That's Interesting

  • The Math of Living Things

    Exploring the intersection of physical and biological laws.

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  • Cultivated meat: Out of the lab, into the frying pan

    Making cultivated meat a $25 billion global industry by 2030 presents opportunities within and beyond today’s food industry.

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  • Exploring the Brain Activity Related to Missing Penalty Kicks: An fNIRS Study

    At vital moments in professional soccer matches, penalties were often missed. Psychological factors, such as anxiety and pressure, are among the critical causes of the mistakes, commonly known as choking under pressure. Nevertheless, the factors have not been fully explored. In this study, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the influence of the brain on this process.

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  • Why professional soccer players choke during penalty kicks

    A new study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain activity as inexperienced and experienced soccer players took penalty kicks.

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  • Behold the 1940s Typewriter That Could Type in English, Chinese & Japanese

    Watch More Than a Thousand Different Characters in Action

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  • How the Internet Archive Digitizes 3,500 Books a Day – the Hard Way, One Page at a Time

    Does turning the pages of an old book excite you? How about 3 million pages? That’s how many pages Eliza Zhang has scanned over her ten years with the Internet Archive, using Scribe, a specialized scanning machine invented by Archive engineers over 15 years ago.

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  • Applying insights from magic to improve deception in research: The Swiss cheese model

    Social psychologists, placebo scientists, and consumer researchers often require deception in their studies, yet they receive little training on how to deceive effectively.  The field of magic offers a potential solution; magicians have deceived audiences for millennia using a variety of robust techniques.

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  • The Strange Costumes of the Plague Doctors Who Treated 17th Century Victims of the Bubonic Plague

    In the 17th and 18th centuries,with the bubonic plague sweeping Europe, plague doctors wandered towns and countryside in a “fanciful-looking costume [that] typically consisted of a head-to-toe leather or wax-canvas garment,” writes the Public Domain Review, “large crystal glasses; and a long snout or bird beak, containing aromatic spices (such as camphor, mint, cloves, and myrrh), dried flowers (such as roses or carnations), or a vinegar sponge.”

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  • Inside Baikonur, Kazakhstan’s Gateway To Space

    As liftoff nears for the first astronauts launched from U.S. soil since 2011, we take a look at the Soviet-built cosmodrome that sent more than a dozen NASA astronauts into orbit.

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  • Music Is Truly a Universal Language: New Research Shows That Music Worldwide Has Important Commonalities

    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s description of music as a universal language has become a well-worn cliché, usually uttered in a sentimental and not particularly serious way.  In the sciences, the “universal language” hypothesis in music has been taken far more seriously.

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