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7510 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
Why do we listen to sad music?
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No one wants to be sad. So why do we love listening to sad songs so much? New research suggests that we're drawn to sad songs because they evoke mostly positive emotions, which is great for our mental health. According to the study published by the journal PLOS One, researchers found that "a wide range of complex and partially positive emotions, such as nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence, and wonder," were brought out in the participants that took part in the study by sad music. These are emotions are all healthy, feel-good emotions. The researchers concluded that "Music-evoked sadness plays a role in well-being, by providing consolation as well as regulating negative moods and emotions." Source: http://www.plosone.org/article ...
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5472 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
Higher testosterone levels linked to men who enjoy spicy food
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According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Grenoble in France, the results published were plain and simple - men who enjoyed dipping their food into hot, spicy sauce happened to have higher levels of free testosterone floating around their bloodstream after the meal. Salt preference, however, didn’t seem to have any link to testosterone levels. What does this correlation entail? Does capsaicin - the chemical responsible for spiciness - increase testosterone, or are those who are more likely to take risks possess higher levels of this potent male hormone? ...
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34498 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
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33905 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
Mosquitoes have preferences too
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According to a new study published in the journal PLOS One, it was found that identical twins are equally attractive to mosquitoes than fraternal - or non-identical - twins. This correlation lead researchers to conclude that mosquitoes might be making preferential choices based on differences in our DNA. What causes this preferences? While it may be nice to believe that that mosquitoes are attracted to "sweeter blood", it's not true at all. Female mosquitoes - the ones that bite, in order to get protein necessary for egg development - are actually drawn to us by chemical signals related to body odour. ...
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17887 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
Why do our eyes move when we're dreaming?
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Scientists have worked out why your eyes move when you’re dreaming. Scientists have known for decades that the rapid eye movements (REMs) that occur during sleep signal that we’re dreaming, but what do the individual eye motions really represent? It’s long been hypothesised that each movement of the eye reflects new visual information in our dreams, and now for the first time researchers have demonstrated that this is actually the case. According to a new study by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, each flick of the eye that occurs during REM sleep accompanies the introduction of a new image in our dream, with the movement essentially acting like a reset function between individual dream "snapshots". Source: http://www.sciencealer ...
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3114 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
Who knew hawks were a hummingbird's best friend
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Sometimes it pays to have big, bad neighbors! Tiny black-chinned hummingbirds (shown above) have learned to build their homes near hawk nests. The hawks are too big to be interested in teeny hummingbird eggs, and they scare off the medium-sized birds that are. According to the study, of the 342 hummer nests studied over three years, 80% were near hawk nests - and for good reason. The researchers monitored hummingbird egg and fledgling survival near six active and six inactive hawk nests. Those hummers unlucky enough to be near inactive nests lost all but 8% of their young, while those in a “good” neighborhood had a 70% success rate, they report. Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2015/09/why-hawk-hummingbird-s-best-friend ...
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12354 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
This man was paid $18 000 by NASA to lie on his back for 70 days straight
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The study, titled "CFT 70 ( Countermeasure and Functional Testing in Head-Down Tilt Bed Rest Study)," aimed to learn more about how human bone and muscle might deteriorate in space. According to Drew Iwanicki, who took part in the study and who is pictured above, he experienced some serious headaches because of increased blood pressure to his head. His spine went through some serious pain, and staying horizontal was difficult. However, as soon as the bed was tilted to the vertical position, after 70 days of course, his legs felt heavier and his heart started to beat at 150 BPMs. ...
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13199 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
How one perceives beauty is merely superficial
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Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but what’s influencing our eye? Scientists reveal that it’s not genetics but life experiences that lead us to find one face more attractive than another. This finding furthers the on-going debate of nature versus nurture. Here's how the study went down: Researchers asked 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-gender fraternal twins to view 200 faces and rate them on a scale of one to seven, with one being the least attractive and seven the most attractive. A group of 660 non-twins then completed the same survey. If genes were more involved in facial preference, identical twins would have had similar ratings; if the influence of a familial environment carried more weight, fraternal twins w ...
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15664 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
Homosexuality is not a choice
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Scientists have discovered evidence that homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice, but rather is rooted in a person’s biology. While specific genes have not been found, a male twin study reveals that homosexuality may be caused by chemical modifications that alter gene activity. As the fetus develops, certain genes get turned on or off depending the chemicals the fetus is exposed to. These chemicals don't necessarily have to be chemicals ingested or inhaled by the mother, but could be an imbalance in a hormone, such as testosterone. As adults, genes can also activate and deactivated based on our environment. More research is needed, but scientists stress that these findings shouldn’t be used to produce tests for homosexuality or a misguid ...
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3365 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
Sweet tooth explained
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Someone who greatly enjoys sweet foods is said to have a "sweet tooth." Experimental evidence now shows us that eating sweets forms memories that may control eating habits. In other words, people may enjoy eating sweets because the taste is correlated with positive memories. The findings, published online in the journal Hippocampus, show that neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place. In the study, a meal consisting of a sweetened solution, either sucrose or saccharin, significantly increased the expression of the synaptic plasticity marker called activity ...
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7002 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
How to tell the best joke
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According to a new study, it's your voice that is to blame if your joke ever falls flat. Researchers recorded men and women telling corny one-liners and then manipulated the pitches of their voices. Artificially lowered voices made the speakers sound more dominant; higher pitched voices made them sound less so. Volunteer listeners then rated each joke’s funniness. Female listeners laughed or groaned regardless of the comic’s voice pitch, but for men it depended on how burly and dominant they were. Guys with bigger biceps and higher self-rated attractiveness were more likely to prefer lower-pitched jokes than less dominant listeners, and vice versa, according to a study in press in Evolution and Human Behavior. The researchers suggest humor ...
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25514 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
Schizophrenia may boil down to a specific gene, scientists find
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A landmark study, based on genetic analysis of nearly 65,000 people, has revealed that a person's risk of schizophrenia is increased if they inherit specific variants in a gene related to "synaptic pruning" - the elimination of connections between neurons. The findings represent the first time that the origin of this devastating psychiatric disease has been causally linked to specific gene variants and a biological process. They also help explain decades-old observations: synaptic pruning is particularly active during adolescence, which is the typical period of onset for schizophrenia symptoms, and brains of schizophrenic patients tend to show fewer connections between neurons. The gene, called component 4 (C4), plays a well-known role in t ...
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4521 |
bio_man |
8 years ago |
How sleep affects memory
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For decades, scientists have debated whether rapid eye movement sleep - the phase where dreams appear - is directly involved in memory formation. Now, a study provides evidence that REM sleep does, indeed, play this role in mice. In this new study, the researchers used optogenetics, a recently developed technology that enables scientists to target precisely a population of neurons and control its activity by light. For this study, the neurons in the hippocampus were targeted (hippocampus being the structure that is critical for memory formation during wakefulness and is known as the 'GPS system' of the brain). To test the long-term spatial memory of mice, the scientists trained the rodents to spot a new object placed in a controlled environm ...
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5033 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
This is shocking
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To take the zap out of a school of electric eels, fishermen in 17th century South America sent teams of horses into the water as bait, scooping up the eels after they had exhausted themselves in the attack. According to famed naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the eels would leap out of the water to shock the frightened - but mostly unharmed - horses. Until now, no one else had recorded evidence of such behavior, and many scientists were skeptical of Von Humboldt’s account. A new study shows that not only do the animals leap from the water to attack their prey, but they also increase their voltage as they leap (see video below). The jumping behavior was first observed by accident: As scientists were studying the eels in an unrelated exper ...
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4025 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
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