Tag: Biology

AotM #10: National Dessert Day

I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to dedicate each Articles of the Moment post to whatever random and strange holiday happens to fall on that day. Because why not?

So…Today happens to be National Dessert Day. Treat yourself to some delicious pastries.

  1. There’s a lot of fearmongering going on lately about all the chemicals and “toxins” we’re potentially exposed to all the time, and how many of them are untested and have unknown biological effects. Well, those are actually some good points. I don’t have much hope that companies will start voluntarily testing all of their products and additives extensively before release, but I do have hope that blood and DNA testing will become cheap and easy enough for individuals to self-examine. Eventually, this will lead to greater awareness in the public, which will put economic pressure on companies, which will ultimately lead to better ground-up testing and a safer environment for us all. But then, I’m an optimist.
    Of course, another way of looking at it is that cancer rates haven’t really risen that much despite all of these new chemicals around us, so maybe we should embrace our exposure and breed future generations of super-immune cockroach kids!
  2. You should always be healthily skeptical of any images you see, as they’ve always been doctorable, but with further changes in technology like this algorithmic image builder, you have even more reason to be wary.
  3. Here’s a long and in-depth, but very well-written & researched article about just how short-sightedly fearful and greedy Big Content as been over the last hundred years. It’s nothing terribly surprising, other than the fact that Big Content has been so dense and slow to adjust to the Internet Age.
  4. Continuing the environmental and technological thread of the other articles today, I present a very long but highly engrossing exploration of Earth’s fiber networks, which happens to be by my favorite author, Neal Stephenson. If you’re interested in networking, communications, technology, or geography, you won’t regret spending the time to read it. Enjoy!

AotM #8

  1. If you click this link (although I’m not saying you should click this link), you might, possibly, find out that, if you want, uncertainty is more stressful than negative feedback. Makes perfect sense—when we don’t know where others stand, our minds make up all manner of extreme explanations, but if we know the players and the situation, even if it’s not ideal, we can make informed decisions and move forward. Tell it like it is, folks.
  2. The grass is always greener…White med students are more likely to be interested in alternative medicine and therapies, while their non-white classmates seem to reject their own cultures’ cures. This is not good, since a lot of medical wisdom from Asia, Africa, and India that could use thorough additional research might be lost before Western doctors can collect it.
  3. It seems to be a universal human trait that facial scars increase male attractiveness, at least in the short term (in other words, at least for making babies and spreading genes, but not for long term childrearing).
  4. Another reason not to worry so much about China—even in Asia, the US is the preferred security partner over China. This is probably largely because the US Navy is still (and will remain) the world’s largest and capable by far, no matter what China develops, and because the US still has a much more global outlook than China, which is a more regional power.
  5. Although I usually only include articles that confirm my personal anti-religious/pro-spiritual beliefs, this one is interesting and significant enough to share nonetheless—”attending religious services sharply cuts risk of death“. As the researchers in the article state, more study is needed to find out why this happens, but it’s certainly food for thought.
  6. As yet another reminder of how little we actually do know (i.e. too many people believe that our current level of scientific and medical knowledge are infallible and all-knowing), we only just now found out how bleach kills bacteria. Also interesting—our bodies produce the active ingredient in bleach as bacterial defense.
  7. You may have already noticed this, but food prices are rising a lot more than you may realize, since many companies are “secretly” reducing the volume of their packaging, so you get less for the same (or more) money. If only more people read packaging (ingredients, nutrition info, volume…) more diligently, everyone would benefit.
  8. And finally, for some fun and comedy…Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch is actually a couple millennia old. It’s kind of comforting to know that our ancient ancestors shared our sense of humor so closely.

AotM #4

  1. Simple sugars can activate proteins, not just phosphate compounds. It’s discoveries like this that reveal just how little we still know about the human body, and just how protean our bodies can be.
  2. Two studies that reveal just how much influence our subconscious perceptions have—especially with regard to what we conclude based solely on people’s faces. We change our votes based on how someone looks, and we can gauge physical ability with just a glance at a face as well. Whether you take this as a reason to question your every decision, or as a reason to more fully trust your subconscious senses, is up to you….
  3. Some more gorgeous photos of our amazing solar system—this time of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.