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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George Reeves, who starred as Superman in the 1950’s TV series, was frequently assaulted by children wanting to test his invulnerability.

George Reeves, who starred as Superman in the 1950’s TV series, was frequently assaulted by children wanting to test his invulnerability.

 

George Reeves was always cautious when interacting with children who were fans of Adventures of Superman, because on multiple occasions they thought he was really Superman and tried to test his invulnerability. 

Most often, kids would come up to him and try assaulting him, but what one kid did really blew away the rest. At one appearance in costume, George Reeves greeted a young boy who quickly pulled a pistol out and pointed it at him. The boy had taken the pistol, a Luger, from his home. 

It had belonged to his father, who had brought it home after World War II. He wanted to shoot Superman to see if he was really invulnerable like on the TV show. Reeves didn’t want to say he wasn’t really Superman, because it would have ruined the entire appearance and possibly upset the child. 

He managed to get out of it by convincing the child if he shot him, the bullet could bounce off him and hurt someone else. 

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Almost half of movies fail the feminist Bechdel test. That means that they don’t contain a conversation between women about something other than men!

Almost half of movies fail the feminist Bechdel test. That means that they don’t contain a conversation between women about something other than men!

The Bechdel test was created by Alison Bechdel as a means of putting numbers to sexist trends in movies. The requirement is basically a litmus test: does it or does it not contain two, named female characters who have a conversation about something other than men. 

It’s important to realize that the test does not necessarily say that a movie is or isn’t sexist based on whether it passes or fails the test. Rather it’s meant to be a way of analyzing movies in broader terms related to feminist themes. What’s truly incredible about this test is that it’s shown that 48% of movies don’t pass the test. 

In general, movies don’t show extended relationships between women. The fear is that most conversations between women characters in movies are superficial, dealing only with the closest hot guy. Basically, our movies might still be sending subtle, sexist messages. 

Movies such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Avatar, and the Social Network all fail the Bechdel test. Do you think the results of the Bechdel test are worrisome or irrelevant? 

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An MIT student wrote Newton’s equation for acceleration before jumping out the window to his death.

An MIT student wrote Newton’s equation for acceleration before jumping out the window to his death.

Phillip Gale was a sophomore student at the prestigious school MIT when he decided his life was no longer worth living. His plan to kill himself was fairly methodical and simple. He began with some research, asking fellow students about how he could get onto the roof of the tallest building at MIT: the Green Building. 

With his research done, Gale drew a stick figure throwing a chair and wrote out Isaac Newton’s equation on a blackboard. He signed the message with “Phil was here.” He then threw a chair out the window to break it, since the windows were sealed. He jumped out after it. Some people, hearing the crash of the chair first, looked out in time to see Gale fall to his death. 

His main reason for killing himself was that he didn’t want to “live in mediocrity” any longer. He was tired of feeling “detached” from the world. He felt like he couldn’t achieve his goals and that he didn’t have a future worth looking forward to. It is truly shocking that someone attending college at a highly competitive university would consider themselves mediocre, and that that mediocrity was worth dying for, but it shows that each mind is a world.

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Atomic clocks are proving Einstein’s theory of relativity. The higher you live, the faster you age!

Atomic clocks are proving Einstein’s theory of relativity. The higher you live, the faster you age!

Eintstein’s theory of relativity was a huge leap for the time he came up with it, and it’s only beginning to be proven now. Einstein’s theories were based in the realization that gravity is basically acceleration. 

Extrapolating from that idea, you can come to the understanding that the stronger gravity, the slower time would run. Time actually moves slower at different altitudes. Time is not a clearly defined absolute, rather it is based on relative perspectives, and as we are now discovering height away from the ground, since that affects gravitational pull.

By placing highly accurate clocks at different altitudes, researchers were able to record this difference. These clocks used aluminum atom trapped in an electric field. These atoms vibrated, which caused the clock to measure time to an extremely accurate degree. Researchers found that height actually did affect the progression of time, and would affect the progression of aging. 

They have estimated that for a person who lived 79 years, that person would 90 billionths of a second faster for every foot off the ground. A person in a pent house would age faster than someone living at a low altitude.

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An Olympic rower stopped mid-race to let a family of ducks pass.

An Olympic rower stopped mid-race to let a family of ducks pass.

It’s hard to say whether this was a reflection of his kindness or his confidence. Henry Robert Pearce was an Australian-Canadian sculler, who competed in the amateur sculling championships in 1927, 1928, and 1929 and won each year. 

His victories bought him the opportunity to compete in the 1928 Olympics. Pearce won all his races with incredible ease, beating his competitors by up to 12 lengths. In the quarter final, he was in the midst of brutally defeating his French opponent when a family of ducks decided that it was the right moment to hop on over to his lane. 

He stopped momentarily to let the ducks pass, and still won by 20 lengths and broke the course records. Kudos to him for extending the Olympic principals of cooperation and tolerance to even our warm-blooded brethren. 

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There is a man who graduated high school, college, and taught high school English and Social Studies for 19 years all without knowing how to read.

There is a man who graduated high school, college, and taught high school English and Social Studies for 19 years all without knowing how to read.

His name is John Corcoran, and today he is an American author. Until he was 48, his reading comprehension was only about that of a second grade level. He wasn’t discovered throughout his entire education and 29 years of his career.

Because he was one of six children, his parents were too overwhelmed to notice he had trouble reading. At school, he was assigned to the “dumb row,” but because of other disciplinary issues, teachers often forgot about his reading difficulties. He attended two junior colleges after graduating high school, and eventually went to and graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso.

He managed a bachelor’s degree in Education and Business administration thanks to his athletic scholarship and aggressive cheating. For his first job as a high school teacher, Corcoran had his students write their names on a seating chart and pronounce them for him daily.

Because his literacy had only fallen since second grade, he couldn’t even tell one name from the next. After 17 years of teaching, followed by ten years as a real estate developer, he decided it was time to learn to read. Since then, he has become a spokesman for literacy programs and has even started his own foundation devoted to reading.

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