“No human volunteers were used for feeding the mosquitoes.”
—Malaria Infected Mosquitoes Express Enhanced Attraction to Human Odor
May 2013
14 posts
“in 2005, the pole changed course and began galloping east towards Greenland”
—Polar wander linked to climate change
“when she’s ready to mate, she doesn’t pick the strongest or the brightest guy around. She just goes for the closest.”
—“You’ll Do”: Lack of Choosiness in Female Strawberry Poison Dart Frogs
“when the action was ambiguous, participants rated the action less harshly when it was done by the CEO rather than the janitor”
—How Your Social Status Influences the Way You’re Judged
“Like many anthropologists in human biology, I have a freezer full of other people’s spit and pee from past projects.”
—Your Lady Parts Don’t Like It When You Get Sick
“Males tend to cooperate with physically attractive females without careful evaluation of their trustworthiness”
—Minocycline, a microglial inhibitor, reduces ‘honey trap’ risk in human economic exchange
“most words have about a 50% chance of being replaced by a completely different word every 2000 to 4000 years”
—English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language
“The preponderance of skulls best fits a scenario in which hominids retrieved heads left untouched by big cats”
—Human ancestors had taste for meat, brains
“He correctly identified the objects’ size and softness more than twice as often as would have been expected by chance.”
—Neuroprosthetics: Once more, with feeling
“We needed a space-based telescope to probe the hot gas”
—Newborn Stars and their Effect on the Universe
“This is the dark side of transposons.”
—The Jumping Gene: Friend or Foe?
“The reason we were able to identify this is because it’s a 50-foot whale waving its tail at you.”
—Whales Get Fishing Tips From Peers
“In two groups, the blue corn tasted bad, so the animals learned to eat only the pink corn.”
—Monkeys Conform to Popular Diet
“sensation-seeking — rather than consumption of sexually explicit material may play a more important role in a range of sexual behaviors”
—Teens Only Slightly Influenced by Sexual Media
April 2013
25 posts
“environmental activism is so frowned upon by those the right that they’ll do anything to keep themselves distanced from it”
—Why Do Conservatives Like to Waste Energy?
“But the Microraptor could have just as easily happened upon a dead bird and snaffled up the free meal.”
—There’s Something Fishy About Microraptor
“It’s a classical case of human’s tendency to overestimate ourrselves”
—Frequent Multi-taskers Are Worst At It
“when participants searched for humans, relatively more of the cortex was devoted to humans, and when they searched for vehicles, more of the cortex was devoted to vehicles”
—How Your Brain Finds A Needle In A Haystack
“even unladen, the swallow would produce an explosion 16 times greater than the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883”
—On Meteors, TNT, Swallows and the End of the World
“the inability to control one’s train of thought has important real world consequences”
—In Defense of Working Memory Training
