The placebo effect is a really interesting phenomenon. Some people given placebo drugs would experience effects similar to what real drugs would give them. This phenomenon could not be attributed to the placebo drug, because the placebo drug has no therapeutic value, and so this phenomenon might be happening because of a person’s belief that the treatment was real. But how strong can a placebo effect be? It can be so strong that it could affect your consciousness, just like what psychedelic drugs do, according to a new study from McGill University.

Indeed, 61% of the participants in the experiment reported some effect after consuming the placebo.

“The study reinforces the power of context in psychedelic settings. With the recent re-emergence of psychedelic therapy for disorders such as depression and anxiety, clinicians may be able to leverage these contextual factors to obtain similar therapeutic experiences from lower doses, which would further improve the safety of the drugs,” said Jay Olson, a Ph.D. candidate in McGill’s Department of Psychiatry and the lead author on the research paper that was recently published in Psychopharmacology.

Of course, this kind of effect would only be possible if you set the mood right. More details on how they conducted the study over at Neuroscience News.

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

It would seem that we can “turn back time” on already old cells as researchers from Stanford University of Medicine found out that old cells can go back to a more youthful state when they are “induced to briefly express a panel of proteins involved in embryonic development.” This method could also potentially give us back our youthful strength. At least, that’s what happened in elderly mice.

The researchers also found that elderly mice regained youthful strength after their existing muscle stem cells were subjected to the rejuvenating protein treatment and transplanted back into their bodies.

The proteins, known as Yamanaka factors, are commonly used to transform an adult cell into what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. Induced pluripotent stem cells can become nearly any type of cell in the body, regardless of the cell from which they originated. They've become important in regenerative medicine and drug discovery.

The study found that inducing old human cells in a lab dish to briefly express these proteins rewinds many of the molecular hallmarks of aging and renders the treated cells nearly indistinguishable from their younger counterparts.

More details about this amazing study over at Science Daily.

(Image Credit: qimono/ Pixabay)

Timex is known for producing high-quality watches, and offering these watches at an affordable price.

How are they able to produce high-quality watches? What’s it like inside their factory? In this video, take a look at how things are in a Timex production facility in Cebu, Philippines. See how a watch is formed in its full glory.

Via The Awesomer

(Video Credit: Timex/ YouTube)

Tranquilizer darts are quite useful in that they allow us to sedate large and/or wild animals without getting dangerously close to them. They are also very handy in movies when needed. But they don't really work the way you see in film. Here's the real story about tranquilizer darts, which actually do hit humans from time to time. -via Digg

On the internet, you can find recipes for all kinds of homemade weirdness. But when it comes to ice cream, Sato Shigeaki probably thought of it first. His sardine ice cream recipe is already 26 years old.

In 1994, the Japanese Patent Office granted Sato Shigeaki a patent for sardine-flavored ice cream. In his patent application, Shigeaki explained that his intention was to to promote the fishing industry by encouraging children who don't like fish to eat them. He also provided the basic recipe for his sardine ice cream. It involved cooking the sardines with onions, soybeans, rice wine, and walnut paste. Then adding this concoction to a base of chocolate ice cream.

It turns out that Shigeaki was in the business of making ice cream to promote businesses that weren't ice cream. He also patented ice cream flavors that incorporated trees, beer, wine, and even silk! Read about Shigeaki's odd ice creams at Weird Universe.

One of the things that seems very weird in Star Wars is the planet Tatooine, which has two suns. Binary suns? How could a planet revolve around two suns? The most logical explanation is that the planet moves orbitally in the same plane, or disk, that the suns use to revolve around each other. Binary stars have been found in the Milky Way galaxy, some with planetary discs in their revolutionary plane, but others are much stranger. Some revolve perpendicular to their planetary disks, and one system has four stars!  

The stars in the binary system Ea and Eb are both low mass, about 0.93 and 0.28 times the mass of the Sun. They orbit each other in just 19 days on a mildly elliptical orbit, and are surrounded by a lovely disk of gas and dust about 4 billion kilometers in radius (a disk that orbits both stars in a binary like that is called a circumbinary disk).

Careful examination of the data showed that the plane of the stars' orbits and the plane of the disk match to within a few degrees. In fact, looking at other short-period binaries they found the same thing.

But when they looked at binary stars that orbit farther out, the disk is highly tilted. An earlier paper from a different team of astronomers, for example, looked at a different young system, called HD 98800. This too is what's called a hierarchical quadruple system, with two pairs of binary stars orbiting each other. The inner pair (HD 98800 Ba and Bb) has a ring of dust surrounding it, but that ring is perpendicular to the binary orbital plane. The orbital period of that binary is 315 days, much longer than UZ Tau E. Again, the same is true for several other system they examined.

But back to Tattoine, which is more mundane than we realized in 1977. If the planet's revolution is circumbinary, its residents would see a solar eclipse about every day (although they shouldn't look at it). Read about both real and fictional binary and multiple star systems at Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: Disney/Lucasfilm)

Most Star Wars geeks could retell the story of the first Star Wars movie pretty easily, possibly adding analysis along the way. But Liam's girlfriend Jessie has only seen the movie once, about three years ago. She recalls some things in great detail, but loses track of the overall scheme of things rather often. At least she remembers the character's names. Liam animated her account with appropriately stupid visuals. -via Geekologie

Have you ever wondered what frogs’ skulls look like? Well, wonder no more, and prepare to be amazed, as their skulls look like mythic dragon heads!

Scientists recently highlighted the diversity of frog skulls in a series of incredible images, part of a new study investigating skull evolution and function in armored frogs.

In these frogs, skulls can be shield-shaped or exceptionally wide; they may be pocked by grooves or adorned with pointy bits that may provide extra protection against being eaten, the researchers reported.

Check out the photos over at Live Science.

(Image Credit: Florida Museum/ Image by Edward Stanley/ Live Science)

The GameBoy Advance has had a lot of amazing and unforgettable games. But amidst all of these amazing titles stands a forgotten Hideo Kojima game — a unique and intriguing, and fun game titled, Boktai: The Sun Is In Your Hand.

The concept is as indulgent as a Kojima game could ever be: you play as young vampire hunter Django (named after a famed spaghetti Western hero) who fights immortals with a solar-powered gun. Like your namesake, you drag bosses into a solar pile driver in a coffin.

So what makes this game unique? Embedded in the cartridge is a solar sensor for, well, detecting sunlight, and that’s what makes the game unique: actual, real-life sunlight affects your gameplay experience, as sunlight affects in-game events. For example… 

Some indoor levels have skylights that let the light in, for instance, a feature you could only discover if sunlight was striking the cartridge's solar sensor...

Some puzzles required you to track your position by the direction of Django's shadow—which could only be seen under real-world sunlight. Others required you to bend the fourth wall by flipping your GBA upside-down to see through illusions. Some sections even required you to block sunlight from hitting the cartridge with your hand in order to deactivate traps or trick bosses.

This would mean that you need to play the game at daytime if you want to have that full, gameplay experience. That, or you could just cheat the sensor with a backlight.

It indeed was a unique game. Unfortunately, unlike other Hideo Kojima games, this lacked in popularity for many reasons, and eventually became a forgotten classic. But for people who have had the chance to play this game in their childhood, like Jean-Karlo Lemus’s story in Ars Technica, this was an unforgettable Hideo Kojima game.

(Image Credit: Konami/ Ars Technica)

A winery in Maryland has gotten creative with their curbside wine delivery. Stone House Urban Winery has enlisted the help of 75-pound brindle boxer named Soda Pup. The winery believes it is a way to spread joy and wine all at the same time.

“We’ve had people call in just specifically to have soda pup bring wine out to them. people who have never even been here before,” Yata adds.

It’s bringing people together but not too close together.

Yata jumped online and found a nifty little backpack. They pack the wine in the pockets and a treat in there so Pup gets something out of it.

Don't worry, Soda Pup isn't carrying too much on his back. His little backpack only holds two bottles at a time. His owner says they are also giving him plenty of breaks.

Via - WJLA

Photo - ABC7 File Photo

Odd Tinkering once again amazes us with his restoration skills, this time by restoring a broken iPhone 4S that he bought on Ebay for only $5.

“I haven’t worked much with such “new tech” or phones so this was an interesting and challenging restoration,” he says so in the video description. Despite his lack of experience with these modern phones, he was able to successfully restore this broken iPhone.

While the video is mostly disassembly and cleaning, it still is fun to watch.

(Video Credit: Odd Tinkering/ YouTube)

People all over are working hard to keep themselves occupied and bring a smile to others at a safe social distance. In Seattle, Cristie Kearny converted her little free library box into a Peep Show! It's not at all x-rated, but a diorama made with marshmallow Peeps. The first show is "Mary Peepins," a candy takeoff on the Disney movie. Kearny plans to change it out and stage a different movie diorama every week. See more pictures of it at Boing Boing.

Africa contains many fossil remains of species that could be our ancestors -or could be evolutionary branches of ancestral species that didn't lead directly to Homo sapiens. The more species are found, the muddier the picture gets. Two-million-year-old fossils of Australopithecus africanus and another that could be Paranthropus robustus lived in the same area a few hundred thousand years apart. Both seem to have walked upright on two legs by their anatomy. But more recent tests show that the slightly older fossil did walk upright, while the newer one appears to have lived in trees, even though it was built for walking.   

It's hard to say exactly what that means, since we don't know the younger hominin's species for sure, or exactly where it fit into the family tree. However, it definitely spent some time in actual trees, hundreds of thousands of years after other hominins in the same area had taken up bipedalism. And two species which had clearly evolved for similar ways of life still practiced very different behavior. That means that our early cousins were a much more diverse group, both physically and behaviorally, than we've realized until fairly recently.

The researchers say they would like to CT scan the femurs of other early hominin specimens to help shed more light on how they moved in life. They also hope to study other bones, to better understand what their internal structure can tell us about what hominins did, rather than just what kinds of selective pressure their ancestors faced.

The real story here is how they determined the difference. While the fossil bones look alike, deep scans revealed where the hominin's lifestyle put stress on those bones. Read how they figured this out at Ars Technica. 

(Image credit: Georgiou et al. 2020)

Blood doping is a method which aims to boost a person’s athletic performance by increasing the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in the bloodstream.

Athletes can use this technique to fuel their muscles with more oxygen-carrying red blood cells—for example, by receiving a transfusion.

While blood doping (which is banned in professional sports, by the way) is an artificial method in humans, there are many animals who can dope naturally.

… pigs, marine fish and diving seals can boost their blood oxygen levels by 40 to 60 percent in physically demanding situations…

While this is already an impressive feat, there is an animal who dopes on an entirely different level. Introducing the bald notothen, the Antarctic fish which can increase its blood oxygen levels by over 200 percent.

Like most fish native to Antarctica, the bald notothen’s blood contains antifreeze proteins that help it withstand extreme cold. Yet these proteins, along with red blood cells (RBCs), can make blood viscous and hard to circulate. Some Antarctic fish compensate by eliminating RBCs altogether, absorbing oxygen directly from the water via gills and skin as they passively await prey. Bald notothens, however, actively swim below surface ice to chase krill and other crustaceans while dodging predators such as penguins and seals. For this behavior, “you need to supply [more] oxygen to the muscles,” says Michael Axelsson, a cardiovascular physiologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and co-author of the new study, which was published in January in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Now that’s DOPE!

(Image Credit: Paulo Oliviera/ Alamy / Scientific American)

In just one minute, Pakistani martial artist Muhammad Rashid was able to break 256 walnuts using his elbow. In doing so, Rashid has successfully broken the previous Guinness World Record of 229 walnuts set by Prabhakar Reddy, an Indian martial artist.

Rashid is a multiple record-holder, having previously set Guinness records for breaking walnuts with his head, as well as smashing beverage cans with his elbow and coconuts with his head.

I’ll just use a hammer, thank you very much.

(Image Credit: Guinness World Records)