Category: Life Is Like Science Fiction


Why People Believe in Conspiracies

After a public lecture in 2005, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

Read more at Scientific American

Snort stem cells to get them to brain

STEM cells show promise for treating a range of neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s, strokes and Alzheimer’s, but it is tricky getting them into the brain. Perhaps inhaling stem cells might be the answer – if mice are anything to go by.

Read more at New Scientist

Prisoner escapes jail in cardboard box

Embarrassed officials were at a loss to explain how Jean-Pierre Treiber, 45, a double murder suspect, managed to elude detection in the box he had built himself at a workshop in the high security prison of Auxerre, Burgundy.

With its hidden human cargo, the box was loaded with dozens of others onto a lorry for delivery to the Yonne region, southeast of Paris.

Read more at Telegraph.co.uk

Killer birds bite off bats’ heads

It sounds like the avian equivalent of an Ozzy Osbourne legend. Great tits have been discovered killing and eating bats by pecking their heads open.

Read more at New Scientist

Eye movements reveal processing of hidden memories

By relating subtle eye movements to activity in the brain, researchers in California have shown that a structure called the hippocampus can retrieve memories of past events or experiences – even when people have no conscious recollection of them.

Read more at new Scientist

Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late

Early birds may get the best worms—or at least the best garage sale deals—but they also tire out more quickly than night owls do.

Read more at Scientific American

Plastics patch found across 1,700 miles of Pacific

Ocean scientists recently back from a voyage to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” said on Thursday they had found plastic debris strewn across a 1,700-mile (2,700-km) long stretch of open sea.

The research team from the three-week Seaplex expedition said more work remains to be done to determine the full extent of the trash vortex, how it affects marine life and how it might safely be removed from the ocean.

Read more at Scientific American

Obese People Have ‘Severe Brain Degeneration’

A new study finds obese people have 8 percent less brain tissue than normal-weight individuals. Their brains look 16 years older than the brains of lean individuals, researchers said today.

Those classified as overweight have 4 percent less brain tissue and their brains appear to have aged prematurely by 8 years.

The results, based on brain scans of 94 people in their 70s, represent “severe brain degeneration,” said Paul Thompson, senior author of the study and a UCLA professor of neurology.

Read more at LiveScience

Regular marijuana usage robs men of sexual highs

Stoners may be trading sexual highs for the chemical kind. Males who smoke marijuana daily are four times more likely to have trouble reaching orgasm than men who don’t inhale, finds a new study of 8,656 Aussies.

Read more at New Scientist

Sperm Prefer Attractive Females

I don’t make this stuff up, promise. I just find it and pass it along for your perusal: “Males may alter the velocity of sperm they allocate to copulations by strategically firing their left and right ejaculatory ducts, which can operate independently.”

And what leads to that double firing?

Among red junglefowl, it’s attractive females that do the trick, according to an article at Discovery.com this week.

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