Last week's Curios covered face pareidolia, the perils of acetaminophen, and exploding whales.
Curio No. 1032 | :) Do you have face pareidolia?
Do you see faces everywhere? Whenever you notice three-prong outlets looking distraught, or car grilles with facial expressions, you are experiencing face pareidolia. That's the phenomenon of seeing faces in inanimate objects. This "affliction" affects some people more than others. One study suggests the more susceptible you are to face pareidolia, the more likely you are to suffer from neuroses like schizophrenia. Participants in that study were more likely to see faces in random dot patterns if they also suffered from neuroticism or rated themselves as in a bad mood... keep reading.
Curio No. 1031 | Mixing music in your ear
Mix this up. A company called Doppler Labs has invented earphones that can modify how you hear the world. Here Active Listening earbuds use noise-canceling technology to edit the volume, equalization, reverb, and flange of nearby sounds in real time. External sounds are picked up by a tiny microphone inside the earbuds, then processed through frequency filters and played through a speaker in your ear. The earphones sync with a mobile app via Bluetooth. You can choose from out-of-the-box settings that filter out common background noises like airplanes and loud restaurants. Or you can custom mix the sound to get special effects... keep reading.
Curio No. 1030 | Painkillers are feelingkillers
Two new experiments suggest that acetaminophen--the active ingredient in Tylenol, Nyquil and Robitussin to name a few--makes us less sympathetic to others' pain. In the first experiment, half of the participants were given 1,000 mg of acetaminophen, the other half a placebo. Both groups were asked to read a scenario with a person in pain, and rate that person's pain on a scale of 1 to 10. In a second experiment, participants were asked to rank how painful a loud sound was to them, as well as to other participants. In both experiments, the group that took acetaminophen rated things as less painful for not just themselves but also others... keep reading.
Curio No. 1029 | Health tip: run the "beer mile"
Here's a curious fact. People who exercise on a given day are more likely to consume alcohol later that night. A recent study from Penn State--known for both its athletic prowess and its party-schoolness--found that exercising was likely to lead to same-day drinking; and that more vigorous exercise correlated with more vigorous drinking. It turns out the Penn State researchers were only expanding upon a huge study from 15 years ago, which found a clear correlation between exercising and drinking with over 40,000 participants. Yet that study received hardly any attention. Curious indeed! Scientists believe the correlation is a result of alcohol and physical exercise activating similar reward pathways in the brain... keep reading.
Curio No. 1028 | Um, don't blow up the whale
Hundreds of whales get beached every year. And they pose a real problem. You can't put them back in the ocean because they're too heavy. You can't bury them in the sand because they're too large. If you cut them open, they are apt to explode because of gas build up, making a huge mess. And if you leave them there, the smell of decay may linger for years. Today biologists load them on trucks and cart them away to be studied and carefully "composted." But in 1970, that was not the norm. So when a 45-foot, 8-ton Pacific gray whale washed ashore at Florence, Oregon, residents had no idea what to do. Eventually, officials rallied behind a highway engineer's novel idea: blow the whale up... keep reading.
Curio No. 1027 | How much profit Amazon makes will surprise you
Amazon.com was founded in 1995 as an online bookseller. Since then it has blossomed into the biggest e-commerce business in the world. 15% of all retail sales in the US are conducted by Amazon! Given such amazing scale, you'd think Amazon makes a lot of money. Nope. Every year since its inception, Amazon has averaged roughly zero net profits. And it's not an accident. Not making money is outlined in founder Jeff Bezos' original business model for the company. Any revenue that the company makes must be pumped back into Amazon for further growth. So profits from a popular plasma TV that sells well in Macedonia ends up paying for a new data center in Ireland... keep reading.
Curio No. 1026 | A skin for your skin
We have a lot of skin. Like, over 20 pounds on the average person. And that doesn't count the several pounds we shed each year. Skin is one of the more amazing parts of the human body, but isn't perfect. It sags and gets more delicate with age. It is susceptible to cancer and a host of painful and debilitating diseases. Plus it is very difficult to reconstruct once it is damaged. So scientists have lots of reasons to be working on synthetic skin which is exactly what researchers at MIT have been doing for several decades. And now they may have a pretty exciting result. XPL, or "second skin" as it's being called, is a cross-linked polymer made from silicone... keep reading.
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