Why beauty is beautiful

This is really cool. It's been known for a while that prototypical images are more beautiful than their individual images. For those of you who don't know, it's called the "beauty-in-averageness effect" and a famous test in the 1990s gave large evidence in support of it when people scored computer composites of 16 faces higher than any of the individual faces (the same faces that had gone into creating the composite face, in fact).

Recently, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the University of Otago, New Zealand, and the University of Denver expanded on this idea by asking "why?".

They measured response time of people to rate a variety of things, as well as other tests (if you want further explanation, leave a comment and I'll post more details of the tests) and concluded that beauty basically depends on what you've been exposed to and therefore what you identify with the quickest.

This is very interesting because it accounts for cultural and historical differences in beauty, as well as people's tendency to follow fashion trends of all kinds.

Edit:
Here's an article about this story
And here's the full research article, if you want to go more in-depth

New "engine on a chip"

Researchers at MIT are working on a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip. It could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can.

It could replace batteries eventually, and their goal is to finish it by the end of the year. They have all the components working, now it's a matter of getting them working together. Exciting!

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Bulletpoints mofos!

I wrote a big long post yesterday but then the new Nero 7.5 froze my comp, teach me for not restarting it for like 2 weeks... So today we have bulletpoints. Mofo.

• Scientists find popular acne drug leads to depression. I'd just like to point out that this is pretty useless research, I took that same acne drug when I was a teenager (Accutane, well actually I took Roaccutane but same thing) and it says on the packet that side-effects include depression, and the doctor who prescribed it gave a verbal warning about it too! Still it's good for the purposes of seeing what causes it biologically. Why am I writing in bulletpoints if they're so long, you may ask? I don't know, would be the answer.
  
• 3.3 million years ago a three year old girl died in what is now Dikika in Ethiopia. She was recently discovered by a paleoanthropological research team from the Max Planck Institute inLeipzig, Germany. She belongs to the same species as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and left behind some amazing bones, including a complete skull (picture) with a natural brain sandstone impression in addition to many previously unknown skeletal parts including the hyoid bone. Also, the spinal column, both shoulder blades, the ribs and both collar bones, both knee caps, substantial parts of the thigh and shinbone from both legs and an almost complete foot.
  This is so amazing! Also as some of you will know I'm studying anthropology so this is a great time to be doing it :)
  

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Breathing problems linked with depression

Yes, the worse your breathing is the more likely you are to be depressed! Perhaps if you've broken your nose before and now it gets blocked easily and makes that weird whistling sound sometimes it may be time to get nasal plastic surgery. They just go in and carve up your nose, scraping away the soft bone. Could make you happier, and happiness is a good thing.

Those with minimal cases of the condition (sleep-related breathing disorder) were 1.6 times as likely to be depressed; those with mild cases, twice as likely; and those with moderate or worse, 2.6 times as likely. The total people studied were 3,202 which is pretty huge.

It was also found that women were twice as likely to be depressed, although that's not a new finding.

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67 Dinosaurs found in one week

A recent week in the Gobi Desert saw 67 dinosaur skeletons found, adding to Montana State University's collection of Psittacosaurus skeletons. They now have about 100 of them.

The Psittacosaurus was a very common dinosaur, it's known as a "parrot lizard", it was a plant eater that lived about 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous Period. It was an ancestor of horned dinosaurs like Triceratops.

Among these finds are new species, including two meat-eating fossils. One looked like a new raptor species. However Jack Horner, a Paleontologist involved, said "we find new species all the time. A hundred Psittacosauruses are a lot more interesting to me than new species"

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Vegan children in danger!

The AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) has found that children who don't consume dairy products are disadvantaged and could be harming their bodies by depriving them of things like calcium, vitamin D and protein. Vegans, who don't consume anything that comes directly from an animal, can substitute by eating things like bread with added calcium, but in the end there is no substitute for the package of goodies dairy offers.

Me and Denny have been saying that for years, you commie pinko snobs should just grow up and show some damn pride and patriotism by eating and drinking dairy products! Also you all look tiny like you'll blow away in a breeze!

Get a job!!!!

The Island Effect

It's common knowledge the evolution happens at a quicker rate in isolated locations (in my country alone we have many examples of this like the giant weta and the moa).

In fact it's what sparked Darwin to theorize evolution in the first place, seeing the giant tortoises and iguanas of the Galápagos Islands.

Now data has been collected and published by Virginie Millien. She calculated 826 evolutionary rates for 170 populations representing 88 species. She of course found that evolution had accelerated in island species. This data also relates directly to why intermediate fossils are much more abundant for mainland species, because they exist longer.

Exciting day in news!

Here's a breakdown of all the cool new stories I've come across today so far:

• Feelings matter less to teenagers - When making decisions, teenagers underuse the medial pre-frontal cortex, which means they're less likely to think about how they themselves and other people will feel as a result of their intended action. From a study by the University College London
• Earth-like planets may be more common than once thought - More than one third of the giant planet systems recently detected outside Earth's solar system may have Earth-like planets, many covered in deep oceans with potential for life. From a study by the University of Colorado at Boulder
  
• A study of twins shows that fatigue in childgood is mainly due to genetic inheritance. From a study by Cardiff University.
  
• A study of 100,000 17-18-year-olds shows that men have a 4 to 5 point IQ advantage over women by adulthood. The results were found at every socioeconomic level and across several ethnic groups
  
• A new drug AMD3100, G-CSF shows the ability to mobilize angiogenis cells from bone marrow in humans, which then circulate in the bloodstream and go to sites of repair in the body, allowing for rapid healing (going from days to hours)
  
• A three-drug combo has been shown to inhibit the growth of aggresive tumors.
  
• A 70-year-old evolutionary hypothesis has been proven to be happening all the time, has been observed in fruit flies.
  

What a great start to the day, be well ya'll!

p.s. If you want more information on any of these stories I'm happy to explain further, just leave a comment and I'll reply :)

3 Terabyte DVDs

Apparently this new laser technology developed by Harvard University engineers could offer optical storage in the terabytes range.

It's called a plasmonic laser antenna, made from a metallic nanostructure known as an optical antenna which is integrated onto the facet of a commercial semiconductor laser.

Ken Crozier, a leader of the research, says "the optical antenna collects light from the laser and concentrates it to an intense spot measuring tens of nanometers, or about one-thousandth the width of a human hair."

The wavelengths used are far smaller than the wavelengths of Wi-Fi. Currently semiconductor lasers have the greatest commercial penetration of all laster, but this new invention extends the capability to the nanoscale and down to dimensions much smaller than a wavelength, which means it can be perfect for use in near-field optical microscopes, spatially resolved chemical imaging and spectroscopy.

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Designer babies ya'll

According to a new study by psychologists at the University of East Anglia, the well-educated are significantly more open to the idea of "designing" babies than poorly-educated people, particularly with improving their future-child's IQ.

Here are some other things that were found by the study:

• Because of "parental uncertainty" - the idea that women know if a child is their's whereas men don't - men show a significantly greater preference than female parents for their children to inherit their own characteristics.


• Parents aren't as concerned about female's IQ as males.


• Older women and childless women are much more willing to improve the physical, social and intellectual characteristics of children.

Televised movie trailers show smoking

Uh. So what?

Smoking isn't good for you, it increases the chances of diseases and smells bad, yes I get that. Buuuuut!

Some people smoke.

Uh oh the secret's out. Heaven forbid we actually let kids know that people smoke. If not for these movie trailers they would never figure it out.

Is that what people really believe?

If only we had more PHDs (the ones working on these ridiculous studies now) studying the things that actually matter, like gee I dunno, cancer?

A short shoutout to the brilliant devs of Flock and a bit of shameless advertising, but it's a free program so not so shameless perhaps

You may have noticed that this post as well as the previous one have little "Blogged with Flock" sigs at the bottom. Actually all my posts have been blogged with Flock, I just hadn't tried that option until today.

You've no doubt heard of Firefox, well, Flock is also a free web browser. It's based on Firefox but is better in so many ways that to list them all would invalidate the second word of the title of this post. Basically the features that are resposible for my many marriage proposals to it are the integrated blogging (just click File>New Blog Post and you're presented with a lovely interface to blog with, regardless of which site or company hosts your blog), integrated RSS (just click a button and you have an RSS news reader right inside the browser) and the over-all ease-of-use and great looks. It also integrates with Flickr for those of you who use that, oh boy it's nifty.

So may as well try it out, just click on "Flock" at the bottom of this post or in the links section of the blog (to the right) :)

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The funniest thing I'ver ever seen, ever, in all my years, well for a while anyway, honest!

Right here we have a video of some guy and his wife/girlfriend/sister, someone anyway, being absolutely stalked and harrassed by these two Canadian rednecks who hate BMWs.

So they follow this guy for a while, a long time actually, and I have to say the BMW driver is a calm dude, he puts up with it for so long and gives them ample opportunity to go away.

The rednecks get out to smash the guy's car (I assume) with a baseball bat... What happens next? You'll see. Also, dude and chick from the video, if by some fluke you ever read this you are legends. I was actually a bit surprised to see her go grab the camera off that guy, got a bit worried it could turn into a hostage situation. Aw rats I've revealed too much...

Hilarity is in store for all who follow this link

Also if you'd like to download a copy to your hard drive, right click here and save it to a location on your computer, where you save it is entirely at your own discretion, though it is probably smart to take a mental note of where you put it.

You'll need a video player that plays FLV files. Here's one.

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