SAM MCDOUGLE
Outrageous Beetle Sperm is the Result of the Complicated Evolution of Sex
Dawn Higginson and her colleagues looked closely several species of beetle, and they all had outrageous sperm.
Scorpions are Aerodynamically Tuned to Beat the Desert
You may think of scorpions in terms of their offensive weapons - that is, the badass stinger of your wildest nightmares – but they’re also evolved in the defense department too. "New research":http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/la203942r, published...
An App for Fighting the Voices in Your Head
A research team in Norway is in the early stages of developing a mobile app designed to help schizophrenics train their brain to ignore the ultra-realistic, often unsettling inner voices characteristic of severe cases of the disease.
Making Sense of Why Mushroom Trips Make No Sense
Cognition is a sense that, when functioning properly, makes sense of things so we can navigate the changing world. Go on a trip without a navigator, and weird shit is going to happen.
No Matter What Twitter Says, You've Got No More Than 150 Friends
There's a popular concern that having, say, a thousand friends on Facebook or ten thousand followers on twitter, implies a new age of humans sociality that values quantity over quality. This line of thought has always reeked of bullshit to me. To...
How to Create a Santa Who Can Actually Fit in Chimneys
How skinny would Santa Claus have to be to fit down America’s smallest fireplace chimneys?
Parasites, Drivers of Our Evolution, Pushed Us to Have Sex
The Cold War looks like a pillow fight compared to the ancient arms race between humans and the vicious microbes that mate and feed inside them.
Despite Their Giant Breasts, Messed-Up Modern Turkeys Can't Mate
The farm-bred modern super-turkey is a delicious Frankenstein, an oversized man-made beast.
New Research Shows That It's Good To Be Overconfident, Delusional
Self-delusion and overconfidence are usually thought of as negative character traits, falling under the general umbrella of "douchebagery." But, like other natural traits of _Homo Douchebagis sapiens_, such as self-awareness and rationality...
We Still Don't Know How to Talk About the Ethics of Human-Animal Hybrids
In ancient Greece, the word “Chimera” referred to a monstrous beast with the body of a lion, a tail that was a snake, and a goat head growing out of its spine. In genetics, chimeras are any animals that have working genes from two distinct zygotes - in...
Meet Karakuri Ningyō, Japan's First Robot
“Karakuri ningyō” roughly translates as “Mechanism Dolls” (which is a decent Industrial rock band name) though the word “karakuri” can also mean “to take a person by surprise.” Karakuri ningyō (or just “Karakuri” for short) were the real-life...
Kind of Like a Roomba, But For a Nuclear Disaster
If Watson is the artificial intelligence on the proverbial "front lines" of synthesized knowledge, Packbots are robots on the real "front lines."