Scientific Approach to Swatting Flies; Weird Water; And More

http://lifehacker.com/5857984/a-scienti ... pular=true
A Scientific Approach to Swatting Flies
By Adam Dachis
Nov 9, 2011

Wired Magazine found that the answer to your aggravation lies in our good old friend science.

Flies are so hard to swat because they have a 360 degree field of view. This allows them to see you coming, allowing them to begin a series of postural adjustments so they can fly away quickly—well before your hand (or whatever) deals the crushing blow. Understanding the fly's biology is necessary in the war against it and its will to live. It's faster than you, but it isn't smarter. Wired suggests the following two methods for more effective fly-swatting:

click link for 2 suggestions!

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-wei ... omaly.html
Weird world of water gets a little weirder with a new anomaly
November 9, 2011

Strange, stranger, strangest! To the weird nature of one of the simplest chemical compounds -- the stuff so familiar that even non-scientists know its chemical formula -- add another odd twist. Scientists are reporting that good old H2O, when chilled below the freezing point, can shift into a new type of liquid. The report appears in ACS' Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

Pradeep Kumar and H. Eugene Stanley explain that water is one weird substance, exhibiting more than 80 unusual properties, by one count, including some that scientists still struggle to understand. For example, water can exist in all three states of matter (solid, liquid,gas) at the same time. And the forces at its surface enable insects to walk on water and water to rise up from the roots into the leaves of trees and other plants. In another strange turn, scientists have proposed that water can go from being one type of liquid into another in a so-called "liquid-liquid" phase transition, but it is impossible to test this with today's laboratory equipment because these things happen so fast. That's why Kumar and Stanley used computer simulations to check it out.

More information: Thermal Conductivity Minimum: A New Water Anomaly, J. Phys. Chem. B, Article ASAP. DOI: 10.1021/jp2051867

How our brains perceive the physical world is so subjective, and apparently, easily manipulatable!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... A_facebook
The Neuroscience of Barbie
A fascinating experiment that lets people experience reality as dolls--or giants
By Travis Riddle | November 8, 2011

A research group at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has managed to make people feel as though they actually inhabited bodies of vastly different size – either that of dolls or of giants. The researchers showed that this fundamentally changed the way people perceived the physical world.

This research also adds to a growing body of literature that demonstrates that the world we perceive is not an identical copy of the physical world. Hills appear steeper when we are wearing heavy backpacks, objects appear closer when we desire them, and, as shown here, the world appears larger when we are in a smaller body. Although the world does not actually physically change in these ways, our mind seems to be constructed in such a way that allows a surprising degree of flexibility in perceiving the physical nature of the world. As scientists work to determining the limits and uses of this flexibility, we will likely be treated to an assortment of findings which may seem to come straight out of fiction.

Just don't do it.
http://www.livescience.com/16903-sex-an ... ancer.html
Sex With Animals Linked to Penile Cancer
Jennifer Abbasi
Date: 07 November 2011

For many people, bestiality is a bad joke, but for some it could be a matter of life or death, according to a new study finding that men who had sex with animals in their lifetimes were twice as likely to develop cancer of the penis as others. In addition to SWA, three other risk factors for penile cancer were found: smoking, the presence of premalignant lesions on the penis and phimosis, a condition where the foreskin cannot be retracted over the penis.

Men who had sex with animals also reported a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.

The researchers found no association between penile cancer and the number of animals the men used over time, the species (which included mares, cows, pigs and chickens, among other animals) or the number of other men who also participated. However, the higher rate of reported sexually transmitted diseases in men who had sex with animals could be a result of group sex, said lead author Stênio de Cássio Zequi, a urologist inSão Paulo. More than 30 percent of subjects practiced SWA in groups.

Sex with animals could be as ancient as sex itself. "Since time immemorial, this habit has been described in folk music, theater, jokes and oral traditions," Zequi told LiveScience. "In some antique civilizations there were temples or rituals designated for SWA practices." Yet SWA is underrepresented in scientific literature, and the new study is the first to link the practice to male genital cancers. Penile cancer accounts for up to 10 percent of cancers in men in Asia, Africa and South America, although it is rare in the U.S.