Can you guess who owns the most land on Earth?
Your cells contain a mysterious organelle called the vault, a protein superstructure that can open and close and contain stuff. Nobody knows what it does, but recently Thrasher-Collins et al used it to hide gene therapy vectors, so they don’t trigger an immune response. This makes it possible to use the same vector several time on the same person.
We’re getting closer to understanding the mechanisms behind sexual attraction.
More evidence for antagonistic pleiotropy in aging – some of the alleles that help you reproduce when you’re young may cause you to age faster when you’re old.
Aboriginal mythology contains surprisingly precise descriptions of the paths taken by the creator-beings when they created the world. These were used by people as orally-transmitted maps. When you reconstruct these paths and map them to actual Australian geography, they match modern night-time light intensity from satellite images.
Sulikowski et al claim that women, when asked to give advice to other women about how much to cut their hair, deliberately give bad advice to those who have nicer-looking hair, in an attempt to sabotage potential competitors. I haven’t checked the object-level scientific rigour, but I find it interesting on the meta-level.
A long time ago, critical theorists like Horkheimer pointed out that the scientific method doesn’t tell you anything about which hypotheses to investigate, so the worldview created by the scientific method may still be distorted by social context and power structures.
Here I notice all of the 7 authors are women. The hypothesis they test is completely foreign to me as a man, and I doubt any male psychologist would ever come up with it. I think this illustrates why diversity in science is important – but I also notice the authors seem to be grey-tribe-ish contrarians, so it’s not just diversity in gender.
If you look at the following gif for a while, then look at black-and-white strips, the vertical black lines will appear red and the horizontal black lines will appear green.
This is called the McCollough illusion. The special thing about it is that it lasts very long – several months if you look at the gif for >15 min (I tried and can attest). So in the 1990s scientists did the obvious thing and tested it on Alzheimer patients with advanced amnesia. It still works.
Huang et al recreated the spiral of silence with students in a Zoom room.
Wholesale wikipedias
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Shrimps_in_art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuations_in_the_length_of_day
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_delusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praisepit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C5%9Fref_Arma%C4%9Fan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_king