On June 4, 2013, the city of Huntsville, Alabama was enjoying a gorgeous day. Blue skies, mild temperatures. Just what the forecasters had predicted.
But in the post-lunch hours, meteorologists started picking up what seemed to be a rogue thunderstorm on the weather radar. The “blob,” as they referred to it, mushroomed on the radar screen. By 4 PM, it covered the entire city of Huntsville. Strangely, however, the actual view out of peoples’ windows remained a calm azure.
The accents that creep into the way we speak can reveal a lot about where we are from, but there are also subtle clues visible in our faces and the way we move.
There are few things as frustrating as being unable to fall asleep, especially if you have a big day ahead and need your rest. In a recent YouTube video, Doctor Jo, a licensed physical therapist and doctor of physical therapy, demonstrated a simple breathing exercise that she recommends to clients, claiming it can help you drift off nice and quickly, rather than spending hours in bed, staring at the ceiling or counting sheep.
Food marketers know that if they call their product a superfood, it’s sure to sell. Take quinoa, for example. In the early aughts, when the ancient grain first became trendy, quinoa prices tripled in the span of five years. (Many Bolivians, who had relied on it as a food staple for centuries, were soon priced out of the market.) The moral here: it’s important to question anything knighted with the superlative.
The avocado is a fruit of a different time. The plant hit its evolutionary prime during the beginning of the Cenozoic era when megafauna, including mammoths, horses, gomphotheres and giant ground sloths (some of them weighing more than a UPS truck) roamed across North America, from Oregon to the panhandle of Florida. The fruit attracted these very large animals (megafauna by definition weigh at least 100 pounds) that would then eat it whole, travel far distances and defecate, leaving the seed to grow in a new place. That’s the goal of all botanical fruits, really. Survival and growth via seed dispersal.
Imagine you’re sitting at a bar in Manhattan. As the bartender’s making your drink, you overhear a conversation from the table behind you.
Two well-dressed men are talking. One looks familiar. He’s a hedge fund manager you’ve seen on TV. You don’t recognize the other guy. But, from the sound of it, they work together.
Getting a good night’s sleep can delay the onset of dementia later in life, scientists have discovered.
How people slumber can be used as a “crystal ball” to predict if they will be hit by Alzheimer’s disease in the future, according to the researchers.
Plenty of deep sleep was found to best delay the onset of dementia because it slows the build up of a toxic plaque in the brain called beta-amyloid.
Someday, solar panels may be light and cheap enough that they could be hung on a clothesline, thanks to a synthetic mineral called perovskite. Physicist Sam Stranks explains the science and the challenges that stand in its way.
One article showed up in my feed one fine afternoon: Why you should not pay for your HDB with CPF
Naturally, I clicked because I am a believer in paying for your HDB with CPF. Maybe I might get converted to the pay-with-cash camp.
The peacock’s dazzling tail feathers do not exist for them to carry out everyday activities such as eating or sleeping, but because their colourfulness is attractive to peahens: the more brilliant the feathers, the greater the chance the peacock has of finding a sexual partner. Tail feathers, to peahens, can be powerfully attractive. Scientists have long been interested in unravelling the subconscious processes that influence partner choice, since heritable characteristics that are favoured in sexual partners will tend to increase in frequency in subsequent generations. That’s why the peacock’s tail feathers are so radiant: over many generations, more beautiful tail feathers have been selected. This means that partner preferences tell us something about the evolutionary pressures that shape a species – including us. So what do we find attractive in each other, and why?