October 2011
8 posts
Science Behind the Factoid: 93% Body Language
As we all know, 78.3 percent of statistics are made up, probably because exact, precise numbers seem very authoritative and neat. One such made up but commonly repeated statistic is this: 93 percent of communication is body language, or 93 percent of all human communication is nonverbal. The wording and exact percentage sometimes varies, but the essence remains the same: words mean almost nothing....
Russia restores its orbital GLONASS group →
GPS used to be the Global Positioning System. Meaning, the only system of its kind. Although free to use across the world, the system is operated and controlled by the US government. Naturally, this makes other countries uneasy. During the 2008 war in South Ossetia, when the US backed Georgia and Russia backed South Ossetian separatists, GPS was blacked out in the region. There are several...
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2011 Nobel Prizes →
The 2011 winners of the Nobel prizes in physics and physiology or medicine have been announced. The physics prize goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess for their research on a specific class of supernovae, which turned out to be unexpectedly dim, indicating that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. The prize in medicine was awarded to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A....
Why Is There Music? →
Music is present in all cultures. It’s a very basic thing that nearly all humans enjoy, but unlike, say, food or sex, we can’t connect it to any survival advantage. So why is there music, and what is it we enjoy about it? Those are some questions the Auditory Processing Laboratory at Montreal Neurological Institute is trying to investigate. In a series of papers, scientists from the...
