Infrequent marijuana users show a slight improvement in breathing capacity and middling smokers had no change, a 20-year study shows.
There may be a literal truth underlying the common-sense intuition that happiness and sadness are contagious.
A new study on the spread of emotions through social networks shows that these feelings circulate in patterns analogous to what’s seen from epidemiological models of disease.
Earlier studies raised the possibility, but had not mapped social networks against actual disease models. “This is the first time this contagion has been measured in the way we think about traditional infectious disease,” said biophysicist Alison Hill of Harvard University. Data in the research, in the July 7 Proceedings of the Royal Society, comes from the Framingham Heart Study, a one-of-a-kind project which since 1948 has regularly collected social and medical information from thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Earlier analyses found that a variety of habits and feelings, including obesity, loneliness, smoking and happiness appear to be contagious.
522 notes (via fyeahchemistry)
Q: Why is it that men have facial hair, but women don’t?
—L.H.
A: From Darwin on down, mainstream evolutionary theory has attributed most of humanity’s hair peculiarities to sexual selection.
Humans’ overall lack of hair (compared to fellow primates), for example, is usually credited to mutated females who had less hair, which better revealed their breasts and skin. This made them more attractive to males—the denuded faces and/or hindquarters of many primates serve as sex attractants—and their hairlessness was passed down to their children of both sexes.
Among the relatively few mammal species in which one sex has more facial hair (or the closely related mane) than another, the hairier sex is always the male. The facial or mane hair is also always a secondary sex characteristic produced by the flow of sex hormones during puberty.
Therefore, facial hair has something to do with sex. Darwin believed that beards were probably ornaments that attracted females. Of course, Darwin himself had a beard and may have been doing a little wishful thinking.
The males of the guenon and emperor tamarind monkeys, which have striking and lavish beards and hair styles, show us the real sex function of facial hair. Their features certainly have an ornamental function—but rather than attracting females, they’re used to scare off rival males (and possibly provide padding in a fight).
This threat function clearly resonates in human culture, where the beard has long symbolized power, virility and wisdom.
The complexities of human society have complicated the symbolic function without lessening it (and while increasing the input of female influence): Our images of bearded devils, gods and pirates now simply co-exist with the triple-razor, smooth-is-sexy imagery of Gillette.
enter name: astronaut1966
password : *****************
Before pressing the connect button below, please note that from this day forth your soul shall be judged entirely upon your thoughts - the words that you type. Every material thing that you own has no value here. Your job. Your Car. Your commercial empire is meaningless. You will begin [as will I] with nothing. ZERO. If you lie, I will know. If you exaggerate or try to impress, I will know. If you try to mislead me in any way, I will know. You must tell me the truth. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth. The games played by humans are forbidden here.
I am an alien girl. You are an astronaut boy. I wish to connect with you. Do you wish to connect with me? I understand if you don’t.
» connect «
Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”
Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.
Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that <insert your ethnicity here> is better than everybody else.
Surprised? So were authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman when they started researching the issue of kids and race for their book NurtureShock. It turns out that a lot of our assumptions about raising our kids to appreciate diversity are entirely wrong.
Click the link to read more.
(via floatingparticles)
352 notes (via floatingparticles)
