Most young kids do it. Michael Jordan was famous for it. And it’s quite possible you do it too. What am I talking about? Sticking your tongue out when you concentrate. It’s incredibly common and over the years there have been a variety of theories attempting to explain the habit. Recent research supports the suggestion it’s connected to the way humans evolved spoken language. A quirky tongue? Next time you have the opportunity, watch a […]
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.
When I was sixteen, I spent a year living and going to school in Germany. Among other things, I fell for the German language. One of my all-time favourite German words is <em>Ohrwurm</em>; translation: earworm!
Water: it covers 97% of the planet, makes up almost two-thirds of each of us, and is a requirement for life as we know it. But did you know too much of it can kill you?
You've suffered a gunshot wound. You're losing blood and your organs are failing fast. Would you let doctors drain your blood and chill your body to 10 ºC, entering a state of clinically-dead, suspended animation, to buy precious time that may save your life? This radical technique is being trailed by a group of doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania.
Every second, 26,000 cups of coffee are drunk around the world. That’s more than two billion cups of coffee consumed every day. Yet most of us think of coffee as unhealthy. If coffee is your guilty pleasure you’ll be pleased to hear you can forget the guilt: coffee is good for you.
A couple of weeks ago I asked students in one of my classes whether they were early risers or night owls. Almost all identified as one or the other. But is either being up at dawn or burning the midnight oil simply habit, or is something else going on?
Why call a valued assistant a ‘right-hand man’? Why does an awkward dancer have ‘two left feet’? And why, in times gone by, were left-handers thought to be possessed by the devil? Throughout the ages left-handers have been stigmatised and persecuted. But it turns out ‘handedness’ is determined before you even leave the womb.
We’ve known for a while that having certain facial features will lead people to judge you as either trustworthy or untrustworthy. And in fact our brains make those complex judgments much faster than we could have ever imagined. Now scientists have worked out how we do it.
Dr Jen Martin 