Category:
Science
Science
Fish Urine Research
Jake Allgeier studies fish urine. I guess someone has to. He says that there's a lot more of it than you would think, and it's a lot more important for marine environments than people realize. From redandblack.com:
Posted By: Alex - Thu Feb 07, 2013 -
Comments (7)
Category: Science, Fish, Body Fluids
New Gold
Scientists have discovered a bacteria that ingests toxic mine runoff and excretes gold. You can't teach a trick like that!
Posted By: Alex - Tue Feb 05, 2013 -
Comments (2)
Category: Science
Life Imitates THE FLY
Full article here.
Posted By: Paul - Fri Jan 18, 2013 -
Comments (3)
Category: Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Health, Insects and Spiders, Science, 1950s
The Science of Scantily Clad Avatars
Researchers Anna Lomanowska and Matthieu Guitton spent a year examining scantily-clad avatars in the game Second Life in order to determine just how much skin they show — and whether the female avatars show more skin, on average, than the male avatars. A tough job, but someone had to do it! They discovered that "virtual females disclose substantially more naked skin than virtual males." This adds to the growing body of evidence that pretty much everyone likes looking at naked women. (Advertisers have known this since forever.) Their full article can be read at PLOS ONE.
Posted By: Alex - Sat Dec 29, 2012 -
Comments (5)
Category: Science, Sexuality, Women, Videogames and Gamers
How Cold Is It?
Watch what happens to boiling water thrown out the window in Siberia in the winter.
Posted By: Alex - Mon Dec 24, 2012 -
Comments (8)
Category: Science
The Butterfly Effect
I hope every WU-vie's morning goes better than this.
Posted By: Paul - Wed Dec 19, 2012 -
Comments (6)
Category: Death, Destruction, Disasters, Humor, Science, Cartoons
On Space Time Foam
This is an art installation in Milan, where you crawl with other museum patrons over a plastic surface. Lot of weird pics at the link.
But is that plastic suspended over a high well of emptiness, an atrium or courtyard, as it seems in the video? And guaranteed not to break?
Posted By: Paul - Mon Dec 10, 2012 -
Comments (4)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Performance Art, Science, Europe
Does Nostalgia Keep You Warm?
Researchers at the University of Southampton and Sun Yat-Sen University collaborated to explore whether feelings of nostalgia help protect people against the cold. They conducted various experiments (published in the Journal Emotion) such as 1) putting people in a cold room, asking them to recall a nostalgic event from their past, and then asking them to guess the temp; and 2) asking volunteers to recall a nostalgic event while their hand was dunked in ice-cold water. [nbcnews.com]The researchers concluded that overall recalling nostalgic events "evinced greater tolerance to noxious cold." So instead of turning up your heater this winter you could save some money by wistfully remembering the good old days instead.
Why would nostalgia keep you warm? The researchers suggest that "the nostalgia-warmth link derives from a universal mental association between interpersonal affiliation (which nostalgia fosters) and warmth, which is rooted in infant-caregiver interaction."
But, of course, more research is necessary. For instance, the researchers propose that future investigations will explore whether "nostalgia functions in a different capacity for individuals reared in warm (compared to colder) climates. Conceivably, in colder climates nostalgia could primarily serve to ameliorate thermoregulatory (cold) discomfort, whereas in warmer climates it could primarily serve to ameliorate thirst."
Posted By: Alex - Sat Dec 08, 2012 -
Comments (9)
Category: Science, Experiments
Edgar Larkin
I'm always fascinated by scientists who are also bonkers about the supernatural. Even Isaac Newton dabbled in the occult, which was more understandable for his era.But here's a twentieth-century fellow who led such a double life: Edgar Lucien Larkin.
I'm sure you will want to read all 366 pages of his masterwork to be found here.
Posted By: Paul - Mon Dec 03, 2012 -
Comments (4)
Category: Eccentrics, New Age, Religion, Rituals and Superstitions, Science, 1900s
What Makes Durian Stinky?
Durian is reputed to be the stinkiest fruit in the world, so researchers at the German Research Center for Food Chemistry recently set out to find out exactly what makes it so malodorous. They write in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry:The sensory properties of fresh durian combine a pleasant creamy consistency, a pronounced sweet taste, and a strong, penetrating odor, not comparable to that of any other kind of fruit. The aroma profile can be best described as a combination of an intense sulfury, roasted onion-like odor with fruity, sweet, caramel-like, and soup seasoning-like notes. In Southeast Asia, durian is deeply appreciated and often referred to as the “king of fruits”, whereas some people in the Western hemisphere regard the durian odor as offensive and nauseous. The unique odor properties of durian have repeatedly attracted the attention of chemists... Despite the quite high number of studies on durian volatiles, it is still unclear which odorants predominately contribute to its aroma. Therefore, our aim was to systematically assess the odor contribution of individual durian volatiles.
Their investigation involved a) shipping Durian by air freight from Thailand to Germany; b) extracting pulp from the fruit; and then c) analyzing the pulp by means of a "Trace GC Ultra gas chromatograph" equipped with a "tailor-made sniffing port":
The sniffing port consisted of a cylindrically shaped aluminum device (105 mm × 24 mm diameter) with a beveled top and a central drill hole (2 mm) housing the capillary. It was mounted on a heated (200 °C) detector base of the GC. During a GC-O run, the panelist placed her/his nose closely above the top of the sniffing port and evaluated the odor of the effluent. If an odor was perceived, the retention time was marked in the FID chromatogram printed by a recorder and the odor quality was noted.
This effort yielded "several new aroma compounds with interesting odors," but the authors of the study caution that further investigations are still required in order to "unequivocally assess the contribution of individual odorants to durian aroma."
Posted By: Alex - Sun Dec 02, 2012 -
Comments (7)
Category: Food, Science, Experiments
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Contact Us |