A recent National Science Foundation Distinguished Lecture series featured Michael Goodchild, a world-renowned geographer and director of the University of California, Santa Barbara's Center for Spatial Studies. On November 17, Prof.

Science told us that vitamins are good. The polluted environment and the stress of modern living result in more free radicals than evolution has prepared us for; supplementing is fine. I swallowed it – literally! Science tells us that supposedly “natural” supplements are also just out of molecules and that I am an esoteric mystic if I look into any childish natural stuff.

In my post about the somewhat wretched dating website HotOrNot.com, I wrote about researchers' determination that all humans value the same standards of beauty.

Really, no matter if you're hot or plain, you recognize a set standard of hotness—your self-image is subject to your creative delusions, but there's an inviolable piece of humanity that knows the truth about others. And so the obvious question is what about poultry? Specifically, are turkeys turned on by hot models?

Today, of all days, I'm sure you can see the importance of this research.

We know the mouth is a useful orifice for venting our feelings: if we're "hot," speaking our anger can help us "cool off". And so the bigger the mouth, the better the cooling, right? Actually, yes.

When our brain gets hot, we cool it through the mouth, and the best way to cool through the mouth is by yawning.

Researchers showed this by cooking parakeets.

Okay, they stopped short of actually cooking them, but they found that when temperature increased, the parakeet yawn rate doubled (there was no description of researchers' yawn rates).