As a scholar of yawning, the French physician Olivier Walusinski, has put it, ‘its survival without any notable evolutionary variations is an indication of its functional importance.’
Cecil Adams
Posted inExtras
What’s the connection between outlaw bikers and ball-peen hammers?
Hunter S. Thompson’s 1966 book on the Hells Angels doesn’t mention hammers, but a later memoir by group leader Sonny Barger recalled punishment he’d visited on some guys who tried to steal his bike: ‘We bullwhipped them and beat them with spiked dog collars, broke their fingers with ball-peen hammers.’
Posted inExtras
Are we heading back to 25-year lifespans because germs are invincible?
From an evolutionary biology perspective, a highly lethal virus isn’t always a particularly successful one
Posted inExtras
Is it possible to raise enough venison to make a regular fast-food item?
Who knew there was such a hunger for deer?
Posted inExtras
How did Minnesota diverge linguistically from “duck duck goose” to “duck duck gray duck”?
In departing from duck-duck orthodoxy, the Swedes are hardly alone.
Posted inExtras
Can you harness electricity from electric eels?
Even if you were able to haul in enough starter stock for your state-of-the-art electric-eel farm, you might encounter difficulty sustaining a population.
Posted inExtras
Who profits from climate change?
Those wanting to make a profit in this arena are advised to stick near the top of this list if they want to keep their souls.
Posted inExtras
Is there a general consensus on aspartame’s health effects?
As recently as 2016 Pepsi was still dithering over which fake sugar to put in its no-cal drinks
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What happened to all the supergeniuses?
The supergeniuses we recognize today created their fields (Galileo) or revolutionized them (Einstein). Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton argues that for a century no disciplines have been created wholesale, but rather combined with existing fields into hybrid forms: astrophysics, biochemistry.
Posted inExtras
Why are some English names pronounced so differently than they’re spelled?
The tendency to pronounce a word more succinctly than its spelling would suggest pervades the language in both Britain and North America, particularly when it comes to place names
Posted inExtras
Does artificially altering hurricanes’ strength have any effect?
The thinking went that if you could seed a hurricane with something that would cause the supercooled water to cohere into raindrops, this would release pent-up heat energy and disrupt the wall of thunderstorms that define the hurricane’s eye
Posted inExtras
Why do we hate some noises?
The authors noted that the waveforms of the sound resembled the alarm cries of macaque monkeys and speculated that perhaps our aversive reaction is a vestigial reflex