Freezing Fat to Death

Harvard researchers found kids who sucked on popsickles lost facial fat. Plastic surgeons reasoned if they could manipulate temperature and have people lose fat in other places. And they have been successful.

The procedure uses extreme cold to kill fat white cells while energizing brown fat (fat that helps burn calories). Overtime the fat white cells enters the stage of apoptosis - cell suicide.

Don't Ask the Left Ear

In an Italian dance club a woman approached people and asked for a cigarette. When speaking into people's right ear she got 34 people to give her a smoke vs. only 17 if she spoke into the left ear. It shows that the brain processes sound differently based on which ear its coming from but scientists still can't understand why generosity increases if the request comes through the right ear.

Previous studies have shown that humans tend to prefer listening with their right ears - possibly because right ear auditory stream gets precedence in the brain's left hemisphere, where most linguistic processing occurs.

A Different Kind of Liquid Metal

A ferrofluid is a liquid which contains iron and becomes highly magnetized if near a magnetic field.

Here's a trippy video of what it looks like and how it works.

Weaklings Have Better Hearing

A study finds that weaker people, like women, tend to have better hearing than stronger male counterparts. The weaker participants perceived threatening sounds quicker than others because they thought the threatening sound was closer than it actually was. Such behavior could be a survival mechanism.

Eyes Do Math

Researchers scanned brain activity of people moving their eyes right or left and asked participants to do mental math. They found that the brain circuitry that moves the eyes right does mental addition and the circuitry moving eyes left does mental subtraction. The finding demonstrates that math's development is too recent and advanced to have a brain region solely devoted to it - we reuse preexisting systems.

eBay Lessens Looting

When eBay began, archaeologists were scared that online buying and selling antiquities would increase stealing and trafficking of archaeological treasures. Contrary to expectations, eBay's existence has lessened looting because 1) eBay created a market for cheap fakes which lowered the incentive to steal real artifacts and 2) Collectors are more wary of buying on-line.

Words of Encouragement

In a study, half of 400+ black and white students wrote about any neutral topic over the course of a year. The other half wrote about why they cherished certain values. Black kids who had written about what they cherished improved grades ~.25 of a point on 4.0 scale vs. the control group. The lowest initial black performers improved scores .4+ of a point. 2 years later, the scores continued to improve among the group. White students who engaged in the affirmation exercise showed no improvement.

Ethnic minorities may feel poor academic performance confirms negative expectations about them. The affirmations may help alleviate those fears.