The Astatotilapia burtoni. A species of cichlid fish. In this species, there are two types of males: the “leaders”, who are aggressive and territorial, and the “subordinates”, the weaker, non-territorial males. The former has the control on the group’s resources, territory, and space, and pushes everyone around. The latter, on the other hand… well, they just follow. Surprisingly, when it comes to complex tasks, it is not the “leaders” who wield much influence. Rather, it is the silent subordinate who has the greater influence. These were findings from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a few months ago.

"The same traits that make you powerful in one context can actively reduce your influence in others, especially contexts in which individuals are free to choose who to follow," writes Alex Jordan, the senior author of the study. 

"More aggressive domineering personalities are most often in positions of power, but they may be least effective and have little influence when compared to their consensus-building coworkers."

When Polly found out about this study and its findings, she knew that she learned something very important.

… when it comes to staying focused and coming together to push through a challenge, to build the collaborative team needed to function well and improve despite adversity, those who adopt a less in-your-face approach might be the most effective.

As the assertive voice in her family, Polly is now trying her best to be the passive, yet powerful, voice, just like her husband.

I’m practicing this wait-and-see style more often now too. Learning to listen better. Pausing to think before I answer. Realizing, not everything requires my input or opinion. And that collaboration, particularly in family and friendships—really in any group where you need to come together to get through—makes things better for all.

[...]

Like the fish, I imagine we all work better when we aren't pushed around, but when we are hungry for leadership, ready to be guided and led by people who respect others and leave room for others to collaborate and share. For other voices to be heard. 

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Russell D. Fernald and Sabrina S. Burmeister/ Wikimedia Commons)

It has been a long-standing belief that birds are dumb animals due to their rather weird brain structure, which lacks the neocortex, the part of the mammalian brain responsible for working memory, planning, and problem solving. But in recent years, scientists found out that birds are, in fact, smart animals, who are capable of making tools, as well as understanding abstract concepts. They can also recognize paintings by Monet and Picasso. But what makes them capable of doing these things? They don’t have a neocortex, right?

Now, researchers have found a previously unknown arrangement of microcircuits in the avian brain that may be analogous to the mammalian neocortex. And in a separate study, other researchers have linked this same region to conscious thought.

The two papers are already being hailed as groundbreaking. “It’s often assumed that birds’ alien brain architecture limits thought, consciousness, and most advanced cognition,” says John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist and specialist on crows at the University of Washington, Seattle, who was not involved with either study. Researchers who have “demonstrated the cognitive abilities of birds won’t be surprised by these results,” he adds, “but they will be relieved.”

“This research confirms the old adage that looks can be deceiving,” Marzluff says. Although bird and mammalian brains “look very different, this study shows us they are actually wired in very complementary ways.”

So the next time someone calls you a “bird-brain”, thank that person for complimenting your intelligence.

Learn more details about this study over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: MabelAmber/ Pixabay)

The life of a galley slave was miserable, pulling an oar all day long to propel himself to a penal colony. In 1774, a French galley slave named Bazile complained of illness. He was under the care of two different doctors for about five weeks before he died. Not knowing what the problem was, Dr. Fournier did a post-mortem. He found the man's organs in such an odd state that he decided to wait for his colleagues to witness the complete autopsy.

A few hours later, more than fifty people – physicians, surgeons, students and others – were there to watch the autopsy. Dr Fournier began by pointing out that the stomach was an unusual shape, distorted into an elongated cuboid by its contents. Then he made an incision into the organ and removed a catalogue of items so extensive and bizarre that one of his assistants recorded it for posterity.

The man had ingested 54 foreign objects, some large enough alone to cause his death, yet he lived under medical observation for more than a month. See a list of what was found inside, and the investigation that followed, at Thomas Morris. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Bubzyyy)

Why do cats follow us into the bathroom? They love to sit in the cool porcelain sink. They are fascinated with flushing. They know you don't have anything better to do while sitting on the toilet than to pet the cat. And they are terrified of baths and showers. Is that it? Or could it be that the things humans do in the bathroom are just so strange to them that they have to watch?

(Image credit: BowChikaMeowMeow)

For whatever reason they do it, once you have a cat, you will not have privacy in the bathroom. See a roundup of 50 cute and funny pictures of cats invading their human's bathroom privacy in a ranked list at Bored Panda. 

Davie504 shows us once again that the bass guitar is not just a musical instrument; it can also be a game controller. Thanks to a code that his friend made, Davie was able to control his in-game character as he plays notes on his bass. Surprisingly, he even wins a few games. While everyone struggles in playing the game using either a mobile phone or a mouse and keyboard, he owns the game by his bass.

Now that’s the power of bass.

(Image Credit: Davie504/ YouTube)

If you had the hands of a LEGO minifig, what would they look like? Comic book artist James McKelvie directs us to this image. These flesh claws would actually be useful for precision tool work. We'll have to change the way keyboards are designed, though.

-via Super Punch

Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio was a #1 hit in 1995. For the upcoming Oktoberfest, YouTuber There I Ruined It (previously) turned it into a Bavarian polka. All it took was a couple of tubas, an accordion, some lederhosen, and lots of nerve. (via Laughing Squid)

What are Fall Guys? Some thought that they are humans inside a suit. They thought wrong.

Fall Guys developer Mediatonic has revealed an awful piece of concept art designed to show exactly what is going on underneath your character's suit.

And it is a horrifying revelation. They might look cute and jelly-like on the outside, but it’s a different story on the inside.

While an adult human is shown in the image below for scale, it is clear the skeleton within the Fall Guys' costume is a different species entirely.

The bent legs and long neck remind us of a chicken. But then we get to the head. Oh, the head.

Scary!

(Image Credit: Fall Guys/ Twitter)

Being around here on the planet millions of years even before the appearance of the first humans, it is not surprising that hippos know more about life than we do. Having been here on this planet longer than we have, these animals have realized many truths about life. Most of these truths, however, are hard-hitting truths, and we still might not be ready to hear them.

But if you’re ready, head over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

From afar, the squirrel sees the hazelnuts that Jeffrey Wang placed strategically inside the soundboard of a teeny-tiny grand piano. As the squirrel approached the tiny musical instrument, Wang, a musician and photographer, knew that his lure worked.

And as it reached its tiny claws inside to retrieve the snack, it was caught ‘playing’ the piano.

But the squirrel was not a beginner piano player, as...

Reliable sources say he [played] The Nutcracker.

Epic!

(Image Credit: SWNS/ Classic FM)

The player you control hits the tennis ball back to the other side of the court. Unfortunately, the ball goes out of bounds. And then you see the player blurt out a curse word on your screen.

When Super Tennis was originally released in Japan in 1991, the in-game tennis players would exclaim the world “s***”. The North American and UK versions, however, substituted “rats” instead.

Recently, however, the game was re-released on the Nintendo switch, but the Japanese version remains unchanged. The profanity is still there.

While some people in Japan might be aware that the word is profanity, many are not, and it does pop up in mainstream media. On a recent Japanese TV drama, for example, one character exclaimed the word.

Though, it’s still wild to see the word on kid-friendly Nintendo hardware.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: @FarmboyinJapan/ Twitter)

Tony Williams had no one to talk to. Ever since his wife Jo died of pancreatic cancer last year, Tony spent his days just sitting near the phone, hoping that it would ring. It didn’t.

Without any family nearby, Tony put two adverts in his local newspaper looking for a friend to chat to, but didn’t get any replies.

In a bid to find a pal to listen to music with, or just chat in the garden, Tony had business cards made to hand out when he went to the supermarket or out for a walk.

The 75-year-old physicist, however, did not receive any phone calls, despite his efforts. Finally, he decided to put up a poster on his window.

“I have lost Jo, my lovely wife and soul mate. I have no friends and family, no one to talk to. I find the unremitting silence 24 hours a day unbearable torture,” wrote Tony on the poster. “Can no one help me?”

Now, after spending a summer “waiting for the phone to ring,” Tony has been swamped by the responses.

He is enjoying chatting on the phone to strangers—now friends—from around the world,

People from America, Germany, Holland, Australia, Egypt, India, and Japan have been in touch inviting him on road trips to the U.S. or for an afternoon drinking gin and tonics.

[...]

“I’ve just been completely overwhelmed and am so thankful for it all,” he said.

Very wholesome.

(Image Credit: SWNS/ Good News Network)

Earlier this week, Reese Witherspoon posted a 24-year-old photo of her and Paul Rudd on her Instagram. “Wait a second… did #Paul Rudd and I take the “Selfie” in 1996?” she wondered on the post. But really, who invented the selfie?

It seems that other celebrities like Britney Spears have been taking selfies long before it was cool, and Bill Nye, along with Witherspoon, have been doing that long before the term was even coined. But as to who really invented the selfie, the answer to that is a bit complicated.

Many people have tried to claim the selfie as their own, with some photos even dating back to 1920. So who, in all this madness is actually responsible for the modern-day self portrait? Well, It turns out the old adage of "but first, let me take a selfie," is actually more like "But ere we go, permit thee to capture a self portrait" -- depending on how you define certain terms. 

According to The New York Times, one of the oldest "selfies" may span as far back as 1839, when Robert Cornelius, a Philadelphia-based chemist with a passion for photography, ran into the frame of a photo. "The first light Picture ever taken. 1839," he wrote on the back of the photograph. 10/10 titling, spot on... or was it...

But does a selfie require a camera to be called a “selfie”? Or does it just have to be a self-portrait?

By that logic, could one argue that painters with likely self-portraits like say, Jan Van Eyck in the 1400s are the art form's true forefathers? What about other drawings? Scribbles on ancient notepads?

What do you think?

(Image Credit: Robert Cornelius/ Wikimedia Commons)

The hearing aids available on the market are expensive. In the United States, a pair of hearing aids costs around $4,700 on average. Considering that the lowest salary in the US is around $1,250 a month, a person under that bracket would have to work for four months in order to buy a pair of hearing aids. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Researchers led by M. Saad Bhamla, have developed a proof-of-concept device which could lead to affordable hearing aids in the future.

The ultra-low-cost proof-of-concept device known as LoCHAid is designed to be easily manufactured and repaired in locations where conventional hearing aids are priced beyond the reach of most citizens. The minimalist device is expected to meet most of the World Health Organization's targets for hearing aids aimed at mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss. The prototypes built so far look like wearable music players instead of a traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids.

"The challenge we set for ourselves was to build a minimalist hearing aid, determine how good it would be and ask how useful it would be to the millions of people who could use it," said M. Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "The need is obvious because conventional hearing aids cost a lot and only a fraction of those who need them have access."

[...]

"We have shown that it is possible to build a hearing aid for less than the price of a cup of coffee," he said. "This is a first step, a platform technology, and we've shown that low cost doesn't have to mean low quality."

Of course, this affordable device offers fewer features than the expensive ones available, but Bhamla compares this issue to buying a basic and a luxury car.

Learn more details about this over at MedicalXpress.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit Craig Bromley/ MedicalXpress)

There is a lot of wind available here on land, and, as we all know, wind is a good source of renewable energy. This wind, however, is too weak to make wind turbine blades move. It appears that we could use this breeze to generate power, not through a wind turbine, but through this nanogenerator.

The method, presented September 23 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, is a low-cost and efficient way of collecting light breezes as a micro-energy source.

[...]

"You can collect all the breeze in your everyday life," says senior author Ya Yang of Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences. "We once placed our nanogenerator on a person's arm, and a swinging arm's airflow was enough to generate power."

A breeze as gentle as 1.6 m/s (3.6 mph) was enough to power the triboelectric nanogenerator designed by Yang and his colleagues. The nanogenerator performs at its best when wind velocity is between 4 to 8 m/s (8.9 to 17.9 mph), a speed that allows the two plastic strips to flutter in sync. The device also has a high wind-to-energy conversion efficiency of 3.23%, a value that exceeds previously reported performances on wind energy scavenging. Currently, the research team's device can power up 100 LED lights and temperature sensors.

Learn more about this nanogenerator over at TechXplore.

This is phenomenal!

(Image Credit: Xin Chen, Xiaojing Mu, and Ya Yang/ TechXplore)