"So natural is our capacity for rhythm that most of us take it for granted: when we hear music, we tap our feet to the beat or rock and sway, often unaware that we are even moving. But this instinct is, for all intents and purposes, an evolutionary novelty among humans. Nothing comparable occurs in other mammals nor probably elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Our talent for unconscious entrainment lies at the core of dance, a confluence of movement, rhythm and gestural representation. By far the most synchronized group practice, dance demands a type of interpersonal coordination in space and time that is almost nonexistent in other social contexts.
Even though dance is a fundamental form of human expression, neuroscientists have given it relatively little consideration. Recently, however, researchers have conducted the first brain-imaging studies of both amateur and professional dancers. These investigations address such questions as, How do dancers navigate though space? How do they pace their steps? How d" - Shannon Jiménez
"Stomach bugs picked up during foreign travel may be prevented by wearing a patch impregnated by toxins produced by the E. coli bacterium." - Shannon Jiménez
computer scientists aim to create stuff...like gods do :P ...those guys above just try to analyze last things with language...which is a failure from the beginning. - krz9000
@krz9000: computer scientists are engineers, who create practical things for people to play with. Everything above doesn't try to create so much as understand the universe, thus, way more pure ;) - Shannon Jiménez
Hey, I had an emphasis in biology! Soooo, I guess I'm purer than myself... - Amber
I don't understand why the girl on the right doesn't see the guy a few feet to her right? You know, the logician? After all, mathematics is just applied logic. - Kevin Fox
and Art tries to visually represent the universe in all these ways and from all these points of view (and more). In this comic, Art isn't on the graph, Art is the graph! ;) - Rachel L Fisher
"My children eat anything. My 9-year-old daughter reaches for second helpings of spinach, and when we eat out I have to stop her brother, now 13, from showing off the weird things he’ll consume by ordering goat testicles. Think of a child staging a sit-in at his suburban dinner table because there’s a fleck of dried parsley on his breaded fish finger, and you have imagined everything my children are not." - Shannon Jiménez
"In a country where melons are a luxury item commonly given as gifts, the watermelon's hefty price tag follows another jaw-dropping auction last month, where a pair of "Yubari" cantaloupe melons sold for a record $23,500." - Shannon Jiménez
"Pasteurization doesn’t kill all bacteria in the milk, just enough so that you don't get a disease with your milk mustache. UHT, on the other hand, kills everything." - Ross Miller
"The Australian researchers did detect trace quantities of a peppery molecule in shiraz wine, but not enough to analyze it. So they looked for the same molecule in ground white pepper, and found it at levels of a few parts per million — enough to positively identify it as a chemical called rotundone.... The Australian scientists may also have discovered how these highly spiced potatoes were allowed to leave the kitchen: they tested 49 people and found that about 20 percent of them could not detect rotundone at all, even at concentrations far above what’s found in white pepper. The scientists say this shows the different experiences two people can have of the same wine, or of the same pepper-seasoned food." - Shannon Jiménez
Does this mean I can get Weez to stop talking about my pepper soup? - Sheila Taylor
No, it just means that Dad isn't one of the 20% that can't taste it! - Shannon Jiménez
First pisco, now this: "The origin of the potato has become, well, a "hot potato" between neighbors Peru and Chile.
The spud dispute began Monday, when Chilean Agriculture Minister Marigen Hornkohl said 99% of the world's potatoes derive from spuds native to Chile.
Peru, where the potato is a source of national pride, bristled at the claim and said the comes from a part of the Andes near Lake Titicaca, most of which is located in modern-day Peru. The country claims to have some 3,000 varieties of potato." - Shannon Jiménez
And I think we ate 2000 of the varieties on our trip... - Sheila Taylor
"Look in particular at squares A and B. A appears to be dark grey, B appears to be white or whitish. But in fact, they are the same exact color.
Don' t believe it? Me neither! Or at least, I didn't until I went ahead and deleted most everything that is not A or B from this picture."
- Shannon Jiménez
Yep. I didn't believe it either, so I copied the pic and edited it myself. Way cool. - Shannon Jiménez
Erick just watched as I erased the edges and says it is so weird that it doesn't seem possible :) - Shannon Jiménez
It's all because shadows are really dark, as measured physically, but you still need to be able to see white things in the shadows and know they're white. Put another way, you judge the darkness of something by inferring the darkness of the pigment that covers it, not by whether it's in a shadow or not. - j1m
"FreeCell soon went viral, joining the text-based role-playing game Avatar among the early online community's most-used programs. Along with shuffling the cards automatically, the program kept track of players' statistics; it was soon recording winning streaks as long as 5,000 consecutive games." - Shannon Jiménez
Before reading this, I was proud of my 53-game streak... - Shannon Jiménez
"Thus the evils of procrastination worked their way into the oft-repeated adages of the new capitalist era. "Procrastination is the thief of time," wrote English poet Edward Young in 1742. A few years later, Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, penned the words: "No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today." Ben Franklin is credited with a similar saying, mockingly transformed by Mark Twain into the procrastinator's motto, "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow." (Those who follow Twain's wry advice don't just procrastinate, they perendinate, a useful word meaning "to put something off until the day after tomorrow.")" - Shannon Jiménez
"Nanotubes are likewise being developed for use in new drugs, energy-efficient batteries, electronics and other products under the assumption that they are no more dangerous than graphite. But some scientists and environmentalists like Maynard caution that they harbor hidden dangers. " - Shannon Jiménez
