Findings Archives

Findings

Autistic children sit for an extra seventy minutes per day; have extra, unpruned synapses in the brain, which may be prunable with drugs that restore brain cells’ autophagy; and exhibit…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

A Thai woman fed herself to crocodiles. Invasive Japanese stiltgrass, in preventing wolf spiders from finding and cannibalizing one another, was causing the spiders to eat more young American toads.…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Researchers announced that a pedestrian visiting Las Vegas is one thirtieth as likely to be killed by a car as is a homeless person living in Las Vegas, that rhesus…

Polish biologists described a long-term pattern of recurrent fellatio between two castrated brown bears. During six years of observation at a Croatian zoo, the recipient-bear and provider-bear never switched roles.…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Octopuses possess a chemical that prevents self-sucking, and can differentiate other octopuses’ severed tentacles from their own, which they rarely eat. Piscivory was reported among spiders on all continents save…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Four new carnivorous sponges, fourteen new dancing frogs, twenty-four new caterpillar-mummifying wasps, and one new nickel-hyperaccumulator plant were described. Three subspecies of yellow-shouldered bat were elevated to species. Hawfinches (Coccothraustes…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Among non–color-blind Americans, green corporate logos are the likeliest to evoke the qualities “family-oriented,” “rugged,” “small-town,” “western,” and “wholesome,” whereas purple is felt to be the most “real,” “smooth,” and…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Professional musicians and the general population can identify the best orchestras from silent video footage but not from sound recordings; lesbians are better at guessing the sexual orientation of other…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Iowa researchers found that viva voce voting gives loud voices roughly forty times the weight of normal voices. Some Chinese parents are confused and upset by the trend of their…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

A compromised refrigerator was sending out spam, and electronic tongues tasted the grapes of Valencia, where engineers created yogurt from the milk of nuts. Cashew cheese from Sacramento was recalled…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

The cost of an acquisition falls by 15.4 percent for each female director on a company’s board, materialistic Israelis experience higher levels of post-traumatic stress following public violence, and extroverted children…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Danes who have recently drunk Sprite are 10 percent less likely than those who have recently drunk Sprite Zero to support the welfare state, 4 percent of Swiss boys have been molested…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Women’s drinking in parks was associated with male-on-female intimate-partner violence, while men’s drinking quietly at home in the evening was associated with female-on-male violence. Among federally licensed gun retailers, 98.9 percent…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Attentive fathers tend to have smaller testicles, pornography makes disagreeable Danish men more sexist, 61 percent of Papua New Guinean men are rapists, and 92 percent of Mexicans are relaxed…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

The widespread presence of Aspergillus flavus and parasiticus fungi in tropical wheat stores was increasing the viral loads of the HIV-positive; Geomyces destructans, the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome and…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

In the United Kingdom, overfilled kettles were wasting £68 million per year; the rich refused to stop clearing their peat bogs for grouse shooting; a penis-shaped Kentish strawberry was not made…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

The first Iago sparrows known to have reached Europe arrived by ship in a Dutch port and immediately fought and had gay sex on deck. The genital tubercles of quail…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

At Vanderbilt University, where researchers debuted a smartphone app that locates snipers, a boneless girl was helped to grow bones. “My goodness,” said her doctor. “To go from no bones…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Experts were unable to explain the washing ashore of a thousand starving sea-lion pups in California; thousands of dead prawns and crabs in Chile; hundreds of dead puffins in eastern…

Findings

by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

A study of cuttlefish, deer mice, horses, humans, laboratory mice, meadow voles, pine voles, prairie voles, rats, rhesus macaques, and talas tucu-tucus suggested that males’ superior spatial and navigational skills…

Findings

by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Mathematicians discovered a new prime number, 257,885,161 – 1, and the existence of a pseudoprime that is the sum of 10,333,229,505 known primes and contains roughly 295 billion digits but…

Findings

by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

In Britain, lions, snow leopards, and tigers were playing with discarded Christmas trees, Danish scurvy grass was growing in salty verges, titpox was hitting great tits hardest (the red squirrels…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk warned lest humanity become complacent about a robot uprising; physicists designed a computer simulation whereby it may be possible to determine whether…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Neuroscientists found that voluntary forgetting happens through not-remembering as well as through remembering something else; other neuroscientists replaced subjects’ memories of enjoying cocaine with less exciting ones. Shy rainbow trout…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Rich men with big biceps tend to oppose the redistribution of wealth and poor men with big biceps tend to support it, whereas the weak are less strongly opinionated. The…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Researchers found that human fetuses will prioritize nurturing the brain over enhancing body fatness, are 69 percent likelier to grow into fat children if they are exposed to magnetic fields, and…

Findings

by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Teams of neuroscientists at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften traced dyslexia to the brain’s medial geniculate body and located metaconsciousness in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions,…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Poor Americans die five years younger than the rich and are likelier to say that parents should stay together for the sake of the children. Black Americans, unlike white Americans,…

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by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Studies suggested that the elderly overestimate their driving abilities, possess a distinctive smell whose disagreeable properties do not originate in the underarms, and sometimes die of loneliness. Following research that…

Findings

by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,

Researchers identified genes responsible for the smallness of pygmies, congenital spleenlessness, the blond hair of Melanesians, a 2.6-point increase in IQ (if both parents are carriers), and the similarities between…

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This month’s scientific progress—good, bad, or simply strange.

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This month’s scientific progress—good, bad, or simply strange.

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December 2014

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