Slate asks “Why Do Babies Smile?” But research from the last couple of decades shows there’s more to it. Smiling typically develops around six to eight weeks, a time when a baby spends her days gazing at faces, and when her vision widens to take in the whole face, not just the eyes. It’s unclear if there’s any emotion embedded in these very early smiles or what they mean, if anything, to the infant. Daniel Messinger, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, suspects that these first smiles teach infants the positive associations attached to...
Continue reading...Science
This is what happens when you teach kids that condoms don't work
AP (emphasis mine): About 17 percent of sexually experienced teen girls say they had used the rhythm method –timing their sex to avoid fertile days to prevent getting pregnant. That\’s up from 11 percent in 2002. They may have been using another form of birth control at the same time. But the increase is considered worrisome because the rhythm method doesn\’t work about 25 percent of the time, said Joyce Abma, the report\’s lead author. She\’s a social scientist at the CDC\’s National Center for Health Statistics. … The increase in the rhythm method may be part...
Continue reading...F-Yeah, Science: "Of course, what we're seeing here is salvation to zero-gravity heartburn"
What happens when you add an Alka-Selter tablet to a sphere of water under micro-gravity? (March 22, 2003) — Expedition Six NASA ISS Science Officer Don Pettit performs a series of microgravity experiments with water spheres and effervescent antacid tablets. In the second of four videos, Pettit inserts a tablet into a 50-millimeter sphere and observes the fizzy results.
Continue reading...Tracking the oil spill
The New York Times has a pretty incredible animation showing the spread of the oil spill from 22 April to 9 May. Also, in crazy-time news, engineers are trying to determine if they can plug the leak with…garbage. Last week, we posted a video from Al Jazeera explaining how the spill happened.
Continue reading...National Zoo's panda Mei Xiang not pregnant
It’s official: Mei Xhiang, the lady panda currently in residence at the National Zoo in D.C., is not pregnant. Pandas are notoriously difficult to inseminate and especially more difficult to test for pregnancy, and it was hoped that Mei Xhiang’s artificial insemination in January may have taken hold. But, sadly, it was (yet another) false alarm. Mei Xiang and her partner, Tian Tian are on a ten-year loan from China, and in that time, Mei Xhiang has given birth to one cub, Tai Shan, who has returned to China. The two are expected to be returned to...
Continue reading...Juggalos: How do magnets work?
Jonah Weiner at Slate, for some reason, brings us a review of the new Insane Clown Posse video “Miracles.” It’s a rather grand review, comparing this particular posse of clowns to a rap-rock Wordsworth “dropping f-bombs aplenty in praise of the natural sublime,” for example. The song is a catalog of whoa-dude epiphanies, the sort that teenagers in movies enjoy while lying on the hoods of subcompacts, passing joints, and gazing up at the stars. Wide-eyed and wondrous, rappers Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope hail a variety of phenomena that will “blow your brain,” from “the Milky...
Continue reading...B-A-N-A-N-A-S
Finally, bananas might be good for something after all: A simple fruit that many of us eat every day could soon prove to be a powerful new inhibitor of HIV, and lead to new treatments to prevent sexual transmission of the virus. Bananas, according to new research of the University of Michigan Medical School, might be good for you in an exciting new way. Lectins, naturally occurring chemicals in plants, are drawing the interest of scientists because they can stop the chain reactions that lead to a variety of infections. In laboratory tests, BanLec, the lectin found...
Continue reading...And you thought YOU were lonely
In the ridiculously awesome movie Red Dawn, a small, rag-tag crew of red-blooded American high school kids (featuring, yes, Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen) experience a Soviet invasion and are forced into the woods, far away from home and alone. They decide to form a group—the Wolverines, named after their high-school mascot—and fight back against the invaders. They dwindle in number, but no matter how small they become, they end up successful, and, one would expect, lonely. I mention this excellent metaphor of the pride of individualism in American popular—nay, spiritual—culture to introduce yet another. See, a...
Continue reading...How the scurvy cure was lost
Over at Idle Words, a fascinating story about the history of scurvy, and how the cure, which was basically discovered in 1747, was somehow not well-known even as late as Robert Falcon Scott\’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole. Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be...
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