Apparently there was a whole thing on TikTok about mirrors being able to see behind a piece of paper. People emphatically stating mirrors can’t when its a little more nuanced. Mirrors break our brains.
Category: Science
Do anything related to science biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc
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Dog college
Dog college sounds fun.
“The most important thing is they’re doing what they love,” says Ruth Desiderio, the center’s volunteer and outreach coordinator leading the public tour I’ve joined in on. The dogs, she explains, indicate their interests and aptitude through apparent eagerness and ambivalence, and are allowed to proceed accordingly. If a dog relishes the challenge of sniffing out a hidden human, but reacts with fear to loud, sudden banging sounds–perhaps they’re destined for wilderness over urban search and rescue. If they love to smell and be rewarded, but crave routine, then a long-term post in the lab could be the perfect fit.
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Swallowed by a whale
Off the coast of Chile, a kayaker was swallowed (briefly) by a whale,
“My guess is that the whale was just as surprised as the kayaker,” Dr. Jooke Robbins, director of the Humpback Whale Studies Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts, wrote in an email.
Humpback whales feed by quickly lunging through a school of fish with their mouths wide open, then straining the water out through their baleen, the fringed plates they have inside their mouths instead of teeth.
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The brain washes itself during sleep
Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep.
Scientists think sleep is the brain’s rinse cycle, when fluid percolating through the organ flushes out chemical waste that accumulated while we were awake. But what propels this circulation has been uncertain. A study of mice, reported today in Cell, suggests regular contractions of blood vessels in the brain, stimulated by the periodic release of a chemical cousin of adrenaline, push the fluid along.
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Scent Makes a Place
Sniffing, searching, naming: These actions enable us to more thoughtfully engage with our environment.
Katy Kelleher connects how scent shouldn’t be discounted as one of our senses. Scent makes a place, both physical as to where we are in the world at a particular time and the emotion and memories it evokes. With the background as a perfumer, they illustrate the importance unique smells brought to different cultures. Historically, language has had difficulty accurately translating or describing smell despite the power it can evoke.
Helen Keller called our sense of smell the “fallen angel.”
“It is difficult to put into words the thing itself,” she wrote. “There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approximate phrase and metaphor.”