Discover magazine

Nov

2010

Prescription for an Aggressive Man: Look at More Meat

Discover, November 11 2010.

Even the sight of the reddest, rawest steak won’t get your blood boiling. Surprising new research has found that staring at pictures of meat actually makes people less aggressive. The insight comes from McGill University undergraduate Frank Kachanoff. He wondered if the sight of food would incite men’s defensive desires, much like a dog aggressively protecting its food bowl, he explained in a press release:

“I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Your Next Sponge Bath May Come From a Robot Named Cody

Discover, November 11 2010.

A team at Georgia Tech is looking to replace your sponge bath nurse with this sexy beast to the right. No, not the girl. The sponge bath robot next to her, named Cody. He’s the one that wants to wipe you down with his delicate towel hands.

The robot was developed by researcher Charles Kemp’s team at the Healthcare Robotics Lab, and was described in a presentation and accompanying paper (pdf) at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. The robot uses cameras and lasers to evaluate the human’s body, identifying dirty spots, then gently wipes with its towel hands, making sure not to apply too much or too little pressure. It has flexible arm joints with low levels of stiffness to make sure that it doesn’t push too hard. Study coauthor Chih-Hung (Aaron) King put himself in the tester’s spot for the robot’s first rubs. Read More >

Nov

2010

DOGS AWAY! Pups Go Parachuting to Sniff out the Taliban

Discover, November 10 2010.

Man’s best friend can also be man’s best tandem parachuting partner. The Guardian reports that UK forces have been sending Taliban-hunting dogs into Afghanistan. Dogs have been used previously by American and Austrian paratroopers, which sheds some light on how the British might be using their pups, says Wired:

SAS pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection. Read More >

Nov

2010

And the Prize for World’s Largest Testicles Goes to… the Bushcricket!

Discover, November 10 2010.

A cricket’s constant chirping may seem a bit ballsy, but just wait until you hear about their testicles. For at least one species of cricket, the tuberous bushcricket (Platycleis affinis), the testicles take up 14 percent of the insect’s body mass! The Daily Mail made a stunning observation:

To put this into perspective, a man with the same proportions would have to carry testicles weighing as much as five bags of sugar each. Read More >

Nov

2010

Nanogenerator Takes Us One Step Closer to Power-Generating Clothing

Discover, November 10 2010.

Devices that use the wasted mechanical energy from clothing movements or even a heartbeat seem far out, if not just a bit creepy, but new advances in nanogenerators are making such energy-scavenging electronics possible.

Now researchers at Georgia Tech have made the first nanowire-based generators that can harvest sufficient mechanical energy to power small devices, including light-emitting diodes and a liquid-crystal display. Read More >

Nov

2010

“Story of Stuff” Crusade Takes on E-Waste and Planned Obsolescence

Discover, November 9 2010.

The Story of Electronics has made its debut today (teaser above), following the form of the original Story of Stuff video in 2007. The Story of Stuff, written and narrated by Annie Leonard, created waves of discussion about the environment and consumption in classrooms, homes, and workplaces around the country.

She [created the movie], she said, after tiring of traveling often to present her views at philanthropic and environmental conferences. She attributes the response to the video’s simplicity. “A lot of what’s in the film was already out there,” Ms. Leonard said, “but the style of the animation makes it easy to watch. It is a nice counterbalance to the starkness of the facts.” Read More >

Nov

2010

Step 1: Pee on Stick. Step 2: Ask Your Phone if You Have an STD

Discover, November 9 2010.

Pee-on-a-stick sexually transmitted disease tests could be making their way onto pharmacy shelves and bathroom vending machines in the UK soon. And in this system, a cell phone can take the place of a clinic doctor. The country’s burgeoning STD problem has got doctors thinking about ways to make testing quicker, easier, and less embarrassing. One answer: A pee-on-a-stick test that could be connected to your computer or mobile phone to provide results, and treatment advice, within minutes.

This has been heralded as a “pee on your phone” test, but of course it would be neater and better for your electronics if you pee first, then plug in. If this new home testing procedure could make diagnosis and treatment of these all-too-common ailments easier, it would hopefully reduce their spread and prevalence, said Dr. Tariq Sadiq, who is leading the group developing the new testing strategies. Read More >

Nov

2010

Why People of Other Races “All Look Alike” to You

Discover, November 9 2010.

Some may say it as a joke, others might find it offensive, but it turns out there’s some truth to the idea that people of other races “all look alike.” A new study demonstrates that people have more trouble recognizing faces of people of other races. While this effect has been observed for almost a hundred years, scientists still don’t fully understand why it happens and who it happens to, explains Ars Technica:

It has been suggested that the other race effect is simply a result of differing amounts of facial variation between races, or varying observational abilities of particular races. However, in this study, subjects of both races showed the same trends, suggesting that the other race effect is a generalized phenomenon experienced by people of more than one race. Read More >

Nov

2010

The Monkey Snuggle Market: How Much for a Quick Nuzzle?

Discover, November 8 2010.

In some monkey species, monkey moms use snuggle time with their babies as a commodity. Mothers will “sell” time with their children to other females in their colony for the price of several minutes of grooming. As Science News puts it, they have a “do my hair before you touch my baby” rule. The research team who made this discovery, which was described in the journal Animal Behaviour, studied vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys in the Ivory Coast’s Tai National Park.

Newborn infants draw crowds of female monkeys who want to touch, hold, and make lip-smacking noises at the babies. Touching of the baby can be had for a price of a few minutes spent grooming its mother, though it’s not really known why female monkeys are so drawn to the young of others. The researchers use the idea of a “market” to understand this behavior because the time put into the grooming fluctuates with the youth of the baby and the availability of other babies. The younger babies get more grooming time for their mothers, and if there are few other babies around for competition the “price” is driven up, explains Science News. Read More >

Nov

2010

Toasty Testicles From Laptops Could Make for Less Fertile Nerds

Discover, November 8 2010.

Being a computer nerd just keeps getting worse. Not only can being addicted to the interwebz make it hard to meet chicks, but now research is showing that a man’s relationship with his laptop computer can affect even his most intimate of areas. The study, titled “Protection from scrotal hyperthermia in laptop computer users,” studied how laptop positioning affected testicle temperature.

Participants were asked to sit with a laptop on their knees while the research team monitored the temperature of their scrotum (both the left and right sides). The three positions they tried were: sitting with the laptop on the lap with legs together, the same position with a laptop pad under the computer, and sitting with legs spread 70 degrees apart. They found that the open legged position was the best at lowering testicle temp (a total of about half a degree on the left, and a little less on the right). Read More >