HOME |
RSS | 
The broadcasting squad at Liberty Middle School in Madison, Alabama produced this video. It was entirely shot on iPads and mixed with music by Sigur Rós.
“As people were walking out of the school, it was clear that it was the best vibe in the school that had been there all year,” said broadcasting teacher Daniel Whitt. “Everyone was high fiving. People were smiling at each other. People were saying, ‘Hey man loved your sign.’”
Link -via Metafilter
The human body may seem very familiar to you, especially your own, of course. But there’s some weird things going on that you might not yet know. Like the way you glow!
Fireflies and jellyfish glow, but humans? Believe it. The phenomenon is a natural byproduct of the metabolic process, and scientists have long been aware of the presence of bioluminescence in most living creatures. But it wasn’t until 2009, when a team of Japanese researchers developed a camera 1000 times more sensitive than the human eye, that human bioluminescence was captured on film. The light show apparently works on a 24-hour cycle — brightest in the late afternoon and on the cheeks, forehead and neck. Next time someone tells you “you’re glowing,” you can take it literally.
That’s just one of 11 insane features that you probably haven’t thought about in the human body. Bone up on all of them at mental_floss. Link
(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user Scorpions and Centaurs)
Conventional wisdom holds that seeing someone naked makes you think of them as more of a sex object than seeing them clothed. According to a recent study, that is an oversimplification of what really happens. The human mind thinks of other people in two different dimensions: agency, or what the person observed can or will do, and experience, or what that person perceives and feels. And the amount of clothing worn changes what dimension the observer focuses on, as seen from an experiment in which people looked at pictures of faces or pictures of faces with some body skin also showing (as shown by the hunky “Aaron” shown here, or the female “Erin”).
It turns out that a glimpse of flesh strongly influences our perception of Erin/Aaron. When the pictures only showed a face, they had lots of agency. But when we saw their torso, we suddenly imagined them as obsessed with experience. Instead of being good at self-control, they were suddenly extremely sensitive to hunger and desire. Same person, same facial expression, same brief description – but a hint of body changed everything.
In another experiment, the researchers varied the volunteers’ mindsets, sometimes asking them to look at photos as if they were on an online-dating website, focusing on attractiveness, and sometimes asking them to look at the photos as if they were hiring for a professional job, focusing on the mind. Once again, thinking about how “sexy and cute” someone is – those are bodily attributes – led students to endow them with more experience and less agency. The opposite held when people were asked to evaluate intelligence and efficiency.
Read more about it at Frontal Cortex, but be warned there is no full nudity in the article. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
The official name for the geological epoch we are in now is the Holocene. But there is a movement among those who study such things to refer to the current stage of geologic time as the Anthropocene epoch, a term coined by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, which means “age of man.” This would seem obvious to historians, but in the context of global geology, does the presence of man make that much difference?
Way back in the 1870s, an Italian geologist named Antonio Stoppani proposed that people had introduced a new era, which he labeled the anthropozoic. Stoppani’s proposal was ignored; other scientists found it unscientific. The Anthropocene, by contrast, struck a chord. Human impacts on the world have become a lot more obvious since Stoppani’s day, in part because the size of the population has roughly quadrupled, to nearly seven billion. “The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate,” biologist E. O. Wilson has written. Wilson calculates that human biomass is already a hundred times larger than that of any other large animal species that has ever walked the Earth.
In 2002, when Crutzen wrote up the Anthropocene idea in the journal Nature, the concept was immediately picked up by researchers working in a wide range of disciplines. Soon it began to appear regularly in the scientific press. “Global Analysis of River Systems: From Earth System Controls to Anthropocene Syndromes” ran the title of one 2003 paper. “Soils and Sediments in the Anthropocene” was the headline of another, published in 2004.
More and more, geologists are coming around to the idea that humankind has such an effect on the earth that we are, indeed, living in the Anthropocene epoch. Read the entire story at National Geographic in a feature article that is part of the year-long 7 Billion project. Link
(Image credit: Mitch Epstein)
A study of lice genes is helping scientists to pinpoint the era in history when humans began to wear clothing. Really.
The key to the study by David Reed and colleagues, which appears in Molecular Biology And Evolution, is that there are two kinds of lice that hang around humans: the head lice that live on our scalp, and the body lice that live in our clothes. At one point in the past these two shared a common ancestor, Reed reasoned, and the body lice would have split off and become a separate group once they had human clothing in which to live.
The genomes of the two kinds of lice split somewhere between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago, which means that humans ran naked for hundreds of thousands of years without body hair or clothing. Clothing probably arose during an Ice Age, and eventually enabled humans to leave Africa to explore colder parts of the world. Link
Israeli archaeologists have found teeth of modern humans in a cave in central Israel that date back 400,000 years. That makes them twice as old as modern humans found in Africa, which is where they’ve been thought to have originated.
“It’s very exciting to come to this conclusion,” said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.
He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he says, “this changes the whole picture of evolution.”
The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.
Sir Paul Mellars, a prehistory expert at Cambridge University, said the study is reputable, and the find is “important” because remains from that critical time period are scarce, but it is premature to say the remains are human.
The archaeologists from Tel Aviv University are confident that other human fossil evidence will be found at the site. Link -Thanks, özi!
(Image credit: AP/Oded Balilty)
Do you ever feel like you are just a cog in a machine? This Indian ad for a pain reliever illustrates that feeling, as humans are turned into industrial machines and vehicles. -via the Presurfer
Life in Haiti-Canon 5D MKII & Glidetrack from Leclerc Brothers Motion Pictures on Vimeo.
When I first saw this title, I put it off assuming it would just show the depressing story of Haiti. I’m happy to report that I was wrong, because this piece by the Leclerc Brothers is beautiful. Yes, the destruction is evident, but the film serves a deeper purpose… The human condition, at this moment in time.
Music by: George Fenton from Planet Earth, “Namibia – The Lions and the Oryx”
Comments Off
For at least two weeks straight, UK tree surgeon John Hancock had a robin as his lunch companion. The species has been known to accept hand-feeding before, but this was different as the bird actually comes into Hancock’s truck to feed.
“We used to throw the odd crumb towards him, but none of us expected him to join us in the truck every day. He will take anything out of your hands and seems to enjoy human company.”
Now the robin descends from nearby trees every day and lands on John’s wing mirror ready for the snacks they bring especially for him.
Mr. Hancock and friends made a YouTube video of “Robbie” and created a Facebook fan page.
After a gestation period of nine months, humans usually live in their parents’ nest for around 16 years. While the parents are out foraging for food, juveniles are looked after in large groups by other adults.
In adolescence, the offspring adopt a more nocturnal lifestyle and engage in ritualized activities of drinking fermented liquids and dancing to rhythmical sounds, which scientists believe help them to find a mate.
Enlarge the picture at the link to read all of it. Link -via Boing Boing
Humans! is a short animation by Reza Rasoli, Greg Gunn and Casey Hunt of Three Legged Legs. It’s done in the style of a PSA – and while you may not agree with the gloom and doom depiction of humans as parasites, it’s still a very interesting (though a bit gory) animation.
Hit play or go to Link [aniboom] – via Cool Infographics
