Category: Science (page 5)

Here is a great talk on what is currently possible with fruit flies. The activity of particular neurones can be controlled by light, to study the effects of particular neurones in behaviour.

The video suggests that daylight saving time is a mess and does not benefit the modern world.

What an amazing study: Researchers measured the income of professional lap dancers. They then correlated it with the period in their menstrual cycle and found that fertile women had an increase in their income. But only if they did not use contraceptive pills.

No explanation on dancing technique is necessary, although it might be interesting to pursue.

The study by Miller and colleagues shows that there is estrus in modern human females in an real world setting.

Google has scanned a lot of books and has assembled a big dataset spanning many years of human writing activity. To the extent that writing captures human culture, the dataset is large enough to represent quite an accurate subset of human culture.

In this talk the speakers present some analyses that can be done on such a dataset. The approach could be termed culturomics. It is a bit like genomics, with the difference being that the raw data are words instead of DNA sequence.

As these sort of analyses become more sophisticated, the results have the potential to become very interesting. Here is a taste of things to come.

Since the cold season is upon us in the Northern Hemisphere, and you are probably in the vicinity of freshers and schoolkids, you may find the following link useful: It is a good summary of the best things to do (and not to do) to prevent falling ill.

How to Most Effectively Battle the Common Cold

After 3 years in St Andrews, I still have not managed to see it. Maybe this year…

In the meantime, here is a nice explanation of what it is.