"I've been asked to analyze an exotic chemical sample from a supervillain attack. It's highly caustic and behaves so strangely when it should be inert that it looks alive."
Even under the circumstances I had to flash a grin. "Sounds like magic."

Pavlov's dogs could not have been more faithful. "Because people ( Read more... )

The daily activity rhythm of most rodents can be easily recorded because they ( Read more... )

Puzzles. I hate puzzles. Ivan liked flowcharts -- nice and clear and you could always tell just where you were and what you should do next, everything laid out neatly. No ambiguities. No traps. Why couldn't life be more like flowcharts?

* There is no such thing as being wise beyond your years. One can only know as ( Read more... )

[...] experimenters trapped wild Seattle crows just once while wearing rubber masks sold on the Internet as caveman faces. More than two years after the incident, people of various genders and ages and with different body sizes and walking gaits attracted shrieking, dive-bombing crows when wearing the masks. Yet the same people could walk ( Read more... )

Vampire bats in Costa Rica live in colonies of a dozen or so but hunt individually. On any day, some may be lucky and others unlucky. The lucky ones return to the hollow trees where ( Read more... )

During moments of insight, cognitive filters relax momentarily and allow ideas ( Read more... )

In a fairly straightforward experiment, the researchers assembled a large number of identical tetrahedral-shaped dice and began adding these to different-shaped containers, shaking and adding more dice until no more could be added. Packing fractions were then determined by injecting a well known filling fluid until the containers were full and ( Read more... )

There are specially devised formulas by which one can estimate internal cranial capacity (in cubic ( Read more... )

He devised an objective measure of the degree to which a lecturer bored the ( Read more... )

Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. [ ... ] Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of ( Read more... )