Feb 09
“Are you depressed?” begins every article on this subject. I’m just going to go ahead and assume you are. But don’t kill yourself yet. Scientists from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine have invented a smartphone that’s sure to annoy as well as depress you. A smart phone spots symptoms of depression by harnessing all the sensor …
Dec 12
That smell might be telling you something. In a paper published by The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Russian scientists have discovered that women find the smell of a man infected with gonorrhea to be “putrid.” As if they don’t have enough problems. IBN Live reports: “Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odour attractiveness in humans,” …
Apr 08
Those men in the white coats are attempting to make pills to improve morality. Dr Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner says: “Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate. There is already a …
Feb 05
Twitter has helped social change and fueled revolutions. Now it is helping scientists perform an informal census of mental dysfunction. Dr. Waldo Andersnatch from the University of Zurich says: “We have long known how hard it is to find and diagnose the many people suffering from a spectrum of mental disorders. Some of these sufferers are difficult …
Jan 15
Female tears of grief reduce arousal in men. And not just because of the smeared makeup. Apparently, lady tears smell icky. Just a slight whiff turns men off. According to the study’s director, Noam Sobel: “We know that women tend to cry more during menstruation, when it’s not an effective time to conceive.” So ladies, …
Nov 16
pic nicked from here It seems that we’ve found a variety of causes of obesity. Viruses, glands, and big bones. Just about everything is to blame except eating too much and not moving enough. You can add the FTO gene (nicknamed the greediness gene) to this ever-growing list of things that cause people surrounded by an …
Oct 31
pic nicked from here A functioning, mini-human liver has been grown in the lab by researchers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. They say these manmade livers are meant to create donor organs, of which there is a shortage, and to test drugs on. Both worthy causes. But I hope …
Sep 19
For years, people have been attempting to make the fashion industry complicit in the rising rates of bulima and annorexia, blaming the thin models for the increase in eating disorders. And it would seem a likely culprit. But, according to a new study, the thinness of models has no impact on the eating habits of the viewer. …
Feb 01
Victims of Body Dysmorphic Disorder look in the mirror and see a monster looking back at them. And, when some women hear about BDD, they figure they have it. Why wouldn’t they? After all, they don’t look like the people they spend the most time with. That is, the people on television. Thinking you have …
Jul 21
You’ve probably heard of the placebo effect. It’s when scientists prescribe a sugar pill and that sugar pill works just as well as the real one. The reason for this has been pretty mysterious to say the least. But now researchers at UCLA have presented the first genetic explanation for why placebos sometimes work. The …
Although Ryan Oakley began his career as a simple rake (drunk) he has since become Toronto’s most renowned flaneur (no car) and notorious dandy (overdresses). A misanthropic composer of psycho-geographical fictions (sci-fi), he is also a server of food, a tender of bar and a washer of dishes. While performing all these functions with efficiency and elegance (disdain and malice), he somehow finds the time to publicly criticize friends, strangers and cultural crap.
