Tag: Science
In True Blood, a softcore porn series about a southern restaurant, vampires are allowed to roam the earth freely because Japanese scientists discovered a way to synthesize blood. The vampires have always been around, you see, but now that they don’t depend on mauling and feeding on humans for sustenance, they can come out of the dark […]
If you’ve ever watched Planet Earth from end to end (as you should), there’s one particularly haunting time-lapse sequence which is burned into your memory: Cordyceps. Watch as insects are infected with a fungus that makes them go insane, kills them and then grows out of their dead bodies, like a surrealist horror remake of A Bug’s Life. Good news! […]
According to a report published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, an unexpected effect of climate change might have Puerto Rico’s coqui frogs croaking at a different pitch than they did decades ago. In 1983 and 1984, Peter Narins and a group of other researchers discovered that the higher the frogs lived in […]
In 2001, a medical student figured out how to make you cum at the push of a button. Now, fifteen years later, he’s still struggling to find interest in his discovery. Stuart Meloy uncovered the magic touch while doing research on pain relief, but now hopes to use it to help women who have trouble climaxing. According […]
Say you want to implant a chip to monitor your blood sugar level, or check some other bodily function. It could make keeping track of your body much more convenient than it would be with an external devices, seamlessly sending information to your computer or phone as often as you’d like. But how do you […]
Sit back and ooh-ahh at these trippy, colorful macro photos of butterfly and moth wings by Linden Gledhill, a biochemist/photographer who’s also directed at least one really great music video. It’s enough to make want to bust out a Magic Eye book. Look at those patterns, maaaaan. […]
In an effort to better equip advertisers for convincing you to buy products you don’t actually want or need, marketing researchers at North Carolina State University studied the lyrics to chart-topping songs over the past 50 years. If people respond to certain themes in lyrics, the thinking goes, they’ll respond to those same themes when […]
A group of Italian researches who have developed a Kinect-powered computer that can detect human emotion by analyzing bodily movements. New Scientist explains how it works. The system uses the Kinect camera to build a stick figure representation of a person that includes information on how their head, torso, hands and shoulders are moving. Software looks for […]
In an effort to better understand animated images’ ability to “convey emotion, empathy, and context in a subtle way,” a pair of MIT researchers created GIFGIF. The site presents you with two randomly selected animated GIFs, and asks which better conveys a specific emotion, like fear, shame, excitement, or amusement. The goal is to use the […]
Somehow, fecal microbiota transplantation is a real, scientific treatment that actually cures diseases. That is, in real life, not an Austin Powers film or a bad episode of South Park, you can get other people’s poop implanted into your colon to treat your Clostridium difficile, a deadly digestive infection. And it works! But until now, there’s been no place […]
