It is illegal for physicians to determine the sex of a fetus in India.

It is illegal for physicians to determine the sex of a fetus in India.

India has a long history of preferring sons to daughters. The distribution of women versus men in society is heavily weighted towards males, even with the efforts of lawmakers to even out this distribution. It is really interesting that among higher classes this preference towards males tends to be more pronounced than in lower classes. 

Because of this unequal distribution, lawmakers have made it illegal for India physicians to figure out the sex of fetuses in their mother’s womb. The hope is that without parents knowing the sex of their child, they’ll be less likely to abort a girl and carry it full term, helping to even out the population. 

However, many physicians continue to offer services to tell the gender of an unborn child, despite the risks. For many doctors, the payout for offering to find the gender of a fetus is greater than the risk of being caught and punished by the government. 

The actual extent of this law breaking is more or less unknown, but it’s thought to be very common. The business of finding genders and aborting females is thought to be worth more than $100 million in India.

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Cheetahs are almost all genetically identical.

Cheetahs are almost all genetically identical.

Talk about twins! Cheetahs have very little genetic difference from one another. Researchers tested the genetics in the red blood cells of 55 cheetahs, both in the wild and at various zoos. There are 47 enzyme indicators that are generally used to examine the genetics of humans or other animals.

All of them gave identical results for every cheetah. There were also 200 total proteins checked and they all matched in all the cheetahs. Cheetahs are an endangered species with an estimated population of 1,500 to 25,000 cheetahs worldwide. It is this genetic uniformity that probably contributes to their status as endangered species. 

At some point in the past, cheetahs must have gone through a population bottleneck. This reduced genetic diversity, which in turn affected their ability to reproduce. In captivity, cheetahs have a very low reproduction rate, which was the reason for the genetic research in the first place. 

What they found was that cheetahs probably don’t have much better reproduction rates in the wild either. When genetic diversity goes down, the amount of sperm and viability of it goes down, therefore slowing reproduction rates. 

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A jockey won a race after dying of a heart attack mid-race.

A jockey won a race after dying of a heart attack mid-race.

It must have been shocking for people to go to congratulate the winning jockey and discover him dead. Frank Hayes, the jockey that day, wasn’t technically a trained jockey. Rather, he was a stable hand, certainly highly knowledgeable about horse and horse racing, but definitely not a professional. 

Hayes convinced the owner to let him ride and compete with the horse, who was named Sweet Kiss. The pair, Hayes and Sweet Kiss, were given very low odds: 20-1. With odds like that, people would have thought it not only improbably, but perhaps even impossible that the two would win. The two were competing at Belmont Park in 1923, and certainly racing against fairly experienced jockeys. 

They would have made history just winning. They became a shocking story when the man became the only jockey to win a race dead. Hayes had suffered a heart attack while racing, but he was so strapped in that he remained upright, and people didn’t realize that he was dead. 

Sweet Kiss was never raced again because of superstition, and the horse got the nickname of Sweet Kiss of Death. 

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There is a man with a short term memory of only 30 seconds.

There is a man with a short term memory of only 30 seconds.

His name is Clive Wearing, and he suffers from anterograde amnesia, meaning he can’t create new memories, as well as retrograde amnesia, meaning he’s lost his memories. Before his amnesia came, he was a musicologist, conductor, tenor, and keyboardist. 

It all started nearly thirty years ago. On March 27, 1985, Wearing contracted Herpesviral encephalities, a Herpes virus that attacks the nervous system. The effects of the illness were so great that he lost his ability to store new memories. His hippocampus is so damaged that he cannot transfer memories from short term to long term, and thus can’t form any new memories. 

According to his wife, his memory lasts between 7 and 30 seconds. Every day, he feels that he’s “waking up” several times a minute, as his consciousness is essentially rebooting. His memories from his life before 1985 are very few. He knows that he has children and loves his wife, but that’s basically it. 

He’s lost so much of his memory that he can’t even remember what foods taste like. Fortunately, because his muscle memory was not damaged, he can still play the piano perfectly.

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Scooby was made to look like the opposite of a pedigree Great Dane.

Scooby was made to look like the opposite of a pedigree Great Dane.

The creator and artist of Scooby Doo was Iwao Takamoto. Takamoto did a bit of research before creating the beloved character of children and adults alike. He spoke with a breeder of Great Danes who informed him of what a show-ready pedigree Great Dane would look like. 

Takamoto, of course, took this information into consideration, but he probably used the information the opposite way of how the breeder might have expected him to use it. Instead of making Scooby, a perfect show dog, he gave Scooby several characteristics opposite of the show standards. 

Scooby was given completely the wrong colorization as well as a humped back, bowed legs, and small chin. Since Scooby is a cartoon, he was also given some unrealistic characteristics. For example, Scooby’s tail has far more capabilities than any real dog’s tail would have. 

He can use it to hang from or even press buttons. Scooby’s face is also “malleable,” which means that it could be adjusted in unnatural way to communicate emotion. He also has only one pad on the sole of his feet, which is inaccurate, but make Scooby easier to draw. 

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Social pain is similar enough to physical pain that Tylenol can help numb it.

Social pain is similar enough to physical pain that Tylenol can help numb it.

People tend to consider physical pain to be something completely separate from emotional pain. Interestingly, social pain can affect the brain in extremely similar ways. When you experience physical pain, there is the actual “sensory experience” of pain and there is also the emotional reaction to it when your brain decides the extent of pain you are experiencing. 

This same emotional reaction to physical pain is part of the experience of the pain of social rejection. Researchers tested the theory that you might be able to treat the pain of social rejection like you treat physical pain. What they found shocked them. People actually taking pain medication had less pain from social rejection than people who were only taking the placebo pill. 

They also found that people who are more sensitive to physical pain are also more sensitive to social pain. Of course, researchers caution that you shouldn’t just take Advil for everything. Numbing social pain might not actually be a good idea. Social pain does serve a purpose in shaping a person and their actions. 

The research just shows how emotional pain is just as real as physical pain, and could also inform treatment for when social pain is extreme. 

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The movie Old School is a retelling of Fight Club.

The movie Old School is a retelling of Fight Club.

Many movies are retellings of previous successful movies. If it worked once, why not twice? The art of retelling is putting a new spin and perspective on the idea. For Todd Phillips, the writer and director of Old School, the goal was to add comedy to the past movie Fight Club. 

Phillips deliberately modeled his movie after the Fight Club with the hope that viewers would notice the similarities and appreciate his different take on the old movie. He hoped they would appreciate the comedy and satire of Old School. Check out the source for some of the most interesting common plot points

Here are some other movies that are retellings:

• Pinocchio has several influences including a Bible story and a pornographic novel from Ancient Rome. From the Bible, Pinocchio draws from the story of Jonah. Like Jonah, title character Pinocchio also is swallowed by a whale. Pinocchio’s transformation into a donkey comes from the Roman novel.
• Gilligan’s Island was remade off of Robinson Crusoe. The biggest difference between the two movies is that Gilligan’s Island features 7 people, each representing one of the deadly sins. For example, Ginger represents the deadly sin of lust. 

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