Fact of the day

Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Fact N° 2440
Your brain grows as you make more friends.
Researchers studying rhesus macaques found that the monkeys' brains grew as they were introduced to more cage-mates. There was a hefty 5% increase in gray matter per cage-mate. These increases reflected a greater need to read different gestures and vocalizations from more individuals in a social group; two brain regions showed increases that corresponded with a monkey's status in the dominance hierarchy. Studies on humans are harder to perform, due to the necessity of restricting a subject's total social contact, but the researchers indicated that previous human studies exhibit a similar link between social network and brain size.
Fact N° 2441
Kids who play video games (even even violent ones) show increased creativity.
A study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior gave 491 12-year-olds a common test, the "Torrance Test of Creativity", which involves drawing pictures from existing shapes, titling the images and telling a story about them. Both male and female subjects who played video games - regardless if they were violent or nonviolent - were more creative. But the effect seems limited to video games; games on cell phones or on the internet were not linked to creativity.
Fact N° 2442
Men can unconsciously smell when a woman is ovulating.
According to a study published in Psychological Science, men are able to detect the scent of a fertile woman, even if they're unaware of what it is they're detecting. Researchers asked two groups of men to smell t-shirts. Some had been worn by women at various points in their menstrual cycles; others were unworn control-group shirts. Men who smelled the shirts of ovulating women experienced an increase in testosterone levels. Furthermore, they rated the shirts worn by ovulating women as the most pleasant-smelling.
Fact N° 2443
Strawberries can protect you against alcohol damage.
Consistent alcohol use predisposes us to various health issues, including ulcers and various cancers (between %2 and %4 of cancers are attributed to alcohol). However, new research has indicated that strawberries can help mitigate this damage. European researchers fed rats 0.0014 ounces of a strawberry extract per 0.00003 ounce of body weight, then fed them an alcohol diet designed specifically to damage their stomach tissue, and found that those rats' stomachs were protected compared to those in a control group. Strawberries may even be effective protection against various other kinds of stomach-tissue damage (from viruses, for instance).
Fact N° 2444
A woman's history of orgasm is observable in her walk.
A study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine asked female subjects to take a questionnaire on sexual behavior. The participants were then filmed walking in public spaces. Two professors of sexology, unaware of the women's questionnaire answers, were able to guess with 80% accuracy whether a woman experienced vaginal orgasm just by examining her walk. Researchers theorized that either a woman's physiological characteristics influence both her stride and her sexual behavior, or a vaginally orgasmic woman is also more likely to feel confident and liberated in general.
Fact N° 2445
Online bullying remains much less prevalent than real-life bullying.
According to the Pew Research Center, most teens (69%) treat each other with civility online and when bullying does happen the vast majority of them report ignoring this behavior (90%) or joining in to defend the victim (80%). Over the past year, 12% of teens reported some kind of in-person bullying, while only 8% reported online bullying. Adults also report seeing cruelty in social networking circles, albeit less often than teens (7% of adults reported seeing "frequent" cruelty, compared to 12% of teens).
Fact N° 2446
A dog owner's gender dramatically influences the dog's behavior.
A study in Applied Animal Behavior Science found that of all the possible factors that influence a dog's behavior -- the dog's age, size, gender, and the presence of a leash -- the most influential was the gender of the person walking the dog. Dogs walked by men were four times more likely to threaten or bite other dogs than dogs walked by women. Additionally, dogs with leashes were more likely to be aggressive than dogs without them, likely reflecting the dogs' frustration at being unable to move about freely.

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