hate and suffering. We may have co-opted Master Yoda’s wise words ever so slightly, but anyone who’s done any shopping online (so everyone) knows that the review section of any product can be downright villainous. Do these reviews affect what we buy?
The angry online product review was the subject of a recent study published in MIS Quarterly. In a series of experiments, participants were shown a series of realistic online reviews with varying amounts of anger but with similar amounts of information. After reading the reviews, participants rated helpfulness, their personal opinion of the product/retailer, and whether or not they would buy the product.
Participants overwhelmingly rated calmly written reviews as more helpful than angrily written ones. One would expect, then, that those unhelpful angry reviews would have little effect on the participant’s view or willingness to buy a product, but the study investigators found the opposite. Reading angry reviews made the participants more likely to reject the product, even though they didn’t think the angry review was useful. And when you think about it, it does make sense. Anger means drama, and we can’t resist a juicy bit of drama.
So while we should all aspire to be Yoda and rise above anger and hatred, in reality we seem to be channeling Emperor Palpatine. We let the hate flow through us, and in our anger, we ignore perfectly good products. On the plus side, now we can shoot lightning out of our hands, so that’s pretty cool.
Health care is heading to the hall of fame
We couldn’t be happier here at LOTME because it’s that time of year again.
No, we’re not talking about Healthcare Security and Safety Week or National Metric Week, although those are both kind of important. Hmm, maybe we should talk about health care security or the metric system. After all, in this country, medicine is one of the metric system’s biggest customers. And who doesn’t love picograms? They’re the unit-of-measurement equivalent of a koala.
So we’re doing the metric system, then? Nah.
We’re excited because the 2022 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame were just announced, and, as usual, the world of health care is well represented.
First up is the surprisingly relevant (thanks to the party guest that won’t leave, SARS-CoV-2) pair of Katalin Karikó, PhD, and Drew Weissman, MD, who worked together in the early 2000s to modify mRNA “so it could avoid immediate immune detection, remain active longer and efficiently instruct cells to create antigens to protect against severe disease.” Their discoveries eventually led to the use of modified mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines.
The second, albeit posthumous, physician-inductee is Patricia Bath, MD, who was the first Black female physician to receive a U.S. patent for a medical invention. The laserphaco device and technique to remove cataracts “performed all steps of cataract removal: making the incision, destroying the lens, and vacuuming out the fractured pieces.”
Two other inductees have somewhat tenuous connections to medical care. Lonnie Johnson invented the Super Soaker, a powerful squirt gun that has been criticized by psychologists for encouraging violence, and Carl Benz invented the automobile, which sort of means he invented the ambulance, so there you go.
The induction ceremony takes place on May 5, 2022, in Washington, DC. If you’re attending the black-tie dinner at The Anthem, let us know and we’ll split an Uber. It’s our only night to be fancy.
Web of antimicrobials doesn’t hold water
Music plus mushrooms equals therapy
Magic mushrooms have been used recreationally and medicinally for thousands of years, but researchers have found adding music could be a game changer in antidepressant treatment.
The ingredient that makes these mushrooms so magical is psilocybin. It works well for the clinical treatment of mental health conditions and some forms of depression because the “trip” can be contained to one work day, making it easy to administer under supervision. With the accompaniment of music, scientists have found that psilocybin evokes emotion.
This recent study, presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Lisbon, tested participants’ emotional response to music before and after the psilocybin. Ketanserin, an antihypertensive drug, was used to test against the effects of psilocybin. The scientist played Mozart and Elgar and found that participants on psilocybin had an emotional response increase of 60%. That response was even greater, compared with ketanserin, which actually lessened the emotional response to music.
“This shows that combination of psilocybin and music has a strong emotional effect, and we believe that this will be important for the therapeutic application of psychedelics if they are approved for clinical use,” said lead researcher Dea Siggaard Stenbæk of the University of Copenhagen.
Professor David J. Nutt of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study, said that it supports the use of music for treatment efficacy with psychedelics and suggested that the next step is to “optimise this approach probably through individualising and personalising music tracks in therapy.”
Cue the 1960s LSD music montage.
Chicken ‘white striping is not a disease’
Have you ever sliced open a new pack of chicken breasts to start dinner and noticed white fatty lines running through the chicken? Maybe you thought it was just some extra fat to trim off, but the Humane League calls it “white striping disease.”
Chicken is the No. 1 meat consumed by Americans, so it’s not surprising that chickens are factory farmed and raised to be ready for slaughter quickly, according to CBSNews.com, which reported that the Humane League claims white striping is found in 70% of the chicken in popular grocery stores. The league expressed concern for the chickens’ welfare as they are bred to grow bigger quickly, which is causing the white striping and increasing the fat content of the meat by as much as 224%.
The National Chicken Council told CBS that the league’s findings were unscientific. A spokesperson said, “White striping is not a disease. It is a quality factor in chicken breast meat caused by deposits of fat in the muscle during the bird’s growth and development.” He went on to say that severe white striping happens in 3%-6% of birds, which are mostly used in further processed products, not in chicken breast packages.
Somehow, that’s not making us feel any better.
The itsy bitsy spider lets us all down
Most people do not like spiders. That’s too bad, because spiders are generally nothing but helpful little creatures that prey upon annoying flies and other pests. Then there’s the silk they produce. The ancient Romans used it to treat conditions such as warts and skin lesions. Spiders wrap their eggs in silk to protect them from harmful bacteria.
Of course, we can hardly trust the medical opinions of people from 2,000 years ago, but modern-day studies have not definitively proved whether or not spider silk has any antimicrobial properties.
To settle the matter once and for all, researchers from Denmark built a silk-harvesting machine using the most famous of Danish inventions: Legos. The contraption, sort of a paddle wheel, pulled the silk from several different species of spider pinned down by the researchers. The silk was then tested against three different bacteria species, including good old Escherichia coli.
Unfortunately for our spider friends, their silk has no antimicrobial activity. The researchers suspected that any such activity seen in previous studies was actually caused by improper control for the solvents used to extract the silk; those solvents can have antimicrobial properties on their own. As for protecting their eggs, rather than killing bacteria, the silk likely provides a physical barrier alone.
It is bad news for spiders on the benefit-to-humanity front, but look at the bright side: If their silk had antimicrobial activity, we’d have to start farming them to acquire more silk. And that’s no good. Spiders deserve to roam free, hunt as they please, and drop down on your head from the ceiling.
Anxiety and allergies: Cause, effect, confusion
We’re big fans of science, but as longtime, totally impartial (Science rules!) observers of science’s medical realm, we can see that the day-to-day process of practicing the scientific method occasionally gets a bit messy. And no, we’re not talking about COVID-19.
We’re talking allergies. We’re talking mental health. We’re talking allergic disease and mental health.
We’re talking about a pair of press releases we came across during our never-ending search for material to educate, entertain, and astound our fabulously wonderful and loyal readers. (We say that, of course, in the most impartial way possible.)
The first release was titled, “Allergies including asthma and hay fever not linked to mental health traits” and covered research from the University of Bristol (England). The investigators were trying to determine if “allergic diseases actually causes mental health traits including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, or vice versa,” according to the release.
What they found, however, was “little evidence of a causal relationship between the onset of allergic disease and mental health.” Again, this is the press release talking.
The second release seemed to suggest the exact opposite: “Study uncovers link between allergies and mental health conditions.” That got our attention. A little more reading revealed that “people with asthma, atopic dermatitis, and hay fever also had a higher likelihood of having depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or neuroticism.”
One of the investigators was quoted as saying, “Establishing whether allergic disease causes mental health problems, or vice versa, is important to ensure that resources and treatment strategies are targeted appropriately.”
Did you notice the “vice versa”? Did you notice that it appeared in quotes from both releases? We did, so we took a closer look at the source. The second release covered a group of investigators from the University of Bristol – the same group, and the same study, in fact, as the first one.
So there you have it. One study, two press releases, and one confused journalist. Thank you, science.
Music plus mushrooms equals therapy
Magic mushrooms have been used recreationally and medicinally for thousands of years, but researchers have found adding music could be a game changer in antidepressant treatment.
The ingredient that makes these mushrooms so magical is psilocybin. It works well for the clinical treatment of mental health conditions and some forms of depression because the “trip” can be contained to one work day, making it easy to administer under supervision. With the accompaniment of music, scientists have found that psilocybin evokes emotion.
This recent study, presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Lisbon, tested participants’ emotional response to music before and after the psilocybin. Ketanserin, an antihypertensive drug, was used to test against the effects of psilocybin. The scientist played Mozart and Elgar and found that participants on psilocybin had an emotional response increase of 60%. That response was even greater, compared with ketanserin, which actually lessened the emotional response to music.
“This shows that combination of psilocybin and music has a strong emotional effect, and we believe that this will be important for the therapeutic application of psychedelics if they are approved for clinical use,” said lead researcher Dea Siggaard Stenbæk of the University of Copenhagen.
Professor David J. Nutt of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study, said that it supports the use of music for treatment efficacy with psychedelics and suggested that the next step is to “optimise this approach probably through individualising and personalising music tracks in therapy.”
Cue the 1960s LSD music montage.
Chicken ‘white striping is not a disease’
Have you ever sliced open a new pack of chicken breasts to start dinner and noticed white fatty lines running through the chicken? Maybe you thought it was just some extra fat to trim off, but the Humane League calls it “white striping disease.”
Chicken is the No. 1 meat consumed by Americans, so it’s not surprising that chickens are factory farmed and raised to be ready for slaughter quickly, according to CBSNews.com, which reported that the Humane League claims white striping is found in 70% of the chicken in popular grocery stores. The league expressed concern for the chickens’ welfare as they are bred to grow bigger quickly, which is causing the white striping and increasing the fat content of the meat by as much as 224%.
The National Chicken Council told CBS that the league’s findings were unscientific. A spokesperson said, “White striping is not a disease. It is a quality factor in chicken breast meat caused by deposits of fat in the muscle during the bird’s growth and development.” He went on to say that severe white striping happens in 3%-6% of birds, which are mostly used in further processed products, not in chicken breast packages.
Somehow, that’s not making us feel any better.
The itsy bitsy spider lets us all down
Most people do not like spiders. That’s too bad, because spiders are generally nothing but helpful little creatures that prey upon annoying flies and other pests. Then there’s the silk they produce. The ancient Romans used it to treat conditions such as warts and skin lesions. Spiders wrap their eggs in silk to protect them from harmful bacteria.
Of course, we can hardly trust the medical opinions of people from 2,000 years ago, but modern-day studies have not definitively proved whether or not spider silk has any antimicrobial properties.
To settle the matter once and for all, researchers from Denmark built a silk-harvesting machine using the most famous of Danish inventions: Legos. The contraption, sort of a paddle wheel, pulled the silk from several different species of spider pinned down by the researchers. The silk was then tested against three different bacteria species, including good old Escherichia coli.
Unfortunately for our spider friends, their silk has no antimicrobial activity. The researchers suspected that any such activity seen in previous studies was actually caused by improper control for the solvents used to extract the silk; those solvents can have antimicrobial properties on their own. As for protecting their eggs, rather than killing bacteria, the silk likely provides a physical barrier alone.
It is bad news for spiders on the benefit-to-humanity front, but look at the bright side: If their silk had antimicrobial activity, we’d have to start farming them to acquire more silk. And that’s no good. Spiders deserve to roam free, hunt as they please, and drop down on your head from the ceiling.
Anxiety and allergies: Cause, effect, confusion
We’re big fans of science, but as longtime, totally impartial (Science rules!) observers of science’s medical realm, we can see that the day-to-day process of practicing the scientific method occasionally gets a bit messy. And no, we’re not talking about COVID-19.
We’re talking allergies. We’re talking mental health. We’re talking allergic disease and mental health.
We’re talking about a pair of press releases we came across during our never-ending search for material to educate, entertain, and astound our fabulously wonderful and loyal readers. (We say that, of course, in the most impartial way possible.)
The first release was titled, “Allergies including asthma and hay fever not linked to mental health traits” and covered research from the University of Bristol (England). The investigators were trying to determine if “allergic diseases actually causes mental health traits including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, or vice versa,” according to the release.
What they found, however, was “little evidence of a causal relationship between the onset of allergic disease and mental health.” Again, this is the press release talking.
The second release seemed to suggest the exact opposite: “Study uncovers link between allergies and mental health conditions.” That got our attention. A little more reading revealed that “people with asthma, atopic dermatitis, and hay fever also had a higher likelihood of having depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or neuroticism.”
One of the investigators was quoted as saying, “Establishing whether allergic disease causes mental health problems, or vice versa, is important to ensure that resources and treatment strategies are targeted appropriately.”
Did you notice the “vice versa”? Did you notice that it appeared in quotes from both releases? We did, so we took a closer look at the source. The second release covered a group of investigators from the University of Bristol – the same group, and the same study, in fact, as the first one.
So there you have it. One study, two press releases, and one confused journalist. Thank you, science.
Music plus mushrooms equals therapy
Magic mushrooms have been used recreationally and medicinally for thousands of years, but researchers have found adding music could be a game changer in antidepressant treatment.
The ingredient that makes these mushrooms so magical is psilocybin. It works well for the clinical treatment of mental health conditions and some forms of depression because the “trip” can be contained to one work day, making it easy to administer under supervision. With the accompaniment of music, scientists have found that psilocybin evokes emotion.
This recent study, presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Lisbon, tested participants’ emotional response to music before and after the psilocybin. Ketanserin, an antihypertensive drug, was used to test against the effects of psilocybin. The scientist played Mozart and Elgar and found that participants on psilocybin had an emotional response increase of 60%. That response was even greater, compared with ketanserin, which actually lessened the emotional response to music.
“This shows that combination of psilocybin and music has a strong emotional effect, and we believe that this will be important for the therapeutic application of psychedelics if they are approved for clinical use,” said lead researcher Dea Siggaard Stenbæk of the University of Copenhagen.
Professor David J. Nutt of Imperial College in London, who was not involved in the study, said that it supports the use of music for treatment efficacy with psychedelics and suggested that the next step is to “optimise this approach probably through individualising and personalising music tracks in therapy.”
Cue the 1960s LSD music montage.
Chicken ‘white striping is not a disease’
Have you ever sliced open a new pack of chicken breasts to start dinner and noticed white fatty lines running through the chicken? Maybe you thought it was just some extra fat to trim off, but the Humane League calls it “white striping disease.”
Chicken is the No. 1 meat consumed by Americans, so it’s not surprising that chickens are factory farmed and raised to be ready for slaughter quickly, according to CBSNews.com, which reported that the Humane League claims white striping is found in 70% of the chicken in popular grocery stores. The league expressed concern for the chickens’ welfare as they are bred to grow bigger quickly, which is causing the white striping and increasing the fat content of the meat by as much as 224%.
The National Chicken Council told CBS that the league’s findings were unscientific. A spokesperson said, “White striping is not a disease. It is a quality factor in chicken breast meat caused by deposits of fat in the muscle during the bird’s growth and development.” He went on to say that severe white striping happens in 3%-6% of birds, which are mostly used in further processed products, not in chicken breast packages.
Somehow, that’s not making us feel any better.
The itsy bitsy spider lets us all down
Most people do not like spiders. That’s too bad, because spiders are generally nothing but helpful little creatures that prey upon annoying flies and other pests. Then there’s the silk they produce. The ancient Romans used it to treat conditions such as warts and skin lesions. Spiders wrap their eggs in silk to protect them from harmful bacteria.
Of course, we can hardly trust the medical opinions of people from 2,000 years ago, but modern-day studies have not definitively proved whether or not spider silk has any antimicrobial properties.
To settle the matter once and for all, researchers from Denmark built a silk-harvesting machine using the most famous of Danish inventions: Legos. The contraption, sort of a paddle wheel, pulled the silk from several different species of spider pinned down by the researchers. The silk was then tested against three different bacteria species, including good old Escherichia coli.
Unfortunately for our spider friends, their silk has no antimicrobial activity. The researchers suspected that any such activity seen in previous studies was actually caused by improper control for the solvents used to extract the silk; those solvents can have antimicrobial properties on their own. As for protecting their eggs, rather than killing bacteria, the silk likely provides a physical barrier alone.
It is bad news for spiders on the benefit-to-humanity front, but look at the bright side: If their silk had antimicrobial activity, we’d have to start farming them to acquire more silk. And that’s no good. Spiders deserve to roam free, hunt as they please, and drop down on your head from the ceiling.
Anxiety and allergies: Cause, effect, confusion
We’re big fans of science, but as longtime, totally impartial (Science rules!) observers of science’s medical realm, we can see that the day-to-day process of practicing the scientific method occasionally gets a bit messy. And no, we’re not talking about COVID-19.
We’re talking allergies. We’re talking mental health. We’re talking allergic disease and mental health.
We’re talking about a pair of press releases we came across during our never-ending search for material to educate, entertain, and astound our fabulously wonderful and loyal readers. (We say that, of course, in the most impartial way possible.)
The first release was titled, “Allergies including asthma and hay fever not linked to mental health traits” and covered research from the University of Bristol (England). The investigators were trying to determine if “allergic diseases actually causes mental health traits including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, or vice versa,” according to the release.
What they found, however, was “little evidence of a causal relationship between the onset of allergic disease and mental health.” Again, this is the press release talking.
The second release seemed to suggest the exact opposite: “Study uncovers link between allergies and mental health conditions.” That got our attention. A little more reading revealed that “people with asthma, atopic dermatitis, and hay fever also had a higher likelihood of having depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or neuroticism.”
One of the investigators was quoted as saying, “Establishing whether allergic disease causes mental health problems, or vice versa, is important to ensure that resources and treatment strategies are targeted appropriately.”
Did you notice the “vice versa”? Did you notice that it appeared in quotes from both releases? We did, so we took a closer look at the source. The second release covered a group of investigators from the University of Bristol – the same group, and the same study, in fact, as the first one.
So there you have it. One study, two press releases, and one confused journalist. Thank you, science.
Cook your amphibians before you eat them
Novel food for thought
When you were growing up, your parents probably told you to brush your teeth before you went to bed, warned you not to run with the scissors or play with matches, and punished you whenever you used the neighbor children to play Schrödinger’s cat.
They did those things for your own good, of course, and now the nation’s mother – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is doing the same by warning us about novel outbreak–associated foods. As in, “Put down that novel outbreak–associated food! You don’t know where it’s been!”
Seriously, you don’t know where it’s been. CDC investigators identified 28 novel foods that were linked to 36 foodborne-disease outbreaks that occurred during 2007-2016, including moringa leaf (herb/spice), tempeh (grain), frog, sprouted nut butter, and skate.
The novel foods implicated in these outbreaks were more likely to be imported, compared with 14,216 outbreaks that occurred from 1973 to 2016, and about half didn’t require refrigeration. Two-thirds did not need to be cooked after purchase. Another thing your parents wouldn’t like: Some can’t be washed, like sheep milk, sugar cane, or the aforementioned nut butter.
We wanted to get a food expert to comment on these novel foods, but our editor said that the assistant manager of our local Burger King wasn’t expert enough, so we’ve commandeered someone else’s expert. Cynthia Sears, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Today.com all about the dangers of frogs: “Essentially all amphibians are contaminated, often with salmonella. Eating any amphibian that is not thoroughly cooked is a risk.”
Be sure to cook your amphibians before you eat them. Advice that your parents would be proud to share.
Dieters should stay away from diet drinks
When a drink is labeled “diet” many assume that the calorie-free beverage is the best choice. However, one of the largest studies to date on artificial sweeteners is out to set the record straight.
Artificial sweeteners, or nonnutritive sweeteners (NNS), are used in most if not all diet products to give the illusion of sweetness without the caloric guilt. Some studies say they help with weight loss for that very reason, but others say they can contribute to weight gain. So which is it?
Researchers at the University of Southern California sought to add some clarity to the research already out there.
They looked at an even-gendered split of 74 participants who drank 300 mL of drinks sweetened with NNS, table sugar, or water. The researchers then used functional MRI to see how parts of the brain responsible for appetite and cravings responded to images of high-calorie foods. They also looked at glucose, insulin, and other metabolic hormone levels, as well as how much food the participants ate at their free buffet. (In the participants’ defense, who can say no to a free buffet?)
The researchers made some interesting observations:
- Women who drank the NNS drink ate more than did the table-sugar group, but all men ate the same.
- Images of those calorie-packed goodies increased cravings and appetite for obese men and women in the NNS group, compared with the table-sugar group.
- For all participants who drank the NNS drink, there was a decrease in the hormone that tells the body it’s full.
“By studying different groups we were able to show that females and people with obesity may be more sensitive to artificial sweeteners. For these groups, drinking artificially sweetened drinks may trick the brain into feeling hungry, which may in turn result in more calories being consumed,” Kathleen Page, MD, the study’s corresponding author, said in a separate statement.
Today’s lesson? Don’t believe every label you read.
Instagram vegetables and the triumph of peer pressure
You and your family are sitting down for dinner. You’ve taken the time to prepare a healthy, nutritious meal. Vegetables, rice, seafood – all the right things. But the children around you refuse to partake. What can you do? Why, show them a highly liked photo of broccoli on Instagram!
In reality, kids will probably never like to eat their vegetables, but according to a study published in Appetite, viewing highly liked images on social media can compel adults to eat theirs.
The investigators recruited a group of 169 adults aged 18-28 (average age, 21) and showed them a series of mock Instagram posts of all sorts of food, everything from Brussels sprouts to chocolate cake, as well as nonfood images to act as a baseline. The images had a varying amount of likes. After viewing the images, study participants were offered a snack buffet consisting of grapes and cookies.
The results were a triumph of peer pressure. Those who viewed highly liked images of nutritious foods ate a significantly larger proportion of grapes, compared with those who saw highly liked images of unhealthy food or nonfood.
The authors cautioned that more research is needed, but they said that they’re onto something in the eternal struggle of getting people to eat better. If Mikey liked it, maybe you should, too. Just as long as you don’t try to encourage the eating of peas. That is a dark road none should take, and no one should ever be subjected to that cursed food.
It’s nice to share … hypertension?
You may have heard that, over time, you begin to resemble your spouse. You may have also heard that, as time goes by, your pet might start to resemble you, but that is a story for another time.
A lot of the time, it’s human nature that people partner with someone who is similar to them in physical and environmental status. If you like to go jogging at 5 a.m., you might want a spouse who does the same. A study done using data from couples in Japan and the Netherlands found that couples who had the same lifestyle had similar levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. They also had similar illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes.
It’s important to note that many of the couples were not very genetically similar but had similar lifestyles. Encourage your partner to have a healthier lifestyle, so you can live on for many years to come!
Novel food for thought
When you were growing up, your parents probably told you to brush your teeth before you went to bed, warned you not to run with the scissors or play with matches, and punished you whenever you used the neighbor children to play Schrödinger’s cat.
They did those things for your own good, of course, and now the nation’s mother – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is doing the same by warning us about novel outbreak–associated foods. As in, “Put down that novel outbreak–associated food! You don’t know where it’s been!”
Seriously, you don’t know where it’s been. CDC investigators identified 28 novel foods that were linked to 36 foodborne-disease outbreaks that occurred during 2007-2016, including moringa leaf (herb/spice), tempeh (grain), frog, sprouted nut butter, and skate.
The novel foods implicated in these outbreaks were more likely to be imported, compared with 14,216 outbreaks that occurred from 1973 to 2016, and about half didn’t require refrigeration. Two-thirds did not need to be cooked after purchase. Another thing your parents wouldn’t like: Some can’t be washed, like sheep milk, sugar cane, or the aforementioned nut butter.
We wanted to get a food expert to comment on these novel foods, but our editor said that the assistant manager of our local Burger King wasn’t expert enough, so we’ve commandeered someone else’s expert. Cynthia Sears, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Today.com all about the dangers of frogs: “Essentially all amphibians are contaminated, often with salmonella. Eating any amphibian that is not thoroughly cooked is a risk.”
Be sure to cook your amphibians before you eat them. Advice that your parents would be proud to share.
Dieters should stay away from diet drinks
When a drink is labeled “diet” many assume that the calorie-free beverage is the best choice. However, one of the largest studies to date on artificial sweeteners is out to set the record straight.
Artificial sweeteners, or nonnutritive sweeteners (NNS), are used in most if not all diet products to give the illusion of sweetness without the caloric guilt. Some studies say they help with weight loss for that very reason, but others say they can contribute to weight gain. So which is it?
Researchers at the University of Southern California sought to add some clarity to the research already out there.
They looked at an even-gendered split of 74 participants who drank 300 mL of drinks sweetened with NNS, table sugar, or water. The researchers then used functional MRI to see how parts of the brain responsible for appetite and cravings responded to images of high-calorie foods. They also looked at glucose, insulin, and other metabolic hormone levels, as well as how much food the participants ate at their free buffet. (In the participants’ defense, who can say no to a free buffet?)
The researchers made some interesting observations:
- Women who drank the NNS drink ate more than did the table-sugar group, but all men ate the same.
- Images of those calorie-packed goodies increased cravings and appetite for obese men and women in the NNS group, compared with the table-sugar group.
- For all participants who drank the NNS drink, there was a decrease in the hormone that tells the body it’s full.
“By studying different groups we were able to show that females and people with obesity may be more sensitive to artificial sweeteners. For these groups, drinking artificially sweetened drinks may trick the brain into feeling hungry, which may in turn result in more calories being consumed,” Kathleen Page, MD, the study’s corresponding author, said in a separate statement.
Today’s lesson? Don’t believe every label you read.
Instagram vegetables and the triumph of peer pressure
You and your family are sitting down for dinner. You’ve taken the time to prepare a healthy, nutritious meal. Vegetables, rice, seafood – all the right things. But the children around you refuse to partake. What can you do? Why, show them a highly liked photo of broccoli on Instagram!
In reality, kids will probably never like to eat their vegetables, but according to a study published in Appetite, viewing highly liked images on social media can compel adults to eat theirs.
The investigators recruited a group of 169 adults aged 18-28 (average age, 21) and showed them a series of mock Instagram posts of all sorts of food, everything from Brussels sprouts to chocolate cake, as well as nonfood images to act as a baseline. The images had a varying amount of likes. After viewing the images, study participants were offered a snack buffet consisting of grapes and cookies.
The results were a triumph of peer pressure. Those who viewed highly liked images of nutritious foods ate a significantly larger proportion of grapes, compared with those who saw highly liked images of unhealthy food or nonfood.
The authors cautioned that more research is needed, but they said that they’re onto something in the eternal struggle of getting people to eat better. If Mikey liked it, maybe you should, too. Just as long as you don’t try to encourage the eating of peas. That is a dark road none should take, and no one should ever be subjected to that cursed food.
It’s nice to share … hypertension?
You may have heard that, over time, you begin to resemble your spouse. You may have also heard that, as time goes by, your pet might start to resemble you, but that is a story for another time.
A lot of the time, it’s human nature that people partner with someone who is similar to them in physical and environmental status. If you like to go jogging at 5 a.m., you might want a spouse who does the same. A study done using data from couples in Japan and the Netherlands found that couples who had the same lifestyle had similar levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. They also had similar illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes.
It’s important to note that many of the couples were not very genetically similar but had similar lifestyles. Encourage your partner to have a healthier lifestyle, so you can live on for many years to come!
Novel food for thought
When you were growing up, your parents probably told you to brush your teeth before you went to bed, warned you not to run with the scissors or play with matches, and punished you whenever you used the neighbor children to play Schrödinger’s cat.
They did those things for your own good, of course, and now the nation’s mother – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is doing the same by warning us about novel outbreak–associated foods. As in, “Put down that novel outbreak–associated food! You don’t know where it’s been!”
Seriously, you don’t know where it’s been. CDC investigators identified 28 novel foods that were linked to 36 foodborne-disease outbreaks that occurred during 2007-2016, including moringa leaf (herb/spice), tempeh (grain), frog, sprouted nut butter, and skate.
The novel foods implicated in these outbreaks were more likely to be imported, compared with 14,216 outbreaks that occurred from 1973 to 2016, and about half didn’t require refrigeration. Two-thirds did not need to be cooked after purchase. Another thing your parents wouldn’t like: Some can’t be washed, like sheep milk, sugar cane, or the aforementioned nut butter.
We wanted to get a food expert to comment on these novel foods, but our editor said that the assistant manager of our local Burger King wasn’t expert enough, so we’ve commandeered someone else’s expert. Cynthia Sears, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told Today.com all about the dangers of frogs: “Essentially all amphibians are contaminated, often with salmonella. Eating any amphibian that is not thoroughly cooked is a risk.”
Be sure to cook your amphibians before you eat them. Advice that your parents would be proud to share.
Dieters should stay away from diet drinks
When a drink is labeled “diet” many assume that the calorie-free beverage is the best choice. However, one of the largest studies to date on artificial sweeteners is out to set the record straight.
Artificial sweeteners, or nonnutritive sweeteners (NNS), are used in most if not all diet products to give the illusion of sweetness without the caloric guilt. Some studies say they help with weight loss for that very reason, but others say they can contribute to weight gain. So which is it?
Researchers at the University of Southern California sought to add some clarity to the research already out there.
They looked at an even-gendered split of 74 participants who drank 300 mL of drinks sweetened with NNS, table sugar, or water. The researchers then used functional MRI to see how parts of the brain responsible for appetite and cravings responded to images of high-calorie foods. They also looked at glucose, insulin, and other metabolic hormone levels, as well as how much food the participants ate at their free buffet. (In the participants’ defense, who can say no to a free buffet?)
The researchers made some interesting observations:
- Women who drank the NNS drink ate more than did the table-sugar group, but all men ate the same.
- Images of those calorie-packed goodies increased cravings and appetite for obese men and women in the NNS group, compared with the table-sugar group.
- For all participants who drank the NNS drink, there was a decrease in the hormone that tells the body it’s full.
“By studying different groups we were able to show that females and people with obesity may be more sensitive to artificial sweeteners. For these groups, drinking artificially sweetened drinks may trick the brain into feeling hungry, which may in turn result in more calories being consumed,” Kathleen Page, MD, the study’s corresponding author, said in a separate statement.
Today’s lesson? Don’t believe every label you read.
Instagram vegetables and the triumph of peer pressure
You and your family are sitting down for dinner. You’ve taken the time to prepare a healthy, nutritious meal. Vegetables, rice, seafood – all the right things. But the children around you refuse to partake. What can you do? Why, show them a highly liked photo of broccoli on Instagram!
In reality, kids will probably never like to eat their vegetables, but according to a study published in Appetite, viewing highly liked images on social media can compel adults to eat theirs.
The investigators recruited a group of 169 adults aged 18-28 (average age, 21) and showed them a series of mock Instagram posts of all sorts of food, everything from Brussels sprouts to chocolate cake, as well as nonfood images to act as a baseline. The images had a varying amount of likes. After viewing the images, study participants were offered a snack buffet consisting of grapes and cookies.
The results were a triumph of peer pressure. Those who viewed highly liked images of nutritious foods ate a significantly larger proportion of grapes, compared with those who saw highly liked images of unhealthy food or nonfood.
The authors cautioned that more research is needed, but they said that they’re onto something in the eternal struggle of getting people to eat better. If Mikey liked it, maybe you should, too. Just as long as you don’t try to encourage the eating of peas. That is a dark road none should take, and no one should ever be subjected to that cursed food.
It’s nice to share … hypertension?
You may have heard that, over time, you begin to resemble your spouse. You may have also heard that, as time goes by, your pet might start to resemble you, but that is a story for another time.
A lot of the time, it’s human nature that people partner with someone who is similar to them in physical and environmental status. If you like to go jogging at 5 a.m., you might want a spouse who does the same. A study done using data from couples in Japan and the Netherlands found that couples who had the same lifestyle had similar levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides. They also had similar illnesses such as hypertension and diabetes.
It’s important to note that many of the couples were not very genetically similar but had similar lifestyles. Encourage your partner to have a healthier lifestyle, so you can live on for many years to come!
Your bathroom towel rack has a dirty little secret
Bacteria get the rack ... the towel rack
Obviously, bathrooms have germs. Some people are cleaner about their bathrooms than others, but in general most people just try not to think about the microscopic critters crawling about.
Now you would probably think that the toilet is the dirtiest part of the bathroom because that’s where ... you know, most of the business takes place. Or maybe you’d guess the floor. Truth be told, though, the dirtiest part of the bathroom is where the towels are hung.
According to research conducted by electric heating company Rointe in the United Kingdom, bathroom radiators and towel racks/bars are the most germy and dirty parts of the bathroom.
Company investigators examined five bathrooms using swabs that changed color on contact with bacteria and found that 60% of towel racks and radiators were “really dirty,” compared with 50% of sink drains and just 10% of toilets.
Most people probably pay more attention to the sink, floors, and toilets while cleaning, the company suggested, and dampness is a factor in bacteria growth, so it’s no surprise that towels that stay wet on a rack are prime spots for dust, mildew, and mold.
The toilet may be busier, but you don’t put your face in it.
Anti-vaxxers would like to be called ‘purebloods’
COVID-19 anti-vaxxers are an interesting bunch, to be kind. And TikTok is a wacky place. So you can just imagine that anti-vaxxer TikTok is a very strange place. The citizens of anti-vax TikTok have decided that the real reason so many people dislike them is branding. They consider anti-vaccination to be a negative word (duh), so they now want to be referred to as “purebloods.”
Harry Potter doesn’t quite occupy the zeitgeist as it once did, so let’s give you a reminder: In the books, purebloods came from old wizarding families and claimed not to have any Muggle, or nonmagic, blood. While having pure wizard blood was no guarantee of being a villain, most of them were. In addition, it is made quite clear throughout the novels that having supposedly pure blood had no relevance on one’s wizarding ability. Pureblood was a meaningless title, and only the characters with small, cruel minds concerned themselves over it.
Perhaps the anti-vaxxers have decided that they want to be called the same thing. Maybe they just like the name. It does sound impressive and vaguely regal: Pureblood. Like something the nobles of medieval Europe might have used.
Critical-thinking skills may be in short supply here, or maybe the anti-vaxxers know exactly what they’re doing.
Hated broccoli? Blame your DNA
Were you that kid who would rather sit at the table for hours than eat your broccoli? Well, as much as your parents might have pushed you, new research suggests that it might be their fault you didn’t like it to begin with.
Investigators at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, recently reported that distaste for Brassica vegetables – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and cauliflower – can be traced to the oral microbiome.
These vegetables have a compound called S-methyl-L-cysteine sulfoxide that gives off sulfurous odors ... mmm, sulfurous ... when mixed with an enzyme in the plant, and that enzyme is also produced by bacteria in some people’s oral microbiomes. So why do adults tolerate these Brassica veggies more than children? It’s all about levels.
The researchers tested the idea by asking 98 child/parent pairs to rate the odors and by using gas chromatography-olfactometry-mass spectrometry to identify the odor-active compounds in both raw and steamed cauliflower and broccoli. The children whose saliva produced high levels of sulfur volatiles disliked Brassica vegetables the most, they reported, and the children with high levels of sulfur volatiles usually had parents who produced high levels.
Despite that connection, however, the distaste for raw Brassica seen in children wasn’t seen in adults.
Maybe it’s not that taste buds change as we age, maybe we just learn to tolerate the sulfurousness.
Bacteria get the rack ... the towel rack
Obviously, bathrooms have germs. Some people are cleaner about their bathrooms than others, but in general most people just try not to think about the microscopic critters crawling about.
Now you would probably think that the toilet is the dirtiest part of the bathroom because that’s where ... you know, most of the business takes place. Or maybe you’d guess the floor. Truth be told, though, the dirtiest part of the bathroom is where the towels are hung.
According to research conducted by electric heating company Rointe in the United Kingdom, bathroom radiators and towel racks/bars are the most germy and dirty parts of the bathroom.
Company investigators examined five bathrooms using swabs that changed color on contact with bacteria and found that 60% of towel racks and radiators were “really dirty,” compared with 50% of sink drains and just 10% of toilets.
Most people probably pay more attention to the sink, floors, and toilets while cleaning, the company suggested, and dampness is a factor in bacteria growth, so it’s no surprise that towels that stay wet on a rack are prime spots for dust, mildew, and mold.
The toilet may be busier, but you don’t put your face in it.
Anti-vaxxers would like to be called ‘purebloods’
COVID-19 anti-vaxxers are an interesting bunch, to be kind. And TikTok is a wacky place. So you can just imagine that anti-vaxxer TikTok is a very strange place. The citizens of anti-vax TikTok have decided that the real reason so many people dislike them is branding. They consider anti-vaccination to be a negative word (duh), so they now want to be referred to as “purebloods.”
Harry Potter doesn’t quite occupy the zeitgeist as it once did, so let’s give you a reminder: In the books, purebloods came from old wizarding families and claimed not to have any Muggle, or nonmagic, blood. While having pure wizard blood was no guarantee of being a villain, most of them were. In addition, it is made quite clear throughout the novels that having supposedly pure blood had no relevance on one’s wizarding ability. Pureblood was a meaningless title, and only the characters with small, cruel minds concerned themselves over it.
Perhaps the anti-vaxxers have decided that they want to be called the same thing. Maybe they just like the name. It does sound impressive and vaguely regal: Pureblood. Like something the nobles of medieval Europe might have used.
Critical-thinking skills may be in short supply here, or maybe the anti-vaxxers know exactly what they’re doing.
Hated broccoli? Blame your DNA
Were you that kid who would rather sit at the table for hours than eat your broccoli? Well, as much as your parents might have pushed you, new research suggests that it might be their fault you didn’t like it to begin with.
Investigators at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, recently reported that distaste for Brassica vegetables – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and cauliflower – can be traced to the oral microbiome.
These vegetables have a compound called S-methyl-L-cysteine sulfoxide that gives off sulfurous odors ... mmm, sulfurous ... when mixed with an enzyme in the plant, and that enzyme is also produced by bacteria in some people’s oral microbiomes. So why do adults tolerate these Brassica veggies more than children? It’s all about levels.
The researchers tested the idea by asking 98 child/parent pairs to rate the odors and by using gas chromatography-olfactometry-mass spectrometry to identify the odor-active compounds in both raw and steamed cauliflower and broccoli. The children whose saliva produced high levels of sulfur volatiles disliked Brassica vegetables the most, they reported, and the children with high levels of sulfur volatiles usually had parents who produced high levels.
Despite that connection, however, the distaste for raw Brassica seen in children wasn’t seen in adults.
Maybe it’s not that taste buds change as we age, maybe we just learn to tolerate the sulfurousness.
Bacteria get the rack ... the towel rack
Obviously, bathrooms have germs. Some people are cleaner about their bathrooms than others, but in general most people just try not to think about the microscopic critters crawling about.
Now you would probably think that the toilet is the dirtiest part of the bathroom because that’s where ... you know, most of the business takes place. Or maybe you’d guess the floor. Truth be told, though, the dirtiest part of the bathroom is where the towels are hung.
According to research conducted by electric heating company Rointe in the United Kingdom, bathroom radiators and towel racks/bars are the most germy and dirty parts of the bathroom.
Company investigators examined five bathrooms using swabs that changed color on contact with bacteria and found that 60% of towel racks and radiators were “really dirty,” compared with 50% of sink drains and just 10% of toilets.
Most people probably pay more attention to the sink, floors, and toilets while cleaning, the company suggested, and dampness is a factor in bacteria growth, so it’s no surprise that towels that stay wet on a rack are prime spots for dust, mildew, and mold.
The toilet may be busier, but you don’t put your face in it.
Anti-vaxxers would like to be called ‘purebloods’
COVID-19 anti-vaxxers are an interesting bunch, to be kind. And TikTok is a wacky place. So you can just imagine that anti-vaxxer TikTok is a very strange place. The citizens of anti-vax TikTok have decided that the real reason so many people dislike them is branding. They consider anti-vaccination to be a negative word (duh), so they now want to be referred to as “purebloods.”
Harry Potter doesn’t quite occupy the zeitgeist as it once did, so let’s give you a reminder: In the books, purebloods came from old wizarding families and claimed not to have any Muggle, or nonmagic, blood. While having pure wizard blood was no guarantee of being a villain, most of them were. In addition, it is made quite clear throughout the novels that having supposedly pure blood had no relevance on one’s wizarding ability. Pureblood was a meaningless title, and only the characters with small, cruel minds concerned themselves over it.
Perhaps the anti-vaxxers have decided that they want to be called the same thing. Maybe they just like the name. It does sound impressive and vaguely regal: Pureblood. Like something the nobles of medieval Europe might have used.
Critical-thinking skills may be in short supply here, or maybe the anti-vaxxers know exactly what they’re doing.
Hated broccoli? Blame your DNA
Were you that kid who would rather sit at the table for hours than eat your broccoli? Well, as much as your parents might have pushed you, new research suggests that it might be their fault you didn’t like it to begin with.
Investigators at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, recently reported that distaste for Brassica vegetables – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and cauliflower – can be traced to the oral microbiome.
These vegetables have a compound called S-methyl-L-cysteine sulfoxide that gives off sulfurous odors ... mmm, sulfurous ... when mixed with an enzyme in the plant, and that enzyme is also produced by bacteria in some people’s oral microbiomes. So why do adults tolerate these Brassica veggies more than children? It’s all about levels.
The researchers tested the idea by asking 98 child/parent pairs to rate the odors and by using gas chromatography-olfactometry-mass spectrometry to identify the odor-active compounds in both raw and steamed cauliflower and broccoli. The children whose saliva produced high levels of sulfur volatiles disliked Brassica vegetables the most, they reported, and the children with high levels of sulfur volatiles usually had parents who produced high levels.
Despite that connection, however, the distaste for raw Brassica seen in children wasn’t seen in adults.
Maybe it’s not that taste buds change as we age, maybe we just learn to tolerate the sulfurousness.
COVID wars, part nine: The rise of iodine
Onions and iodine and COVID, oh my!
As surely as the sun rises, anti-vaxxers will come up with some wacky and dangerous new idea to prevent COVID. While perhaps nothing will top horse medication, gargling iodine (or spraying it into the nose) is also not a great idea.
Multiple social media posts have extolled the virtues of gargling Betadine (povidone iodine), which is a TOPICAL disinfectant commonly used in EDs and operating rooms. One post cited a paper by a Bangladeshi plastic surgeon who hypothesized on the subject, and if that’s not a peer-reviewed, rigorously researched source, we don’t know what is.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, actual medical experts do not recommend using Betadine to prevent COVID. Ingesting it can cause iodine poisoning and plenty of nasty GI side effects; while Betadine does make a diluted product safe for gargling use (used for the treatment of sore throats), it has not shown any effectiveness against viruses or COVID in particular.
A New York ED doctor summed it up best in the Rolling Stone article when he was told anti-vaxxers were gargling iodine: He offered a choice four-letter expletive, then said, “Of course they are.”
But wait! We’ve got a two-for-one deal on dubious COVID cures this week. Health experts in Myanmar (Burma to all the “Seinfeld” fans) and Thailand have been combating social media posts claiming that onion fumes will cure COVID. All you need to do is slice an onion in half, sniff it for a while, then chew on a second onion, and your COVID will be cured!
In what is surely the most radical understatement of the year, a professor in the department of preventive and social medicine at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, said in the AFP article that there is “no solid evidence” to support onion sniffing from “any clinical research.”
We’re just going to assume the expletives that surely followed were kept off the record.
Pro-Trump state governor encourages vaccination
Clearly, the politics of COVID-19 have been working against the science of COVID-19. Politicians can’t, or won’t, agree on what to do about it, and many prominent Republicans have been actively resisting vaccine and mask mandates.
There is at least one Republican governor who has wholeheartedly encouraged vaccination in his pro-Trump state. We’re talking about Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, and not for the first time.
The Washington Post has detailed his efforts to promote the COVID vaccine, and we would like to share a couple of examples.
In June he suggested that people who didn’t get vaccinated were “entering the death drawing.” He followed that by saying, “If I knew for certain that there was going to be eight or nine people die by next Tuesday, and I could be one of them if I don’t take the vaccine ... What in the world do you think I would do? I mean, I would run over top of somebody.”
More recently, Gov. Justice took on vaccine conspiracy theories.
“For God’s sakes a livin’, how difficult is this to understand? Why in the world do we have to come up with these crazy ideas – and they’re crazy ideas – that the vaccine’s got something in it and it’s tracing people wherever they go? And the very same people that are saying that are carrying their cellphones around. I mean, come on. Come on.”
Nuff said.
Jet lag may be a gut feeling
After a week-long vacation halfway around the world, it’s time to go back to your usual routine and time zone. But don’t forget about that free souvenir, jet lag. A disrupted circadian rhythm can be a real bummer, but researchers may have found the fix in your belly.
In a study funded by the U.S. Navy, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, looked into how the presence of a prebiotic in one’s diet can have on the disrupted biological clocks. They’re not the same as probiotics, which help you stay regular in another way. Prebiotics work as food to help the good gut bacteria you already have. An earlier study had suggested that prebiotics may have a positive effect on the brain.
To test the theory, the researchers gave one group of rats their regular food while another group received food with two different prebiotics. After manipulating the rats’ light-dark cycle for 8 weeks to give the illusion of traveling to a time zone 12 hours ahead every week, they found that the rats who ate the prebiotics were able to bounce back faster.
The possibility of ingesting something to keep your body clock regular sounds like a dream, but the researchers don’t really advise you to snatch all the supplements you can at your local pharmacy just yet.
“If you know you are going to come into a challenge, you could take a look at some of the prebiotics that are available. Just realize that they are not customized yet, so it might work for you but it won’t work for your neighbor,” said senior author Monika Fleshner.
Until there’s more conclusive research, just be good to your bacteria.
How to make stuff up and influence people
You’ve probably heard that we use only 10% of our brain. It’s right up there with “the Earth is flat” and “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
The idea that we use only 10% of our brains can probably be traced back to the early 1900s, suggests Discover magazine, when psychologist William James wrote, “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”
There are many different takes on it, but it is indeed a myth that we use only 10% of our brains. Dale Carnegie, the public speaking teacher, seems to be the one who put the specific number of 10% on James’ idea in his 1936 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
“We think that people are excited by this pseudo fact because it’s very optimistic,” neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt told Discover. “Wouldn’t we all love to think our brains had some giant pool of untapped potential that we’re not using?”
The reality is, we do use our whole brain. Functional MRI shows that different parts of the brain are used for different things such as language and memories. “Not all at the same time, of course. But every part of the brain has a job to do,” the Discover article explained.
There are many things we don’t know about how the brain works, but at least you know you use more than 10%. After all, a brain just told you so.
Onions and iodine and COVID, oh my!
As surely as the sun rises, anti-vaxxers will come up with some wacky and dangerous new idea to prevent COVID. While perhaps nothing will top horse medication, gargling iodine (or spraying it into the nose) is also not a great idea.
Multiple social media posts have extolled the virtues of gargling Betadine (povidone iodine), which is a TOPICAL disinfectant commonly used in EDs and operating rooms. One post cited a paper by a Bangladeshi plastic surgeon who hypothesized on the subject, and if that’s not a peer-reviewed, rigorously researched source, we don’t know what is.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, actual medical experts do not recommend using Betadine to prevent COVID. Ingesting it can cause iodine poisoning and plenty of nasty GI side effects; while Betadine does make a diluted product safe for gargling use (used for the treatment of sore throats), it has not shown any effectiveness against viruses or COVID in particular.
A New York ED doctor summed it up best in the Rolling Stone article when he was told anti-vaxxers were gargling iodine: He offered a choice four-letter expletive, then said, “Of course they are.”
But wait! We’ve got a two-for-one deal on dubious COVID cures this week. Health experts in Myanmar (Burma to all the “Seinfeld” fans) and Thailand have been combating social media posts claiming that onion fumes will cure COVID. All you need to do is slice an onion in half, sniff it for a while, then chew on a second onion, and your COVID will be cured!
In what is surely the most radical understatement of the year, a professor in the department of preventive and social medicine at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, said in the AFP article that there is “no solid evidence” to support onion sniffing from “any clinical research.”
We’re just going to assume the expletives that surely followed were kept off the record.
Pro-Trump state governor encourages vaccination
Clearly, the politics of COVID-19 have been working against the science of COVID-19. Politicians can’t, or won’t, agree on what to do about it, and many prominent Republicans have been actively resisting vaccine and mask mandates.
There is at least one Republican governor who has wholeheartedly encouraged vaccination in his pro-Trump state. We’re talking about Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, and not for the first time.
The Washington Post has detailed his efforts to promote the COVID vaccine, and we would like to share a couple of examples.
In June he suggested that people who didn’t get vaccinated were “entering the death drawing.” He followed that by saying, “If I knew for certain that there was going to be eight or nine people die by next Tuesday, and I could be one of them if I don’t take the vaccine ... What in the world do you think I would do? I mean, I would run over top of somebody.”
More recently, Gov. Justice took on vaccine conspiracy theories.
“For God’s sakes a livin’, how difficult is this to understand? Why in the world do we have to come up with these crazy ideas – and they’re crazy ideas – that the vaccine’s got something in it and it’s tracing people wherever they go? And the very same people that are saying that are carrying their cellphones around. I mean, come on. Come on.”
Nuff said.
Jet lag may be a gut feeling
After a week-long vacation halfway around the world, it’s time to go back to your usual routine and time zone. But don’t forget about that free souvenir, jet lag. A disrupted circadian rhythm can be a real bummer, but researchers may have found the fix in your belly.
In a study funded by the U.S. Navy, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, looked into how the presence of a prebiotic in one’s diet can have on the disrupted biological clocks. They’re not the same as probiotics, which help you stay regular in another way. Prebiotics work as food to help the good gut bacteria you already have. An earlier study had suggested that prebiotics may have a positive effect on the brain.
To test the theory, the researchers gave one group of rats their regular food while another group received food with two different prebiotics. After manipulating the rats’ light-dark cycle for 8 weeks to give the illusion of traveling to a time zone 12 hours ahead every week, they found that the rats who ate the prebiotics were able to bounce back faster.
The possibility of ingesting something to keep your body clock regular sounds like a dream, but the researchers don’t really advise you to snatch all the supplements you can at your local pharmacy just yet.
“If you know you are going to come into a challenge, you could take a look at some of the prebiotics that are available. Just realize that they are not customized yet, so it might work for you but it won’t work for your neighbor,” said senior author Monika Fleshner.
Until there’s more conclusive research, just be good to your bacteria.
How to make stuff up and influence people
You’ve probably heard that we use only 10% of our brain. It’s right up there with “the Earth is flat” and “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
The idea that we use only 10% of our brains can probably be traced back to the early 1900s, suggests Discover magazine, when psychologist William James wrote, “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”
There are many different takes on it, but it is indeed a myth that we use only 10% of our brains. Dale Carnegie, the public speaking teacher, seems to be the one who put the specific number of 10% on James’ idea in his 1936 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
“We think that people are excited by this pseudo fact because it’s very optimistic,” neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt told Discover. “Wouldn’t we all love to think our brains had some giant pool of untapped potential that we’re not using?”
The reality is, we do use our whole brain. Functional MRI shows that different parts of the brain are used for different things such as language and memories. “Not all at the same time, of course. But every part of the brain has a job to do,” the Discover article explained.
There are many things we don’t know about how the brain works, but at least you know you use more than 10%. After all, a brain just told you so.
Onions and iodine and COVID, oh my!
As surely as the sun rises, anti-vaxxers will come up with some wacky and dangerous new idea to prevent COVID. While perhaps nothing will top horse medication, gargling iodine (or spraying it into the nose) is also not a great idea.
Multiple social media posts have extolled the virtues of gargling Betadine (povidone iodine), which is a TOPICAL disinfectant commonly used in EDs and operating rooms. One post cited a paper by a Bangladeshi plastic surgeon who hypothesized on the subject, and if that’s not a peer-reviewed, rigorously researched source, we don’t know what is.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, actual medical experts do not recommend using Betadine to prevent COVID. Ingesting it can cause iodine poisoning and plenty of nasty GI side effects; while Betadine does make a diluted product safe for gargling use (used for the treatment of sore throats), it has not shown any effectiveness against viruses or COVID in particular.
A New York ED doctor summed it up best in the Rolling Stone article when he was told anti-vaxxers were gargling iodine: He offered a choice four-letter expletive, then said, “Of course they are.”
But wait! We’ve got a two-for-one deal on dubious COVID cures this week. Health experts in Myanmar (Burma to all the “Seinfeld” fans) and Thailand have been combating social media posts claiming that onion fumes will cure COVID. All you need to do is slice an onion in half, sniff it for a while, then chew on a second onion, and your COVID will be cured!
In what is surely the most radical understatement of the year, a professor in the department of preventive and social medicine at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, said in the AFP article that there is “no solid evidence” to support onion sniffing from “any clinical research.”
We’re just going to assume the expletives that surely followed were kept off the record.
Pro-Trump state governor encourages vaccination
Clearly, the politics of COVID-19 have been working against the science of COVID-19. Politicians can’t, or won’t, agree on what to do about it, and many prominent Republicans have been actively resisting vaccine and mask mandates.
There is at least one Republican governor who has wholeheartedly encouraged vaccination in his pro-Trump state. We’re talking about Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, and not for the first time.
The Washington Post has detailed his efforts to promote the COVID vaccine, and we would like to share a couple of examples.
In June he suggested that people who didn’t get vaccinated were “entering the death drawing.” He followed that by saying, “If I knew for certain that there was going to be eight or nine people die by next Tuesday, and I could be one of them if I don’t take the vaccine ... What in the world do you think I would do? I mean, I would run over top of somebody.”
More recently, Gov. Justice took on vaccine conspiracy theories.
“For God’s sakes a livin’, how difficult is this to understand? Why in the world do we have to come up with these crazy ideas – and they’re crazy ideas – that the vaccine’s got something in it and it’s tracing people wherever they go? And the very same people that are saying that are carrying their cellphones around. I mean, come on. Come on.”
Nuff said.
Jet lag may be a gut feeling
After a week-long vacation halfway around the world, it’s time to go back to your usual routine and time zone. But don’t forget about that free souvenir, jet lag. A disrupted circadian rhythm can be a real bummer, but researchers may have found the fix in your belly.
In a study funded by the U.S. Navy, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, looked into how the presence of a prebiotic in one’s diet can have on the disrupted biological clocks. They’re not the same as probiotics, which help you stay regular in another way. Prebiotics work as food to help the good gut bacteria you already have. An earlier study had suggested that prebiotics may have a positive effect on the brain.
To test the theory, the researchers gave one group of rats their regular food while another group received food with two different prebiotics. After manipulating the rats’ light-dark cycle for 8 weeks to give the illusion of traveling to a time zone 12 hours ahead every week, they found that the rats who ate the prebiotics were able to bounce back faster.
The possibility of ingesting something to keep your body clock regular sounds like a dream, but the researchers don’t really advise you to snatch all the supplements you can at your local pharmacy just yet.
“If you know you are going to come into a challenge, you could take a look at some of the prebiotics that are available. Just realize that they are not customized yet, so it might work for you but it won’t work for your neighbor,” said senior author Monika Fleshner.
Until there’s more conclusive research, just be good to your bacteria.
How to make stuff up and influence people
You’ve probably heard that we use only 10% of our brain. It’s right up there with “the Earth is flat” and “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
The idea that we use only 10% of our brains can probably be traced back to the early 1900s, suggests Discover magazine, when psychologist William James wrote, “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”
There are many different takes on it, but it is indeed a myth that we use only 10% of our brains. Dale Carnegie, the public speaking teacher, seems to be the one who put the specific number of 10% on James’ idea in his 1936 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
“We think that people are excited by this pseudo fact because it’s very optimistic,” neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt told Discover. “Wouldn’t we all love to think our brains had some giant pool of untapped potential that we’re not using?”
The reality is, we do use our whole brain. Functional MRI shows that different parts of the brain are used for different things such as language and memories. “Not all at the same time, of course. But every part of the brain has a job to do,” the Discover article explained.
There are many things we don’t know about how the brain works, but at least you know you use more than 10%. After all, a brain just told you so.