Garra rufa - "doctor fish' - are now trendy in some fish pedicure places. The pedicuree dips their feet (see? I don't specify a gender or make any judgments, I am not Manny Pacquiao) into water containing the fish and the little critters exfoliate you by basically eating the dead skin from your toes.
Based on new fossil evidence, the age of the Rhine river is five million years older than previously believed.
The famous Rhine of song and legend flows through Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands on its way to the North Sea. The catchment area of the Rhine, around 1,200 kilometers of it, draws from Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Lichtenstein and Italy. As widely known as the river is, its original age has remained a science puzzle.
Men are generally more reluctant to try vegetarian products and a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that is influenced by a strong association of meat with masculinity.
"We examined whether people in Western cultures have a metaphoric link between meat and men" write the authors. And they concluded there was a strong cultural connection to meat - especially muscle meat, like steak.
Evolutionary psychologists would likely disagree, as do unbiased dietary scientists.
Perhaps it was the title:
‘Acquired preferences for piquant foods by chimpanzees.’ but whatever the reason,
Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found it very difficult to get his research paper published.
The work had been inspired by observations the professor had made whilst in Mexico, when he noticed that -
“…virtually everyone in a Mexican village over 5 or 6 years of age liked the burn of chili pepper, but that none of the animals in the village showed a preference for it, even though they ate the pepper daily as they consumed the leftovers of the day in the garbage”
Around election season, in whatever country you are in (assuming you have elections) you can tell True Believers in their earnest politics truly wish the other side could be labeled as having defective brains and genetics and therefore be cured - or at least sterilized.
Females like the bad boys when they are young, we all know that colloquially - and even more so when they are ovulating, say a group of social and evolutionary psychologists.
A group of studies says that salmon raised in man-made hatcheries can harm wild salmon through competition for food and habitat. Salmon, which survived millions of years of evolution, are in danger from...salmon.
The studies provide new evidence that fast-growing hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and habitat in the ocean as well as in the rivers where they return to spawn and even raises questions about whether the ocean can supply enough food to support future increases in hatchery fish while still sustaining wild salmon.
My very first mentor in cephalopod research was Eric Hochberg at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I think I was seventeen when he welcomed me into the museum's secret catacombs (at least, that's how I thought of them) of preserved specimens. Awe washed over me as I stared at shelves upon shelves of jarred octopuses.
Eric introduced me to the California pygmy octopus, Octopus micropyrsus, which would proceed to fascinate me for the rest of my undergraduate career. I saw more of them in jars than I ever did alive, though I kept doggedly digging through kelp holdfasts trying to find them. Reclusive little beasts.
A short while ago we carried a strange claim from a group of ethicists at Oxford. Not only should abortion be okay,
actual children should be aborted even after they are born.
They're ethicists so they can be dismissed rather quickly. Tomorrow they are just as likely to be arguing there should be no abortion at all if you can't abort newborns. Yet there is growing concern that the government doing more things for more people in the best interests of overall society is leading to a resurgence in the social authoritarian rationalizations that gripped the country (and really, the world) the last time progressives held any power.
Things would seem to be good in China. They are the only world economy not in a financial demilitarized zone, things are booming.
Yet more money is not making people there happier. They're actually less happy today than shortly after the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing was crushed by the military, says economist Richard Easterlin, researcher in "happiness economics" and namesake of the Easterlin Paradox.
