Tag: physiology

Belly-button biodiversity

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/07/Belly-Button-Biodiversity.mp3[/podcast] It’s summer, that time of year when belly buttons escape their natural habitat of swimming pools and beaches and wander free in the oddest places, from the library to the shopping mall (although unlike the grins of Cheshire cats, they rarely appear without their owners). But as you survey these navel maneuvers, don’t think …

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Hypnic jerks

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/06/Hypnic-Jerks.mp3[/podcast]

Embarrassment

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/04/Embarrassment.mp3[/podcast] Some people are easily embarrassed. Some, not so much. I, for example, have no problem at all singing in public. (Here’s proof!). That’s not true for everyone. Which is why, I guess, that researchers studying the neurological basis of embarrassment recently chose to trigger embarrassment by making people listen to recordings of themselves singing. …

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Stretching: the truth

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/03/Stretching-the-Truth.mp3[/podcast] Exercise is good for you. It’s a shame, since I personally find the whole sweating/breathing hard/ hurting thing a (literal) pain, but I don’t believe I can mount a successful argument as to why sitting on your rear end eating junk food all day is actually better for you, even though evolution seems to …

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It’s past your bedtime!

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/Its-Past-Your-Bedtime.mp3[/podcast] Ah, New Year’s. A time for resolutions, typically focused on living more healthily. Apparently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, not trusting us to do it ourselves, has decided to make our resolutions for us: it’s started 2011 with a series of stories lecturing Canadians on how unhealthy their lifestyle is, and started something called the …

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A half-billion years of irritation

Just a couple of years ago, I wrote a column about the advent of tearless onions that included some background on why onions make us cry in the first place. Ordinarily I wouldn’t revisit a topic quite so soon, but you know how it is with science: things change fast, and just this week there …

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It’s on the tip of my tongue…

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/03/Tip-of-the-Tongue.mp3[/podcast] How often has this happened to you? “So I was talking to…to…oh, you know, that guy, the one in the head office, big hair, bad teeth, only listens to Perry Como records…geez, why can’t I remember his name? It’s on the tip of my tongue!” It’s a common phenomenon, and it’s not just people’s …

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To sleep, perchance to dream

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/11/Dreaming.mp3[/podcast] Why do we dream? You’d think we’d know by now. Everyone dreams, and people have been fascinated by dreams throughout recorded history. But scientifically, their origin and importance remain uncertain. Do they serve some vital psychological or physiological function? Or are they just meaningless accidents of our brain’s wiring? A few years ago, Finnish …

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On the scent of odourprints

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/10/Odourprints.mp3[/podcast] You smell. No, I’m not being insulting. I smell, too. So does everyone else. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) human noses are not particularly sensitive, and so we only notice one another’s smells under certain circumstances, which we are all familiar with and I am therefore spared from having to enumerate. But to those of …

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Stop that stretching!

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Stretching.mp3[/podcast] There’s a perception that science is always reversing itself. If you don’t like what science has to say about, say, the health benefits or risks of a particular food (eggs, for example, or coffee), you only have to wait awhile until a contradictory study comes out. That’s because science progresses in fits and starts. …

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Reverse-engineering the brain

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/blue-brain.mp3[/podcast] Ah, the human brain. Seat of consciousness, miracle of creation or evolution (discuss amongst yourselves), able to jump to tall conclusions in a single bound, so incredibly complex that we’ll never be able to understand how it works. Um, not so fast. A year and a half ago, scientists at the Blue Brain Project …

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Why sunlight in your eyes can make you sneeze

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/04/photic-sneezing.mp3[/podcast] “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,” the late John Denver sang. “Sunlight in my eyes can make me cry.” Lovely lyrics. But as a kid, I thought it would have made more sense for Denver to sing, “Sunlight in my eyes can make me sneeze.” Because for somewhere between one in 10 and …

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