Mars bears
A smiley-faced bear, in a NASA satellite鈥檚 image of the surface of Mars (above), is inspiring smiles on the faces of humans on the surface of Earth.
Similar discoveries have garnered two Ig Nobel prizes. Richard Hoagland was awarded the 1997 Ig Nobel prize for astronomy for his work, in which he claimed to have identified giant artificial structures in NASA photos, including a human face on Mars. Later, others realised that the face was just made up of shadows cast by hills. The reinterpretation was efficiently summarised in a 快猫短视频 headline: 鈥淢artian conspiracy theorists lose face鈥�.
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This kind of mistaken interpretation is called pareidolia, and Kang Lee and his colleagues received the for neuroscience for studying it. They were trying to understand of people who, for example, can see the face of Jesus on a piece of toast.
Focus on cannabis
Can cannabis make people more efficient at doing repetitive work? With a few exceptions, research about cannabis seems to have had difficulty focusing on the question. Researchers have mostly looked in the opposite direction, asking how much does cannabis impair a person鈥檚 work, cogitation or professional prospects.
A study in Performance Enhancement and Health brings some cheery info, though not much data. Niki Kiepek and her colleagues at Dalhousie University, Canada, surveyed 370 women and 145 men. They explain that 鈥淐annabis was used to enhance motivation to engage in household activities鈥�, that 鈥淢en were more likely to report cannabis reduced boredom鈥� and that some women 鈥渉ad switched to oral consumption of cannabis gummies to reduce judgments associated with smoking鈥�.
A Nigerian study from 2015 hints at a cannabis boost to efficiency. Manasseh Iroegbu at the University of Uyo, Nigeria, is lead author of 鈥淓xploring the performance of mason workers in the construction industry: New evidence from the use of cannabis at work site in a field experiment鈥�.
Forty masons were 鈥済iven each a wrap of cannabis鈥�. Another 40 were not. The study says: 鈥淎 delay time of 30 minutes was allowed after smoking for the cannabis effect to peak. Thereafter, the 80 masons started work at the same time which involved the laying of blocks.鈥� During the next 4 hours, the smokers 鈥減erformed higher than the nonsmokers鈥�.
Alas, that is almost all the detail we are given. The subsequent years have brought mystery. The study is no longer online, nor is the journal 鈥� Social Sciences and Psychology 鈥� where it appeared.
Real-life romance noir
Romance can be challenging, especially when one of the romancers seems 鈥渄angerous鈥� or 鈥済ross鈥�, or has a personality bursting with 鈥淣arcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy鈥�, three qualities known as the .
The conjunction of seamy personalities and romance is much studied by psychologists, perhaps none more diligent than Peter Jonason, who has published about 200 studies on the dark triad. His latest, , appears in Personality and Individual Differences. It explains that, for women and some men: 鈥淭he most repelling factors in the long-term context were being apathetic and gross, and in the short-term context they were being gross and clingy.鈥�
Jonason has another study coming out in the same journal. The title is: . It is classified as a 鈥淪hort Communication鈥�.
A little bit missing
While astrophysicists try to identify the 鈥渕issing mass鈥� that constitutes most of the universe, authorities in Western Australia had to search for a specific, tiny chunk of mass that went missing.
The government quietly blared an alert: The capsule is tiny (6 millimetres in diameter, 8 millimetres tall). Its content 鈥� 鈥渁 small quantity of radioactive Caesium-137鈥� 鈥� is, of course, even tinier. That was the bulk of the info given to the public. After a few days, roadside searchers found it.
That capsule temporarily joined its older conceptual siblings in the public historical record. Most of those are US nuclear bomb cores, six of which between 1950 and 1968. There may be others, their missingness recalling Tom Lehrer鈥檚 ever-pertinent lyric in his song about Nazi and then US rocket designer Wernher von Braun:
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