CΦExi$t

JAMES HAMBLIN

It's like, we should be tolerant and respectful of everyone's beliefs, whatever they are. Just so long as you believe in a cataract month.

Cataracts are more common than glaucoma, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy combined.  Be aware: don't get them. 

Things to avoid if you don't want cataracts:

•  family history of cataracts
•  smoking
•  UV rays
•  serious eye injury
•  steroids

Were you thinking of sustaining serious eye injury this month?


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The Tooth Fairy Rots Your Brain

JAMES HAMBLIN

"Children's beliefs in the reality of fantastic phenomena [may] give rise to genuine constructive memory errors in line with their fantasies."

“To examine how children’s fantasy beliefs can affect memory for their experiences, 5- and 6-year-olds with differing levels of belief in the reality of the Tooth Fairy were prompted to recall their most recent primary tooth loss in either a truthful or fun manner. Many of the children who fully believed in the existence of the Tooth Fairy reported supernatural experiences consistent with the myth..., whereas those who realized the fictionality of the myth recalled mainly realistic experiences."

Define "supernatural" and "realistic," science.

If you're looking to purchase children's drawings of the tooth fairy, consider this one, available in 5 x 7 for $7.49 plus shipping.

Keep in mind, you're buying a print, not the original. 

If you're looking for the original, hand-drawn kid tooth fairy drawings, stained with the tears shed as the they watched their parents sell them, talk to me.

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It's An Eye. You Have To Kind Of Squint, But, Yeah, It Is.

Huge news in the journal Nature, researchers in Japan were able to create a retina out of embryonic stem cells.  That’s a great step towards a treatment for many types of blindness, not to mention a step towards synthesizing all kinds of organs that many people desperately need.

Every time the lady stem cell looked over to that corner of the bar, there he was, peering at her suggestively.  She waited all night, but the guy stem cell never came over to her, so finally she went to him.  

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

“Are you making eyes at me?” she asked.

“No,” he said.  “We’re making them together.”


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The Real-Life Like Button

JAMES HAMBLIN

What compels us to share things on Facebook/Twitter/etc? A study at Penn tells us that when an article evokes a "high arousal" emotion (anxiety, amusement), we're more likely to share it. That's not too surprising, right, but the cooler part to me was the corollary study in which people read a neutral article while either sitting or running on a treadmill. The people who were running when they read the article ended up being more likely to share it.

So we should all be running all the time? Because running elevates your mood and you're more likely to share when you're happy? Or just people who run are more likely to be disoriented and lightheaded, clicking buttons to and fro?

I think there should be actual "Like" buttons on physical things out in the world. Big, blue, glowing things that make pleasing noises when you push them. They could read your fingerprints and synch to your account. And when you're at a certain store, you can just hit this giant Like button on the wall. Or if you like a certain kind of car, you can hit the button on that car. If you see a famous person, you can like them on their forehead.

I don't know, but then maybe the runners would go around liking/sharing tons of stuff while they're out and about, and Mark Zuckerberg could get rich. Then he would issue everyone free blue running shoes in the mail, and on and on and on.

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They Get Their Claws Into You

Everyone’s talking all the time about the new ultra-graphic cigarette warning labels coming out in September and how they may or may not actually deter people from smoking but will definitely not deter people from having goatees. Meanwhile, in Italy:

"Smoking is for people who couldn't get the duck. Don't be a loser."

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The Fit-O-Meter Miracle

JAMES HAMBLIN

WebMD has created a Fit-O-Meter [fit-ah-mitter] that tells you how many calories you burn doing certain activities.

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And it was good.

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People Sleep Better In Hammocks

JAMES HAMBLIN

We all deserve to be rocked, all the time, in every sense. That's the gist of a small study in Current Biology that found people who slept in some special rocking "experimental hammocks" slept better than the people in normal stationary versions.

Not only did they fall asleep faster, they also boast "dramatic boosting of certain types of sleep-related brain wave oscillations," presumably while  asleep.

You rock babies to sleep; why not rock everyone? Babies are just tiny adults. A lot of us would probably gladly try out some sort of new bed that would accomplish this, but exhaustive searching for "hammock beds" and "rocking beds for grown-ups" tells me they're more the kind of thing that exist really easily in your mind but not other places. The "banana hammock" market, though, remains unduly saturated.

If I opened a store called Experimental Hammocks, would you go to it?

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Babies Who Sleep in Smokers’ Rooms Face ‘Thirdhand’ Smoke

"Levels of nicotine in the hair of infants who sleep in the same room with parents who smoke are three times higher than in babies who sleep in another room." 

This is sad and tragic.  Perhaps sadder and more tragic still is the risk to those of us who may be experiencing ‘fourthhand’ smoke from taking baby-hair based dietary supplements. 

"They're supposed to make you less evil."

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Someone Spilled Some Knowledge On You

 

Carl Zimmer's forthcoming Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed tells true stories of science tattoos. Because it's neat when responsible people get reasonable tattoos.

Reason aside, as many of you know I'm seriously interested in getting sleeved. But I'm also looking for a design that would be acceptable for work. Would you be okay with your doctor having a tattoo sleeve? If it was something scientific, say, that I could use to help educate patients -- a pictorial of fetal development throughout gestation, maybe, or depictions of people with different kinds of tumors in the act of the lifestyle choices that caused them -- then yes, it could be okay, right? 

My other idea is just to get the actual cool tattoos I want (extremely NSFW), but then cover them when I'm wearing scrubs, say with a Dri-Fit shooting sleeve like Allen Iverson or something.

If people ask why I'm wearing it, I can always say it's because I'm about to make it rain.
I say that a lot already anyway.

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Narci$$u$

A study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people with narcissistic personalities were 50% more successful at pitching movies than people without. On paper, the pitches weren’t any better. The theory is that people who’ve convinced themselves they’re creative and their ideas are great end up being the best at convincing others of the same. "Self-promotion is a valuable skill, but it benefits everyone to realize how much it can distort perceptions of quality."

In no way does this explain why my standard pitch closer, "please, please, oh Jesus please, I’m drowning in failure," has met with so much success. 

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Everyone's Quitting Facebook

More news to support my sad theory that Facebook is in its "bloated purple dead-on-a-toilet phase": 100,000 British people quit Facebook last month. Even I'm shocked by that number, though. 100,000? What are they all doing with themselves?

Your first inclination is to think, ah, that's great, they're probably getting out into the world, living life instead of clicking through somebody else's. But with society having grown so social media-centric, quitting Facebook can seriously hurt their chances of finding a boyfriend or girlfriend, leaving them depressed and emaciated. Also if they go out and climb a tree, they'll probably just fall because their arms are so weak from technology. This Facebook exodus could be the most ill-fated British surrender since the Siege of Yorktown. There, I said it.

What would it take to get you to quit Facebook? I think this question has already been asked on lots of sites, but let's pretend I just thought of it for the first time. For me, I'd quit if it meant saving the life of a single anonymous child somewhere in the world. Anywhere, even someplace I don't like. Would you? What if you couldn't even use someone else's account to brag about it?

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Most Popular Sleeping Positions

When you find a starfish, you hang onto her. It'll be some moment in the middle of the night when you sneak out of bed to get some water, and you're super careful not to wake her up - so careful that it works - and on the way back into bed a moonbeam illuminates her side of the bed, and you see two palms peeking out the top of the covers, facing up toward the skylight like she's teaching the moon how to dougie. That's when you know it's real. Get some string and try and measure the circumference of her ring finger. If she starts waking up, go yearner.

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Free Surgery Videos

Are you having surgery soon? And you spend a lot of time worrying about what they'll be doing to your body? Do you wish you could understand it from the perspective of the surgeon?

"No" to all three, huh? But you -- what's that -- you think sometimes about cutting people while they're asleep? Well, okay, then you'll still be interested to know that the National Institute of Health has compiled an extensive catalog of educational surgery videos addressed to the healthcare consumer. From "Awake Craniotomy" to "Anal Fistula Plug," they're all there! Probably cancel your weekend plans. Or at least cancel your plans for a weekend free of robot anxiety after you watch "Fully Robotic Gastric Bypass."

Not all robots are trying to cut out part of your stomach, but it's safer to assume that most of them would if given the opportunity. Star Jones ended up losing 160 pounds after a run-in with an ATM. It's true. But what does a robot do with the extra human stomachs, anyway? They couldn't want to eat it, that would be too funny.

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Can You Taste The Danger? It's Delicious

Now seems like as good a time as any for the Food and Drug Administration to call attention to the importance of not drinking unpasteurized milk.

  

Pasteurization, invented in China two thousand years ago and named for the nineteenth-century Frenchman who invented it later, has been federally standardized and regulated for a hundred years.  The FDA joined the internet in late 2010 and has since taken to addressing this and other pressing public health issues, like how to know if you're exercising too much.

Baby cows drink raw milk all the time, and they seem perfectly happy. Why can’t we drink milk without all of this “artificial processing” to "kill bacteria”? It's is another one of those situations where "natural" is a little misleading, like natural deodorant or chemotherapy. As I've said before, there are unfortunately lots of things baby cows can do that you shouldn’t, one of which is drinking directly from an udder.

If you're interested in more news from the FDA, they also have a good twitter, @FDArecalls. Spoiler, they recall about five or six things every day, so odds are good you've eaten or taken one of them in the recent past. Thus, you're probably going to get sick or die, so why not go out on top -- with a tall, cool glass of unpasteurized milk.


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How Couples Meet

30% of new couples meet online, according to preliminary results from sociology research at Stanford. That means online dating/social networking is the #2 way to meet a new lady/dude now, just behind introduction by mutual friends. 

The authors predict it won’t be long before online is #1, which seems totally possible. The internet is the new disco.

I don’t think my #1 will change any time soon, though: meeting under a bridge.

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Facebook Messed Up My Liver

According to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project: 

“Teenagers who drink alcohol spend more time on their computers for recreational use, including social networking and downloading and listening to music, compared with their peers who don’t drink.”

So does drinking make you use the computer, or does using the computer make you drink? It’s an interesting — what’s that, space bar? You like the way my thumb feels? Well, that’s - thank you - I… okay, yes, I guess you can buy me a drink. But just one, really, I have a lot of work to get done.  I’m serious this time!

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British Children Are Growing Weaker

Finally.

10% of them can't even hang from a bar, and their arm strength is 26% less than it was ten years ago. The study, from London Metropolitan University, thinks it's either due to computers or lawyers:

"Falling off a branch use to be a good lesson in picking yourself up and learning to climb better. Now fear of litigation stops the child from climbing in the first place." (A branch?)

At this rate, in 40 years -- assuming we'll be able to type with our eyes by them -- British kids probably won't have arms at all, just little flipper nubs. They'll still be able to play cricket, technically, but it'll be a different verison that's mostly tragic to watch and gets cancelled when it's too sunny.

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Recognizing Early Dementia

-The Journal of the American Medical Association discusses how financial mismanagement can be indicative of early dementia, recognizable by signs such as expressing “concerns about stolen money or missing money.” 


Suuuure, old man.


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God Is Watching Us

Belief in a vengeful god will deter people from cheating on tests, says a study published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.  People who believe in a forgiving god, meanwhile, didn’t exhibit any more “moral behavior” than atheists.  

I guess that pretty much settles the debate over Lil Wayne’s secret to academic integrity.

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Spaceship Potato

New evidence in the round vs. flat earth debate: it’s actually just “shaped like a lumpy potato.” That’s a nice compromise. Everyone likes potatoes! Spanish women are even starting to have potatoes for faces.  Plus, if we leave the earth out in the sun for a while it should grow sprouts, which we could live in or eat (except the ones that are “mildly poisonous”).


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