When Color Blindness is a Good Thing

Research at the University of Münster, Germany, showed that in close martial arts matches, competitors wearing red were awarded ~13% more points compared to if they had a blue uniform.

The discovery is yet another in a string of discoveries that reveal color can affect the human mind. Red, in particular, has been studied and is believed to be perceived as a dominant color, causing the observer to perform adversely.

You can also participate in the study - see here.

But don't think the color of your uniform will make you Bruce Lee. As researcher Robert Barton points out, "If you're rubbish, a red shirt won't stop you from losing, but when fights were relatively symmetrical, colour tipped the balance."

Dirty Money

A study presented at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting stated that 90% of U.S. paper currency is contaminated with cocaine!

This doesn't mean every bill was used to snort cocaine, as most of the paper bills had minuscule amounts. Some money was used in drug deals, but the majority was contaminated while in banks as cocaine residue was left behind on the money counter from the dirty bills.

With experts saying bills can carry bacteria from feces and urine, this is just one more reason to wash your hands after touching money.

Fixing a Broken Heart ... Through the Stomach

Scientists are looking to the stomach to help treat those suffering from heart attacks. Scientists used stem cell patches of lab-grown heart cells onto rats' stomachs' fatty tissue - which is rich in blood vessels and has previously been used to regenerate other organs. After a week, they transferred the patches to the rats’ damaged heart. Experiments showed that the patches did indeed improve the heart's condition.

Still, much work is needed as the procedure is considered too risky for elderly patients because of the extensive amount of surgery time required.

Not That Useless

Long considered to be a useless appendage, scientists are now discovering that the appendix has a purpose and is far more prevalent in nature than once thought.

Scientists have discovered that the appendix can be a source of good bacteria to repopulate the gut after a severe case of diarrhea. The appendix can also help make, direct and train white blood cells.

More astonishing is the fact that scientists now consider the appendix to have been around for ~80 million years. If true, this means that the view of the appendix being a vestigial organ (an organ rendered useless due to the ongoing phenomenon of evolution) would be incorrect. Moreover, scores of other animals also possess this appendage, oftentimes aiding in digestion.

New Findings in Man's Ancestry

Until recently, the oldest known human hair was ~9,000 years old. An excavation in South Africa, however, revealed a hair ~200,000 years old! The hair was found in a fossilized hyena latrine of all places.

What is Eye Color?

It may be man's most attention-grabbing quality, but what really is eye color?

In short, eye color is the expression of a combined number of genes. Eye color expression is like screwing in a certain color light bulb to emit a certain color of light. If you replace the bulb with a bulb of another color, the emitted light's color will change.

Eye color is not a blend of the parents' colors. Each parent has two pairs of genes on each chromosome, all of which can effect the ultimate color expression in a myriad of ways. Brown eye color is the dominant gene, needing only one copy to be expressed, while blue (recessive) requires both copy's. However, no one gene controls eye color - the OCA2 gene, controlling the amount of melanin pigment produced, accounts for ~74% of variation in eye color. Other genes effect the OCA2 gene's expression.

Geneticist Dr Rick Sturm states, "We believe ... there are two major genes - one that controls for brown or blue, and one that controls for green or hazel - and others that modify this trait". This means that brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child, and vice versa.

For New Yorkers

Well, actually for anyone interested in New York City.

This month's National Geographic feature article explains what New York City was like before it was New York City.

There is also a Wildlife Conservation Society effort, dubbed the Mannahatta Project, devoted to discovering the origins of Manhattan.