The science of anthropology is chock-full of theories that have become common knowledge, but at the same time, science is all about questioning and researching what we think we know. The prevailing theory about why men are on average taller than women is explained by natural selection: men who are taller are more successful in competition with other men, including competition in mating, and therefore more likely to pass their genes on. Biological anthropologist Holly Dunsworth tells us that could be an example of circular thinking. What if it's not all about men?

“We need to have more if we’re going to advance the sexual selection hypothesis for why men are taller than women,” she said. In fact, we could turn the narrative on its head: “Maybe dominance and competition are consequences of those size differences rather than the cause,” she said.

Dunsworth found a more direct explanation when she dug into the literature on bone biology and development, focusing in particular on how those relate to hormones. That’s when it became clear to her that “women are shorter than men because most of them have ovaries.”

Read what effect ovaries -and therefore estrogen- could have had in the evolutionary development of human sexual dimorphism at Quanta magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

You learn from your mistakes, and from the looks of these stories, children are doing a lot of learning. The picture above is from redditor StumpedatUserName, who tells the story of his kid who swallowed a SIM key. The next day, he demonstrated to his brother how it happened by swallowing a penny! Let's hope he learned not to do that again.  

Today my son drew in red marker all over his face then got scared that we’d be mad so he tried to hide it by wrapping toilet paper around his head like a mummy. Then he promptly ran into a wall and nearly knocked himself unconscious. A comedy of errors every day with this kid.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 26, 2019

Kids fumbling around trying to get a handle on life can give us some hilarious stories. For a laugh or two, read a bunch more of them at Bored Panda.

The Icknield Way my be the oldest road (or footpath) in England. It was there before the concept of opening land, and people have been traveling on it for thousands of years. So it should be worth saving, right? But what if it cut through your land? Surely you want to have some control over who walked through your property. And that's the conundrum Tom Scott explains here- the tension between the rights of people to travel the same paths they always have and the people who bought up that land and would just as soon have those historic walkways erased from maps.

Taking medicine into space hasn't been a big concern up to now, as even the longest human flights (to the moon) only took a few days. But a trip to Mars is expected to take three years, and that's just getting there. You can't just come home when you're sick, or wait for the next shuttle of supplies. Astronauts on a Mars mission could need any number of medications. However, every extra ounce of supplies taken comes at a cost, so figuring out which medicines are most likely to be needed is the subject of serious research. But the medicines most likely to be needed is just one factor. Drugs can affect the body differently in microgravity. And they'll need to stay stable.  

Longer missions bring more variables to how drugs work differently in space, including expiring faster. “Typically what we purchase and what is approved by the FDA or the equivalent European organizations has a 24 month shelf life,” Wotring said. Unfortunately, it takes about 36 months to get to Mars, which could be a major issue. It’s not like astronauts can get a new shipment of Vicodin.

“The stability of medications as a result of the spaceflight environment is largely unknown,” Bayuse said. “There has been some evidence that suggests that some medications may degrade [in space] before the listed manufacturer expiration date. Unfortunately, there have been some issues highlighted with those studies, such as not having ground controls to compare the results to, confounding variables and limited sample sizes hindering the reproducibility of the results.”

“Currently we do not have enough data to fully characterize what those results mean or how the care of our astronauts may need to be adjusted, if at all,” she added.

Scientists are busy gathering the data they'll need to stock an efficient, workable pharmacy for a Mars mission. Some experts tell about their research on drugs in space at Ars Technica. 

(Image credit: SpaceX)

When a scientist is restricted to his home, he will find something interesting to study. An entomologist is lucky in that respect, since insects are everywhere. Dr. Adrian Smith took at look at the globular springtails (which are technically not insects) that gathered on his garbage can. These bugs are spring-loaded, and can jump and spin in enormous arcs relative to their size. I had never even heard of a globular springtail before, but I will be keeping my eye out for them now. I hear they have a super-weird sex life, too. -via Digg

Margie’s Meatloaf Mecca is the talk of Athens, Ohio. The restaurant serves only meatloaf and strawberry milk. On the restaurant's website, proprietor Margie Pandora boasts of three kinds of meatloaf ("moist, dry and drier") and strawberry milk that uses a half cup of strawberry powder for each glass. A billboard in Athens says the restaurant is "coming soon," but the sign has been up since October, and there is no restaurant at the address. And there never will be.

OU alumni John Sammon and Steve Dimatteo are the geniuses behind this enormous prank. According to Sammon, his friend, Margie Pandora, got married in December, and he decided he wanted to surprise her when she came to her bachelor party in Athens.

“I do marketing, and a couple of my other friends who were in on this are in marketing as well,” Sammon said, adding he is now an owner of an advertising agency. “So we basically created a fake business and put up a billboard to kind of just have some fun with her ahead of the wedding because she’s our good friend.”

Sammon and Dimatteo worked together to come up with the most ridiculous business they could think of, and they decided on Margie’s Meatloaf Mecca, a restaurant that only sells ‘moist,’ ‘dry,’ and ‘drier’ meatloaf alongside strawberry milk.

“Because it’s in Athens, it’s like … it’s gotta be fake, but there’s also an element to it where it could be real, so that’s the fun of all of it,” Sammon said.

The pranksters only paid for one month of billboard space, but the advertising company sees no reason to take it down ...until they are completely out of inventory, we suppose. It certainly draws attention, and the website draws traffic. You can even buy merchandise with Margie’s Meatloaf Mecca on it, including face masks. Read the story of Athens' totally fictional restaurant at The Post. -via Metafilter

When Thomas Edison was only 22 years old, he was granted a patent for an electronic voting machine deigned for Congress to use. It was his first patent, and it's a good thing that its reception didn't discourage him from tinkering with other machines.    

Edison’s “electrographic vote-recorder” had the names of all the voters listed twice: in a “Yes” column on one side, and a “No” column on the other. When a person flipped a switch to indicate their vote, the machine would transmit the signal through an electric current and mark their name in the corresponding column, while keeping track of the total tally of votes on a dial. After everyone had voted, an attendant would place a sheet of chemically treated paper on top of the columns and press down on it with a metallic roller, imprinting the paper with the results.

The machine never gained any ground. Read about the reception it received in Congress at Mental Floss.

This little kitten is named Duck, because of the way she waddles. She waddles because she only has her two back legs. However, as she learned to balance her body and get around better, Duck started resembling a T-rex! Now she's a star, with an Instagram account named Purrasic Duck.

Hi! I’m Duck🦖
Im a two legged lady catosaur double amputee rescue and I’m heckin photogenic

That's just adorable.

Abraham Lincoln ushered our nation through extremely tumultuous times and was also known for a self-deprecating sense of humor. But there's always something new to learn about our 16th president.

But on top of all that, as with George Washington before him and the legendary Teddy Roosevelt after, it turns out Lincoln was also an exceptional, near unbeatable fighter who in his younger years would throw down with anyone who felt like they were man enough. In fact, he often found himself in such matches simply because of his reputation as an exceptional fighter and individuals wanting to test their mettle against him.

Standing at an imposing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 meters) tall and weighing around 210 pounds (95 kg) with a lean, muscular build, Lincoln was a formidable figure in his prime, noted by his peers as being, to quote one contemporary, “unnaturally strong”. While the future President shied away from manual labour in his youth, being more drawn to books and poetry, his rather humble beginnings ensured he didn’t really have a choice in the matter in the end. For example, he apparently had an axe put in his hands at the age of 8 and was expected to do his part for his family with it. As a result, by the time he reached adulthood, Lincoln had matured into a fine specimen of man, gaining a reputation for his prodigious strength.

We know Lincoln best from his presidency, when he was in his 50s and suffering some physical ailments, including depression. But the young Lincoln was pretty well-known for his wrestling matches, the most notorious of which you can read about at Today I Found Out.

Imagine being a zookeeper somewhere and the animal you are in charge of hasn't had a bowel movement in two years. You might be worried. For most critters, keepers would have tried a laxative before that much time passed, but it's really not all that unusual for the giant isopod, which has a very slow digestive process. On May 26, the caretakers of five giant isopods at the Toba Aquarium in Japan found fecal matter in the tank, for the first time since April of 2018. It was an occasion of joy.

Moreover, the feces was found to contain scales of a fish not served by the aquarium.

This means that the food which went into making this poop must have been consumed over seven years ago, before they came to the aquarium. While it isn’t clear exactly which isopod dropped the deuce, the finding is a breakthrough in the field of giant isopod regularity, and will hopefully trigger more detailed research into the subject.

Read more about the weird eating and pooping habits of giant isopods, and see some strange videos at SoraNews24. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Eric Kilby)

The sun is the source of all our energy, in one way or another. Could it also be the source of our eventual destruction? This is the latest apocalyptic question presented by Kurzgesagt. However, the earth has some reassuring protections. The giveaway in the title is "civilization," which doesn't mean human life, but the technology we depend on. We've gotten along without it before.

Redditor s1l4z_behr posted this picture asking others what this object is, and what it is used for. Do you have any idea? It's a pretty neat piece of engineering, and would be cool to have. It looks rather old.

When you give up, the answer is here. -via TYWKIWDBI

The general consensus 400 years later is that Isaac Newton was a very smart young man. During isolation from the plague in 1665-66, he discovered gravity and invented calculus. How bored do you have to be to invent calculus? But even very smart young men have their clunkers. When Newton returned to the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1667, he worked on battling the plague. And he came up with a recipe that will scare away the infection, and most patients, we presume.  

The first step in the cure is hanging a toad upside down in a chimney for three days. You’ll know your toad is ready when it pukes and dies; be careful to collect all the vomit, which Newton describes as containing “earth with various insects in it.”

Next, grind the toad into a powder and mix it with the vomit until you’ve formed several lozenges. Finally, place your toad vomit lozenges “about the affected area.”

However, he was a proponent of social distancing. Read about Newton's plague research at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Fir0002)

The ethereal sounds of Toto's biggest hit are rendered on two Tesla coils. While the song is faithfully reproduced, it does have a bit of a kazoo vibe. Maybe they could tune the Golden Gate Bridge to play this! -via Geeks Are Sexy

In 1870, Frederick "Fanny" Park and Ernest "Stella" Boulton were arrested in London while wearing women's clothing. While cross-dressing was not the main reason for their arrest, it was a minor charge tacked onto the prosecution, and it was the reason that their trial was a sensation in newspapers across England.

It was not just Boulton and Park that were on trial, however. Also facing the same conspiracy and incitement charges were Louis Hurt and John Stafford Fiske, the United State’s consul in Leith, Edinburgh. Three more had absconded – Martin Cumming, William Somerville and C.H. Thompson – meanwhile, another had died, the aristocrat Lord Arthur Clinton, whose love-letters to Ernest Boulton had been discovered by law enforcement. Clinton reportedly died from natural causes, but suicide has always been largely suspected.

Although seeking a guilty verdict for ‘conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence,’ the prosecution focused mainly on Boulton and Park’s cross-dressing, and brought in a variety of witnesses who had seen them dressed in women’s clothing.

The conspiracy and incitement charges were hard to prove, and even harder for journalists of the time to write about. Newspapers, like the prosecution, focused on the cross-dressing. However, no one really complained about Park and Boulton and their fashion choices. People who saw them agreed that they were well-behaved and did not bother anyone, so why were they on trial? Read about the sensational landmark trial of Park and Boulton at the British Newspaper Archive. -via Strange Company