curiosities

In many urbanized areas the lights are always on, and that affects the behavior of birds, according to a new study published in Current Biology. According to ornithologist Bart Kempenaers, the artificial lights make the males start their morning songs much earlier.

Roses certainly smell better than rotten fish. But the brain detects the smell of the latter with more speed and acuity, according to a study carried out by American and Canadian scientists and published in the journal 'Biological Psychology'.

Lighting the streets with blue light instead of white, orange or yellow could reduce both the number of suicides and the crimes committed. Although there are still not enough studies to confirm it, several cities have decided to put this measure to the test. The Japanese railway company Central Nippon Expressway Co began installing LED panels last year to project blue light on its platforms, in order to discourage people from trying to kill themselves by jumping onto the tracks.

It is known as anamorphosis (derived from the Greek, meaning 'to transform') to a particular use of the laws of perspective in painting in which the forms are distorted representations of reality on a flat or curved surface, which only make sense when they look at each other from a certain point of view.

In the 1990s, scientists began to wonder why many birds eat different varieties of chili pepper without reacting to the pungent taste (painful for many) produced by a substance called capsaicin. Anna Pidgeon, University of Wisconsin-Madison ...

Russian astronaut Alexander Skvortsov, commander of the International Space Station (ISS), assures that the cosmos has an unmistakable smell reminiscent of that produced when one granite stone hits another. "It cannot be explained, it is very specific" said the astronaut.

There are words that we usually use synonymously when they really are not. It occurs, for example, with cannibal and cannibal, two terms that do not mean exactly the same thing. Anthropophagous is the name given to the animal that eats human flesh, while cannibal refers to the one that eats the flesh of individuals of the same species.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have developed a novel method to measure the body temperature of extinct dinosaurs from their skeletal remains, teeth and even egg shells. "It's not like traveling back in time and putting a thermometer on the animal, but it comes very close," explained Robert Eagle, a co-author of the study.