Calling all GIFs! Please join your party inside. onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Calling all GIFs! Please join your party inside.

It's the end of the week and we want to know what you've been up to. Do you have updates on projects, life news to share with us all, or just GIFs that want — nay, need — a chance to mingle? Tell us all about what's happening on the other side of your screen, all through the sublime art of the GIF.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Calling all GIFs! Please join your party inside.

Make people misjudge your attractiveness with the Cheerleader Effect onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Make people misjudge your attractiveness with the Cheerleader Effect

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Want to appear more attractive to people? Only show pictures of yourself when you're with your friends. Amazingly, this is not marketing — you don't appear more attractive because you're popular or loved, you actually trick people's brains into considering your face more attractive.

Cheerleaders are a kind of group hypnotism act. Their energy, their choreography, and their uniform appearance meant to take out people's cognitive functions and make them forget that their team is losing. Like armies marching in sync, cheerleaders overwhelm the viewer with an impression of unity and energy that no single member could convey on their own. They also, apparently, overwhelm people with an impression of stunning attractiveness that no single member could convey on her own, but neither armies nor cheerleaders not alone in that. When any people are pictured in groups, each member of the group looks more attractive than they would do on their own. This works for both men and women, and works on both men and women.

If people were to take a guess at why group members appear more attractive than individuals, they might turn up something heartwarming. We are more beautiful when surrounded by the people we love. People pictured with friends attract others because we like people who love and are loved. Unity is beautiful.

Nope.

While it's true that volunteers for a study rated people more attractive when they were pictured in groups, they also rated people more attractive when they were all in individual pictures, but those pictures were grouped together in one image. A now-famous effect shows that layering people's faces, and taking the average of the however many faces are measured, creates a more attractive face. Average, in the sense of having all irregular features blurred away, is beautiful. The Cheerleader Effect does in time what layered faces do in space. When we look at groups of people we take the image of each face and mentally blur it with the next, making each individual face look more beautiful than it would if we focused on it alone. Groups of people literally fool our brains into thinking of a beautiful whole.

[Via Scientific American, The Atlantic]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Make people misjudge your attractiveness with the Cheerleader Effect

Selfiecity: Data-Visualized Selfies onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Selfiecity: Data-Visualized Selfies

Selfiecity hat per Crowdsourcing tausende Selfies analysiert und den daraus entstandenen Datensatz mit verschiedenen Tools visualisiert. Nice! (via Waxy)

Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods:

- We present our findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions.

- Rich media visualizations (imageplots) assemble thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns.

- The interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of 3200 photos.

- Finally, theoretical essays discuss selfies in the history of photography, the functions of images in social media, and methods and dataset.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Selfiecity: Data-Visualized Selfies

The Curiosity Rover is driving in reverse to protect its dented wheels onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Curiosity Rover is driving in reverse to protect its dented wheels

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Curiosity's aluminum wheels have taken a beating since starting its Martian mission back in August 2012. Now, in an effort to preserve them, NASA instructed the rover to drive nearly 330 feet (100 meters) in reverse — it's longest advance in three months.

NASA's Curiosity team is surprised at how quickly the wheels are deteriorating, the consequence of having the rover trundle across sharp, rocky terrain. But its ability to drive so capably in reverse is no accident; the technique was tested on Earth for these sorts of contingencies.

"We wanted to have backwards driving in our validated toolkit because there will be parts of our route that will be more challenging," said Curiosity Project Manager Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement.

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Image: The route driven and route planned for NASA's Curiosity Mars rover from before reaching the Dingo Gap, upper right, to the mission's next science waypoint, "Kimberley" (formerly referred to as "KMS-9") in lower left. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.

The latest stretch run, which followed Curiosity's recent climb over a 3-foot-tall (1-meter) sand dune, was done over relatively smooth ground. And in fact, one of the reasons why NASA wanted to get Curiosity into the Dingo Gap was because of the benign terrain.

"After we got over the dune, we began driving in terrain that looks like what we expected based on the orbital data," added Erickson. "There are fewer sharp rocks, many of them are loose, and in most places there's a little bit of sand cushioning the vehicle."

From here, the rover will be sent to a science waypoint and then to its long-term goal of investigating the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, water-related minerals have been detected from orbit.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Curiosity Rover is driving in reverse to protect its dented wheels

Don't worry, you're not as below average as you think you are onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Don't worry, you're not as below average as you think you are

People, no offense to those who might be reading, are conceited nitwits who think they're far better at things than they actually are. But it also turns out there are certain situations in which they are convinced they're way worse than they actually are. Here's how low self-esteem strikes a blow against accuracy.

In general, we think we're pretty great at everything. Ninety-three percent of drivers consider themselves above average, most employees think they are above the average level of their division, and about a third of workers think they're in the top 5% of their group. There's just something in us that makes us feel like we're doing pretty good compared to nearly everyone else. It's gained the nickname "The Lake Wobegon effect" because of the novel Lake Wobegon Days, by Garrison Keillor, about the little town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where "all the children are above average." Knowing little-to-nothing about the subject doesn't ameliorate the effect. The now-infamous Dunning-Kruger effect shows that people who lack basic knowledge about a subject lack the experience to understand how little they know, and vastly overestimate their comprehension of the subject.

There's also a converse reaction — given the right circumstances, people under-estimate their skills at certain tasks. It might look like this is achieves a nice balance between conceitedness and modesty, but unfortunately there's no experimental evidence to support that. People tended to believe they were very poor at things like juggling or riding a unicycle. To be fair, the experimenters had to pick skills that could be easily tested and were fairly obscure. It's tough to apply the below-average effect, as it's called, to regular life because very few people regularly engage in activities they suck at. It's the quirky and strange (and largely unimportant) activities that cause us to underestimate ourselves.

People also underestimate their likelihood of experiencing unlikely events. For example, if they were to get a lottery ticket with a 1-1000 chance of winning, they'd put their odds at 1-10,000. When their absolute likelihood of success is low, people will underestimate it. When their absolute skills are poor, they will underestimate themselves. It looks like we'll give ourselves anything but a realistic estimation of our abilities.

[Via Lake Wobegon Be Gone]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Don't worry, you're not as below average as you think you are

The U.S. military has developed a pizza that stays edible for years onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The U.S. military has developed a pizza that stays edible for years

In an effort to boost solider morale, researchers at a U.S. military lab in Massachusetts have developed a pizza that can stay on the shelf for up to three years and still remain good to eat.

U.S. soldiers have been pleading with their bosses to have pizza added to their "meals ready to eat" packages, also known as MREs. These kits replaced canned food back in 1981 and are utilized in combat zones or areas where field kitchens can't be set up.

The new long-lived pizza, considered a kind of "holy grail" among food technologists, was developed by the U.S. Army's Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center after two years of research. It can literally be left on the counter for three years, and it would still be edible.

Incredibly, the pizza doesn't require any refrigeration or freezing. The Associated Press explains:

Scientists' efforts were long thwarted because moisture in tomato sauce, cheese and toppings migrated to the dough over time, resulting in soggy pizza that provided the perfect conditions for mold and disease-causing bacteria to grow.

But on-and-off research over the past few years helped them figure out ways to prevent moisture from migrating. That includes using ingredients called humectants — sugar, salt and syrups can do the trick — that bind to water and keep it from getting to the dough.

But that alone would not help the pizza remain fresh for three years at 80 degrees, so scientists tweaked the acidity of the sauce, cheese and dough to make it harder for oxygen and bacteria to thrive. They also added iron fillings to the package to absorb any air remaining in the pouch.

As for the taste and texture, it's a little moist and not very crispy. It's apparently reminiscent of typical pan pizza that you'd make at home and take out of the toaster oven — except that it's eaten at room temperature.

[ AP | AP Photo/Steven Senne]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The U.S. military has developed a pizza that stays edible for years

The sixth and final season of Clone Wars will debut on Netflix onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The sixth and final season of Clone Wars will debut on Netflix

Those waiting for Clone Wars: The Lost Missions to get some kind of closure for the hit Star Wars cartoon won't need to wait much longer. The never-before-seen final episodes will debut on Netflix on March 7th, and here's the first clip featuring a very special cameo!

The 13-episode Lost Missions season will premiere along with the entire series and extended "director's cuts" of various episodes from the first five seasons, meaning there's some serious binge-watching in a lot of people's futures. Here's the official summary for the final season:

In these eagerly anticipated episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, some of the deepest mysteries of the conflict between the light and the dark sides of the Force are revealed. An intrepid clone trooper discovers a shocking secret, Anakin Skywalker's closest relationship is tested to its limits, and what Master Yoda discovers while investigating the disappearance of a Jedi could forever change the balance of power in the galaxy.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The sixth and final season of Clone Wars will debut on Netflix

Benedict Cumberbatch must solve a mystery of his own on Sesame Street onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Benedict Cumberbatch must solve a mystery of his own on Sesame Street

Sherlock Holmes has taken on some difficult mysteries in his life, but none quite so daunting as the one Benedict Cumberbatch faced this morning on Sesame Street, posed by Cumberbatch's (fairly new) arch-nemesis Murray-arty. The Sherlock actor had no choice but to call in some help...

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Benedict Cumberbatch must solve a mystery of his own on Sesame Street

If you stopped watching Agents of SHIELD, Clark Gregg kind of hates you onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com If you stopped watching Agents of SHIELD, Clark Gregg kind of hates you

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The supremely affable Clark Gregg, star of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series, appears to be testing his affability. In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune which he almost certainly already regrets, Gregg called those who have stopped watching the slow-burning show "losers."

Here's the quote from the interview:

If you've given up on "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," Clark Gregg has pretty much given up on you. Even if you're a self-identified geek.

"Those aren't geeks. Those are losers," the man who plays Agent Coulson said on the set of his show, somewhere in Los Angeles.

I imagine Gregg realized the potential gaff almost immediately, although the interview put this qualification at the very end:

"I guess I don't mean to say that people who have been frustrated by that discovery period are necessarily losers," he said. "I just think they should be, perhaps, a little more patient."

Sounds like Gregg is more than a little frustrated himself. One the one hand, the show does have Sif, Deathlok, and Bill Paxton coming up, and clearly the Clairvoyant and Centipede stuff is building to something. On the other hand, even if Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is heating up, we've still been on an extremely slow burn.

[Via Blastr]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com If you stopped watching Agents of SHIELD, Clark Gregg kind of hates you

How much stuff is in a light-year? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How much stuff is in a light-year?

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Imagine taking the distance that light travels in an entire year. Now turn that distance into a cube, each side one light-year across. How much "stuff" would be in there? And how empty would it be? It all depends on where you put your massive cube.

Top image: Messier 15, an ancient globular cluster.

Even though the name is a little confusing, you probably already know that a light year is the distance that light travels in a full year. At speeds of almost 300,000 kilometers per second, that gets you pretty far from home.

So take that distance and turn it into a cube, each side one light year in length. Imagine that giant volume of space; it's a little challenging for some of us to get our heads around. How much "stuff" would be in there, and not just "stuff"… how much nothing is in there? There is an answer, but it all depends on the location of the giant cube.

Measure it at the core of the galaxy, and there are stars buzzing around all over the place. Perhaps in the heart of a globular cluster? In a star forming nebula? Or maybe out in the suburbs of the Milky Way? There's also great voids that exist between galaxies, where there's almost nothing.

The space between the galaxies is actually quite empty. Credit: ESO.

There's no getting around the math in this one. First, let's figure out an average density for the Milky Way and then go from there. Its about 100,000 light-years across and 1000 light-years thick. According to my buddy Phil Plait, the total volume of the Milky Way is about 8 trillion cubic light-years. And the total mass of the Milky Way is 6 x 10 to the power of 42 kilograms.

Divide those together and you get 8 x 10 to the power of 29 kilograms per light year. That's an 8 followed by 29 zeros. Is that a lot? It sounds like a lot.

Millions of glowing stars from the brightest part of the Milky Way — a region so dense with stars that barely any dark sky is seen across the picture. Credit: ESO.

Actually, that's about 40% of the mass of the Sun. In other words, on average, across the Milky Way, there's about 40% the mass of the Sun in every cubic light year. But in an average cubic meter, there's only about 950 attograms. Almost a femtogram; a quadrillionth of a gram of matter. Which is pretty close to nothing. Seriously, air has more than a kilogram of mass per cubic meter.

In the densest regions of the Milky Way, like inside globular clusters, you can get densities of stars with 100, or even 1000 times greater than our region of the galaxy. Stars can get as close together as the radius of the Solar System.

But out in the vast interstellar gulfs between stars, the density drops significantly. There are only a few hundred individual atoms per cubic meter in interstellar space. And in the intergalactic voids; the gulfs between galaxies, there are just a handful of atoms per meter.

How much stuff is there in a light year? It all depends on where you look, but if you spread all the matter around by shaking the Universe up like a snow globe, the answer is very close to nothing.

This article originally appeared at Universe Today.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How much stuff is in a light-year?

Were you used in evil experiments on Halloween? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Were you used in evil experiments on Halloween?

If you lived in Seattle, Washington, in 1976, and on Halloween of that year a lady invited you into her house, you may have been the subject of an experiment. Over 300 children were experimented on, and they may never know!

When these children came up to one of 18 houses, they were invited inside by a nice lady. She had a bowl of candy for them in the front room, and she instructed them to take one piece — then she hastily went into another room to check on something. The children were left alone with the candy, the instructions, and sometimes, with a mirror.

Oh, except they weren't alone. Through a peephole in the wall, a researcher watched to see if the kids would take more than one piece of candy. The experiment was meant to determine if the children disobeyed the instructions by taking more than one piece of candy, and whether the mirror, and awareness of their crime as other people might see it, would change the kids' behavior. The nefarious behavior of the experimenters went unexcused. (Did they have to face a mirror while conducting their illicit surveillance? We'll never know.)

It turned out that children were more likely to be good when facing a mirror. But then, there were a lot of factors that made a difference when it came to candy-stealing. Older children were more likely to steal. Children who arrived in groups were about twice as likely to steal as children who arrived alone. To the surprise of the researchers, who thought girls were more socially impressionable, girls were less likely to steal than boys, and less likely to let a mirror affect their behavior. Children who came inside with their parents (what a different time that was) were disregarded entirely.

So the question is, were you one of those kids? I do hope we find someone among the io9ers who has just, during this article, realized they were experimented on as children. Spread the word!

[Via Self-Awareness and Transgression in Children]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Were you used in evil experiments on Halloween?

Why the clock seems to stand still the second you look at it onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why the clock seems to stand still the second you look at it

When you glance at an analog clock, have you ever noticed that the second hand seems to pause right as you started looking? Either your face is ugly enough to stop a clock, as the old saying goes, or it's the work of the Stopped Clock Illusion.

When you glance at a clock, in a hospital, or at school, or at some other institution that still uses analog clocks, the second hand seemed to lag just for a second before resuming its normal pace around the clock. This is a demonstration of the fact that our brain is as much a part of how we perceive time as the reality of time itself. Have you ever wondered why, as your eyes dart from one place to another, the world doesn't go on and off like a strobe light? Or blur wildly like film of the countryside from a moving car? You are abruptly cutting off all the input to your eyes, making them swivel around, refocusing on whatever the new thing is, and you don't even really notice a skip between the two sights. We can glance away and glance back at something without ever knowing we're doing it.

Researchers think that we don't notice these skips because the brain lets us experience vision as one continuous movement; it fills in these skips in vision the way it fills in a blind spot. Sometimes it does this by making us believe that certain moments lasted longer than they did. We don't notice this until we look at something that makes a regular movement with which we are utterly familiar. We know what a "second" looks like, and we know when one has been drawn out. We just didn't know why until now.

[Via BBC]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why the clock seems to stand still the second you look at it

This wall furniture is the coolest thing your cat will see all day onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This wall furniture is the coolest thing your cat will see all day

Human dwellings must seem stupidly boring for cats who, in their natural state, are fond of climbing, jumping, and perching. Looking to overcome this egregious oversight, German company Goldtaze has put out this incredible line of handcrafted designer cat climbing furniture.

The brain-child of Stefan Hofmann, the items were created for his own cat, Mowgli (who he inherited when he moved into a new apartment).

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Goldtaze — which means "gold paws" in German — carries a number of interesting products, including ceiling-mounted walkways and beds, wall-mounted perches, scratching poles, cat trees, climbing poles, and more. Just be prepared to dig deep into your wallet.

More at Goldtaze (also their Facebook page) and Hauspanther.

[h/t Metafilter | Images Hauspanther & Goldtaze]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This wall furniture is the coolest thing your cat will see all day

The Lazarus sign can convince you that brain-dead people are alive onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Lazarus sign can convince you that brain-dead people are alive

People who are brain dead make certain motions that make it look like they are aware of their surroundings. The most horrifying motion of all is the Lazarus sign — it can convince people that their loved one has literally come back from the dead.

The Lazarus sign is an example of a spinal reflex arc. Living people often experience spinal reflex arcs. If we accidentally press our hands against something sharp or something hot we will pull back before the sensation hits our brain. The sensory nerves send a signal to the spine which sends a signal to the motor nerves to get moving; it's only later that we feel what is was we drew back from. These reflexes don't involve the brain, and so they keep happening even when the brain is dead. Most of the reflexes are simple twitches, but the Lazarus sign is something else. It lasts several seconds — the arms rise up from the body, then draw in to the chest, sometimes crossing over the heart. After pulling in for a few seconds, the arms drop back to the body's sides. The Lazarus sign, some say, is why Egyptian sarcophagi show people with arms crossed over their chests.

No one knows exactly why the Lazarus sign is triggered, but it can happen in response to painful stimuli and it can happen in the last few moments before death. It most commonly happens after a brain-dead patient is taken off a respirator. This is one of the reasons it's called the Lazarus sign; it looks like a person is rising from the dead, and lasts so long that few lay people can convince themselves that it's an involuntary response. Obviously, it's incredibly upsetting for families who see a patient unhooked from a respirator seemingly struggle to life for a few moments, and then die. Some papers on the subject actually counsel hospital staff to take families out of the room just after the respirator is removed, so there's no confusion, false hope, or guilt. The body has a thousand strange and fascinating responses. Though this one, sadly, can cause a lot of pain to the survivors, it causes no pain to the person undergoing it.

Image: Everyone's Idle.

[Via Lazarus Sign and Respiratory Like Movement After Brain Death, Reflex Movements in Patients with Brain Death, Unusual Spontaneous Movements In Brain Dead Patients]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Lazarus sign can convince you that brain-dead people are alive

We Can't Blame Obesity On Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors Anymore onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We Can't Blame Obesity On Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors Anymore

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One popular idea to explain the current obesity epidemic proposes that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a fat-storing adaptation, which allowed them to survive frequent famines. Today, with our overabundance of food, this adaptation is causing us to get fat. There's just one problem with this idea — research now shows that hunter-gatherer societies aren't necessarily prone to food shortages.

The Thrifty Genotype Hypothesis

The notion that hunter-gatherer societies experience frequent periods of food shortage and even famines is pervasive across a number of scientific fields, including paleoanthropology and evolutionary psychology. This concept has even helped shape a variety of different theoretical models in everything from biology to economics — the "thrifty genotype hypothesis" is, perhaps, one of the most notable.

The thrifty genotype hypothesis (and other related theories) stems from the idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had an evolutionary adaption that allowed them to survive the frequent famines they must have faced. This adaptation still persists today, according to the hypothesis.

"If it were true, it would mean that some or all people have an extreme genetic predisposition to convert calories more efficiently to fat," Colette Berbesque, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Roehampton in the UK, told io9. "We've gotten so good at turning calories into fat for later use that we are all just getting obese because we don't have those lean times anymore."

Initially, scientists thought they had found evidence for the hypothesis when they looked at the subsistence practices of Samoans, Pima Native Americans and the Yanomami. People of these societies, they found, quickly experienced rising levels of obesity when they ditched their traditional diets. But it turned out that the groups had actually been involved in non-intensive agriculture — such as horticulture combined with hunting — for a long time, and that it was the "westernization" of their diets that led to their weight gain.

A couple of other studies compared the rates of famine and food shortages among people utilizing different types of subsistence, including agriculturalists, horticulturalists, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. The research showed that hunter-gatherers experienced famines at about the same rate as other people. But when Berbesque took a closer look, she found that the studies didn't take into account different habitats. Half of the hunter-gatherer societies that researchers have data on live in arctic or subarctic regions, where very few agriculturalists live. What's more, it's impossible to tell an evolutionary story with just this sample, because many hunter-gatherers of the past lived in warm areas, Berbesque said.

So Berbesque and her colleagues decided to take another look at hunter-gatherer societies to see if they really do suffer from more famines than other people.

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Hunter-Gatherers Vs. Agriculturalists

For their study, the team used the so-called standard cross-cultural sample, which is a massive database containing information on 186 societies across the globe, including 36 hunter-gatherer societies. The database, which is primarily a sample of preindustrial societies, is coded with thousands of different variables, including famine, diseases, marital patterns, incidences of conflict, location, rainfall, temperature, plant productivity and many others.

The researchers compared hunter-gatherer societies — defined as non-horseback hunting societies that obtain less than 10% of their nutrition from farmed goods or animal husbandry, and engage in minimal trade — with agriculturalists, based on eight different famine-related variables, such as occurrence of short-term starvation, persistence of famine and recurrence of famine. To make sure the habitats were similar, they only looked at cultures that lived in regions with an effective temperature, which is the average temperature of the warmest and coldest months, of at least 13 degrees Celsius (55.4 degrees Fahrenheit). The societies they included also had similar "net primary productivity," which has to do with the amount of new plant growth each year, Berbesque explained.

"We wanted to only statistically compare hunter-gatherers with agriculturalists that had similar habitats," Berbesque said. "Once we did that, we found that hunter-gatherers had significantly less bouts of famine."

In particular, hunter-gatherers had less famine than the agriculturalists across five of the eight variables, including occurrence of famine, severity of famine and persistence of famine. Interestingly, the hunter-gatherer societies also had lower scores for the "contingency of famine" variable. That is, the agriculturalists were more prepared for famines, which, depending on how you look at it, could mean they had to deal with food shortages more often.

Berbesque thinks there are a few reasons why contemporary hunter-gatherer societies were less prone to famines than agriculturalists. For one, they weren't tied to the land, so if they experienced a major change in their food source, they could just pick up and move to a better location. Another reason could be that they just used their land differently. It's sometimes said that preindustrial hunter-gatherers occupied marginalized habitats that weren't as productive as agriculturalists' habitats, but this idea comes from a farmer's point of view — while the land may not have been good for farming, it was still fine for other modes of subsistence.

Though the literature is rife with references to the "feast and famine" lifestyle of ancient hunter-gatherers, the study suggests it wasn't like that at all — a finding with important consequences.

"I think that the thrifty genotype, as an evolutionary story in explaining the western obesity epidemic, is misplaced," Berbesque said. Additionally, some people today adhere to diets that recommend periodic fasting, in an attempt to mirror the diets of our lean ancestors. But the study, as well Berbesque's own observations of modern hunter-gatherer societies, shows the idea behind this practice may be unfounded.

Check out the full study over in the journal Biology Letters.

Top image via Frank Vassen/Flickr. Inset image via Ian Sewell/Wikimedia Commons.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We Can't Blame Obesity On Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors Anymore

Watch every day of the Second World War in this amazing timelapse onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Watch every day of the Second World War in this amazing timelapse

Recently, YouTube user EmperorTigerstar mapped the changing front lines of WWII as it unfolded across Europe. Now, he's finished the job, compiling a timelapse perspective of the entire war that includes the African, Asian, and Pacific theatres.

Personally, I would have started the clock on July 7th, 1937 — the day the Second Sino-Japanese War began, and a date that some historians consider the true start of World War II. At any rate, things get going in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland and end with the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.

Watching the timelapse, I find the war in the Pacific particularly fascinating — starting with the massive offensive by the Japanese in 1941, followed by the patient but unrelenting island leap-frogging by U.S. forces. Front lines on the water aren't quite like the ones on land.

For a list of key dates in Europe, check out this previous post. Here are the dates to watch for in the Pacific and in Central and East Asia.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Watch every day of the Second World War in this amazing timelapse

Conjoined Gray Whales Discovered in Baja California Lagoon onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Conjoined Gray Whales Discovered in Baja California Lagoon

In what may be the first discovery of its kind, scientists working in Mexico's Laguna Ojo de Liebre discovered the remains of recently deceased conjoined gray whale calves.

The conjoined twins probably didn't survive birth and may have been miscarried; the carcass is only about seven feet long, whereas normal calves emerge between 12 to 16 feet. American Cetacean Society researchers Alisa Schulman-Janiger also noted that the twins were underdeveloped.

There's no sign of the mother and the scientists are curious to learn what happened to her. The twins' body has been collected for further study.

Conjoined whales have been discovered before, including fin, sei, and minke whales. But this may be the first documented discovery of conjoined gray whales. Conjoined sharks have also been found.

[Via au.news.yahoo]

Images: Jesus Gomez, Farah Castillo, Guerrero Negro Verde.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Conjoined Gray Whales Discovered in Baja California Lagoon

A Horror Game That Changes Every Time You Play onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Horror Game That Changes Every Time You Play

Play a horror game enough and you know where all the scares are. The terror becomes routine. But Daylight is promising something different. It's going to transform each time you try to escape.

Like Spelunky, No Man's Sky and a slew of other games, the upcoming PC/PS4 title from Zombie Studios—built on Unreal Engine 4—uses procedural generation to recombine some of its various elements. In this case, it looks like the labyrinthine layout of the Mid Island Hospital setting gets a remix with each new game you play. The game's due out soon so we'll see just how well the premise works.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Horror Game That Changes Every Time You Play

Try not to get too excited about these Agent Carter TV series rumors onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Try not to get too excited about these Agent Carter TV series rumors

Please take this with an iceberg-sized grain of salt: The MirrorThe Mirror claims that Hayley Atwell has signed the lead role and is moving to Los Angeles to film that rumored Agent Carter TV series to premiere later this year. As much as I would love this to be true, I'm pretty sure it isn't.

See, The Mirror says that Atwell is moving to L.A. for six full months to film an entire season of the show, which is where my doubt begins. Marvel isn't going to make an entire season of a TV series before finding a channel to put it on; they'd make a pilot first, and that really doesn't require a six-month commitment. Furthermore, studios don't make shows like this on the sly — given the number of people involved in making virtually any modern TV series, they couldn't if they wanted to. The announcement of an Agent Carter series should make the trades well before Hayley Atwell would need to pack up her UHaul boxes.

But say the show is automatically going to ABC, so it's already found a home, and say The Mirror has somehow gotten the scoop before Hollywood. The biggest problem is Agents of SHIELD isn't doing so hot, so I don't know why ABC would want a show starring a lesser-known Marvel movie-verse character right now.I could easily see the show going somewhere like Netflix, but Marvel has already announced four TV series that aren't even due until 2015. So again, I don't know how or why Marvel would be trying to sneak an Agent Carter series in 2014 without some kind of announcement first.

Maybe The Mirror has their finger on the pulse of this single theoretical TV series, and we're going to get an official announcement in the new few days. Maybe Disney told ABC they're going to show as many Marvel series as Disney wants them to, ratings be damned. I'll be delighted to be wrong here. But as the moment, I don't think I am.

[Via ComicBook.com]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Try not to get too excited about these Agent Carter TV series rumors

Can Lego Batman survive this massive, animated Joker's Funhouse? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Can Lego Batman survive this massive, animated Joker's Funhouse?

Good lord. Maybe this massive Lego set doesn't have quite the beauty of the Lego Rivendell we recently showed you, but what it lacks in artistry is more than makes up for in animatronics and a massive assortment of Bat-villains.

It was built by Paul "Brickbaron" Hetherington for the last Brickcon, and understandably won him best in show. I can't help but feel like that sentence would be better if I could have somehow worked my last name into it, though.

[Via Blastr]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Can Lego Batman survive this massive, animated Joker's Funhouse?