An apple didn’t fall on Newton’s head, lemmings do not commit mass suicide, and a duck’s quack actually does echo. Sorry.
Remember when Marty McFly desperately tried to warn the 1955 Doc Emmett Brown that in 1985, Doc was going to be gunned down by Libyan terrorists in Back to the Future? Doc insists that he doesn’t want to know about the future. How about you? Would you want know in advance when you are going to die? New research out of the UK can tell you the chances you’ll still be alive in five years based on your answers to some very simple questions.
Want to build more muscle, play sport more skillfully and heal better after injury, all without lifting a finger? I’m talking about <em>visualisation</em>: imagining your body doing something before you actually do it. Rather than an urban myth, it turns out there is lots of science behind the power of mental training.
Confession time: I adore chocolate. I’ll never forget a chocolate experience I had almost 20 years ago when I was given the opportunity to try some <em>Gymnema sylvestre</em>. It’s a herb that suppresses your ability to taste sweetness. And eating chocolate straight after the herb was rather distressing. The chocolate had virtually no taste and had the texture of wax, or maybe soap. I could feel it coating my tongue and teeth and I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to eat it again. That’s the power of our taste buds. But not all animals can taste the same flavours we can.
Did you ever ride the Gravitron? You're pinned to the wall by forces three times that of normal gravity. It’s fun, unsettling can even make you puke. But what happens if your body experiences extreme changes in gravity for long periods, as is the case for an astronaut?
Is there a smell that has the power to transport you back in time? For me just one whiff of an old-style canvas tent and I’m back camping with my family as a young kid. There are other evocative odours too. The smell of bread dough rising in the sun and a bonfire with damp plane tree leaves…
Remember when Keanu Reeves experienced déjà vu and was told it indicated a glitch in the matrix? Not restricted to Hollywood sci-fi, in fact almost all of us have had the disconcerting feeling that what is happening now has happened before (even though it hasn’t). There are heaps of scientific theories, but no consensus as to why we have these experiences.
Did your parents tell you to turn off the TV and play outside? Perhaps they threatened that you were going to end up needing glasses if you didn’t stop playing computer games. It turns out your folks may have been right after all, although not quite for the reason they thought.
Have you got a big birthday coming up, one that ends in a zero? And have you made any major life decisions recently? Although we measure time using a continuous scale, research has shown that in the year before a milestone birthday, people are more likely to reflect on their lives and make significant changes.
What were you doing at 3:19am Tuesday 27 January? That’s when a huge asteroid passed within 1.2 million kilometres of our planet. Fortunately that’s about three times the distance to the moon so we weren’t in any danger. But how often do rocks from space actually collide with Earth? And what happens when they do?
Most animals do it. You’ve been doing it since before you were even born. And it’s quite likely looking at these photos has made you do it now. Yawning. But why do we yawn and why is yawning so contagious?
Dr Jen Martin 