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(Image credit: Flickr user Andrey)

Some of Guéguen’s Attempts to Observe the Effects of Women Wearing Red
by Alice Shirell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Nicolas Guéguen researches the effects of women who wear red on men. He does research on other subjects too, many of them focusing on the effect of women’s appearance, while hitchhiking or waitressing, on men’s behavior. Guéguen is based at Université de Bretagne-Sud, France. Here are a few of Guéguen’s women-wearing-red studies.

Guéguen and Red Clothed Women
“Color and Women Attractiveness: When Red Clothed Women Are Perceived to Have More Intense Sexual Intent,” Nicolas Guéguen, The Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 152, no. 3, 2012, pp. 261-265. Guéguen explains:

Research has shown that with some nonhuman primates, red is associated with greater sexual attractiveness of females, and recent studies found that a woman with red clothes increases attraction behavior in men. However, the mechanism that explains such behavior was not studied. In this experiment, we hypothesized that men overestimated women’s sexual intent when wearing red clothing. Participants evaluated attractiveness and the sexual intent of a woman presented in a photograph wearing a red, a blue, a green or a white teeshirt. It was found that men evaluated higher sexual intent in the red clothing condition. It was also found that perception of the woman’s sexual intent was not moderated by attractiveness rating.

Six years ago, Annie Correal found a discarded photo album on her Brooklyn street. It contained snapshots of a black couple in New York in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, but the notes gave little information as to their identities. She held on to the album, but as time passed, Correal knew that time was running out on finding who the pictures belonged to.

Gentrification was transforming the neighborhood — soon there might be no one left who recognized the world in these pictures. And the album was literally falling apart in my hands. If I was ever going to try to get to the bottom of it, this was the time.

I decided to uncover its story. I thought it would be simple. But chasing the album would become something of a journey, one that would take me far from present-day Brooklyn to the Jim Crow South, from a remote island in the Pacific to the packed tenements of Harlem, before returning me to Lincoln Place at another moment of great change.

Through knocking on doors, searching public records, and traveling to North Carolina, Correal pieced together the story of Etta Mae and Isaiah Taylor and their experiences in World War II, Harlem nightlife, and the changing demographics of New York City. She even found out why the album was thrown out. Read about the project and the people she found at the New York Times. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jesse Williams)

hey psst, wanna buy some cubes

Serbian artist Tomislav Jagnjić creates lovely digital artwork of science fiction and fantasy scenes, and then gives them hilariously subversive titles.

yo bro is it safe down there in the woods? yeah man it's cool

You can see more of these at his web gallery. Hovering over an image will give you its title. I think there's an implied permission to use these images from the Facebook comments. 

Leo Olten Dunkelberger Tomislav, do you have a site that sells prints or anything? :D

Tomislav Jagnjić no man just download it from artstation and print it who gives a sh*t :D or pm me and say which one u want in hi-res and i'll send it to ya

-via io9

Last fall, a weasel failed to read the warning signs and crossed a fence guarding CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The stone marten was immediately zapped with 18,000 volts, and the incident shut down the collider temporarily. Now the corpse of that hapless creature is on display in an exhibition called Dead Animal Tales at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The exhibit looks at animals that died due to circumstances caused by humans, one way or another. Kees Moeliker is the director of the museum.  

The stone marten is the latest dead animal to go on display at the museum. It joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armoured, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defence did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week.

It was another unfortunate incident that spurred Moeliker to establish the exhibition in the first place. In 1995, a male duck flew into the glass facade of the museum and died on impact, a fate that did not deter another male duck from raping the corpse for 75 minutes. The incident ruffled feathers in the community but earned Moeliker a much-coveted IgNobel prize when he published his observations . “I was the one and only witness,” Moeliker said. “I’m a trained biologist but what I saw was completely new to me.”

Yes, that's where you know the name Kees Moeliker. Read more about the Dead Animal Tales exhibit at The Guardian. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Kees Moeliker)

The Soviet Union produced millions vehicles every year in the 1950s and '60s. In a collection of advertisements for them, there are some that border on fine art, like the art deco poster above. Then there are some that just invite mockery, like ads of the era from all over the world. Consider this ad for the Ukrainian LuAZ 969-M.

It's supposed to evoke an image of the hardy outdoorsman, as he drives his LuAZ into the wilderness for a day of hunting. The wild boar is obviously pasted in, but they carved him a path in the snow to indicate his location. Or did they? The model, who isn't what you'd expect of a typical hunter of the Soviet Union, has no idea where to point the gun. Maybe he didn't really want to field dress a boar that day. You'll find a wide variety of styles in the roundup of Soviet car ads at Vintage Everyday. -via the Presurfer

Evidence of alcoholic beverages goes back at least 9,000 years, and we may eventually find evidence even older. Even before that, our primate ancestors were attracted to fermented fruit for its good qualities: calories, easy digestion, and the good feeling it gave them. Historians once considered alcohol as just another consumable, but it's becoming more clear that alcohol was one of the driving forces behind a lot of developments and upheavals of human civilization.

Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities—for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”

Alcohol had a big role in the rise of agriculture and communities, then trade, then war. Read what we we know about the role of alcohol in human history at National Geographic. -via Digg

(Image credit: Brian Finke/National Geographic)

When the world collapses around us, how will we continue the everyday housekeeping chores of our normal lives? A sense of normalcy will be important when you're battling giant insects, homicidal robots, sulfurous fire, and/or zombies. Tom Gauld gives us tips on keeping your home decluttered and efficient in various post-apocalyptic scenarios. See the rest of the series at The New Yorker. -via Everlasting Blort

Joel and Ethan Coen directed a Super Bowl ad that's being touted as a sequel to the 1969 movie Easy Rider. The bikers are a bit older… actually, they're a lot older, but some things never change, like the Steppenwolf song.

(YouTube link)

Yep, definitely a sequel, as we find out what became of Peter Fonda 48 years later. Looks like he did well. Let's see: Coen Brothers, Peter Fonda, Steppenwolf, Super Bowl. Can you imagine how much this ad cost? Eh, Mercedes can afford it. -via Tastefully Offensive

Photoshop artist MixerOfMeows got a strange request at 6:47 in the morning. A friend needed a very specific, but totally weird, image as soon as possible. Did he ask why? No, he got the specifications and went to work. You can see what he worked with, and the finished image here. No, we still don't know why the friend needed this specific image. I'm sure there's a great story behind it.  -via The Daily Dot

Before Mrs. Miller and William Hung, and even before Florence Foster Jenkins became famous for singing badly, there were the Cherry Sisters: Ella, Lizzie, Addie, Effie, and Jessie Cherry. While mediocre talent is soon forgotten, the Cherry Sisters were so bad that they found a place in history.

The trope of an angry crowd throwing vegetables at a bad performance may have come from the Cherry Sisters. Previous acts were surely pelted with produce before the Cherrys, but they seem to have been famous for it. When they first performed their show, Something Good, Something Sad, in their hometown of Marion, Iowa, audiences were polite, as it was mainly their friends and neighbors in attendance. But as soon as they took their act on the road, it was clear at least one half of that title was misleading. “Spectators routinely laughed, heckled, catcalled, booed, and threw vegetables,” according to their Wikipedia page. One audience member sprayed a fire extinguisher directly into one of the women’s faces to stop the show. They eventually began performing behind a wire mesh to avoid being hit by projectiles (although they later denied ever doing so).

Strangely the group soldiered on, and was booked for various tours and even a Broadway theater. The A.V. Club found the Cherry Sisters at Wikipedia and did some more research on this unconventional vaudeville act. Read about them, and how their refusal to give up led to a refinement in libel law.

Darth Vader leads his minions in a little soft-shoe to the tune of the Imperial March. This toy from Japan is called the Star Wars Space Opera “Pop’n Step” Toys. At the touch of a button, you can put the stresses of the real world aside and watch the villains from a galaxy far, far away dance while you laugh.

(YouTube link)

There are other characters and configurations available. They apparently sync up when you snap them together.

(YouTube link)

I wanted these for about five minutes, then I realized it was much easier to just watch them on YouTube. -via Geeks Are Sexy

When you're trying to goof off at work, you might want to keep your strategy to yourself. Sharing with a coworker could backfire on you, especially when that coworker is more clever than you are! This comic is from Jeff Lofvers at Don't Hit Save.

Happy New Year! In China, January 28th ushers in the Year of the Rooster. The Lunar New Year Festival, or Spring Festival, begins today and runs through February 15th. It is expected to be, as usual, the largest migration of humans of the year, as around 3 billion trips will be made, mostly to hometowns.

People born in the Year of the Rooster are "brave, responsible and punctual." Huy Fong Foods founder David Tran was born in the Year of the Rooster 72 years ago, which is why there's a rooster on the Sriracha sauce bottle.

Mental_floss has a list of things you might want to learn about the Chinese New Year.

The above image is fromwebcomic artist Dami Lee, who is spending the holiday with her family in Korea.

Alaska's Lituya Bay had been used for many years as a temporary shelter for boats traveling the eastern Pacific, but no one lives there permanently. In fact, the local Tlingit people told the legend of a monster at the mouth of the bay who shook the ocean to send huge waves. They knew what was going on. The unique geography of the bay amplifies waves to a terrifying extent. Travelers were there when the largest tsunami wave in recorded history blew through Lituya Bay in July of 1958. It reached about a third of a mile up the shore, destroying everything in its way. It started with a magnitude 8 earthquake.

The earth shook for anywhere from one to four minutes—eyewitness reports varied. When the fault finally came to rest, the foamy water of Lituya Bay settled back into something resembling its ordinary lazy waves, and a new quiet blanketed the bay. Despite the cessation of shaking, Orville and Mickey Wagner on the Sunmore—the boat headed for the bay exit—continued their retreat toward the open ocean.

After a minute or so of apparent calm, a crash described as “deafening” rattled the atmosphere. One of the unnamed mountain peaks that stood at the inland end of Lituya Bay had broken off, dropping ninety million tons of rock into the water with the force equivalent to a meteor strike. The resulting impact shook loose other rocks on the slopes, and chunks of adjacent glaciers, and these plunged into the water practically all at once. Millions of cubic yards of displaced water heaved upward and formed a wave traveling outward at about 110 miles per hour (180 km/h).

Within about a minute, the approaching wave became visible to the boats still at anchor, and the occupants looked on in awe as the wide skyscraper of water traversed the length of the bay towards them. When it reached Cenotaph Island another minute or so later, the proportions of the wave became clear. The center of the wave was almost as high as the highest point on the island, 300 feet in the air. On the two opposite shores, the plowing saltwater reached over 1,700 feet (over 500 meters) onto land, twisting even the most massive trees from their roots and scraping the bedrock nearly clean.

Read the story of the Lituya Bay megatsunami, gleaned from eyewitness accounts and the geologic record, at Damn Interesting. -via Digg

Thursday was Australia Day, and as always, there were plenty of summertime fun celebrations. In Canberra, this epic circular slip 'n' slide makes us all wish we lived Down Under. Jake River Henderson Fraser caught this video.

(YouTube link)

Redditor owenob1 tells us more about the contraption.

I WAS AT THIS EVENT!

EDIT: Phil the creator will be on Today Show, Sunday morning.

Some information:

This is an annual event with a new machine each year. I'm told this is the 4-5th year.

It took about 7 days to design and engineer (and built).

This was made from scratch and not actually a Hills Hoist.

The entire centre pipe is pumped full of water to provide to the hoses.

The rig has 3 speeds, this is number 1... the others were deemed too unsafe.

There is an operator who sits and awaits a thumbs up.

Ordinary dishwashing liquid is used of the black sheeting.

When you fall off it hurts - ALOT.

Meanwhile, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere can stay inside in our winter pajamas and dream of such fun. -via reddit