“Morris suggested that the relative difficulty in achieving female orgasm, in comparison to the male’s, might be favorable in Darwinian evolution by leading the female to select mates who bear qualities like patience, care, imagination, intelligence, as opposed to qualities like size and aggression, which pertain to mate selection in other primates.”
The 2008-2010 United States ammunition shortage refers to a shortage of small arms ammunition in the United States that started in late 2008 and remains ongoing. Both firearms and ammunition have been selling at a record pace since the election of President Barack Obama. Shortages have been experienced for most common types of ammunition used for hunting or target shooting. In addition, primers for handloaded ammunition have also been in short supply.
Remington Arms Chief Executive Officer Ted Torbeck said was quoted in the Chambersburg Public Opinion newspaper on 2009-11-30 from Remington’s most recent quarterly earnings conference call as saying “Since the U.S. presidential election, demand for ammunition has risen amidst concerns that the new administration will further restrict the use or purchase of firearms and ammunition and levy additional taxes on these products.”
However, thus far the Obama administration has not attempted to further restrict gun ownership.
The Milgram Experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Read the fragment about how many participants offered further assistance after the experiments for an extra dose of creepiness.
This is, by a long shot, the most horrifying stuff I’ve read in months. Go on my friend: sit comfortably, pay attention and enjoy your share of deep-down-the-spine chills.
Some anglerfishes, like those of the Ceratioid group, employ an unusual mating method. Because individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were highly reduced male ceratioids.
At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. The male ceratoid lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are significantly smaller than a female angler fish, and may have trouble finding food in the deep sea. Furthermore, the growth of the alimentary canals of some males become stunted, preventing them from feeding. These features necessitate his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish.
When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.
A nightmare originally sponsored by The Oatmeal. By the way, forward this story to anybody you know that gives some credit to ‘intelligent design’.
Today I’m introducing you all to the extraordinary Naked Mole Rat.
- Highly adept at moving underground and can move backward as fast as they can move forward.
- Well adapted for the limited availability of oxygen within the tunnels that are its habitat: its lungs are very small and its blood has a very strong affinity for oxygen, increasing the efficiency of oxygen uptake.
- In long periods of hunger, such as a drought, its metabolic rate can be reduced by up to 25 percent.
- They can substantially reduce their metabolism during hard times, and so prevent oxidative damage. This has been summed up as “They’re living their life in pulses.”
- The skin of naked mole rats lacks a key neurotransmitter called substance P that is responsible in mammals for sending pain signals to the central nervous system. When naked mole rats are exposed to acid or capsaicin, they feel no pain.
- It is extraordinarily long-lived for a rodent of its size (up to 28 years) and holds the record for the longest living rodent.
- Naked mole rats appear to have a high resistance to cancer; cancer has never been observed in them
Should I ever be injected with a mutagen agent, please make sure it contains naked mole rat DNA. Go Splinter go!
“For a few months, following the release of Rocky IV, a joke was making rounds in Hollywood. Since Rocky Balboa had run out of earthly opponents, he would have to fight an alien if a fifth installment of his boxing series were to be made.
Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas took the joke seriously and wrote a screenplay based on the joke. The Thomas script for Predator was originally titled Hunter.”
Jean-Leon Gerome, Pollice Verso (1872).
“The number of combats fought by gladiators was extremely variable. Most combats were fought in small buildings owned by public citizens. Very few fights were open to the public. Most fought at two or three munera annually but an unknown number died in their first match. Up to 150 combats are recorded for a very few individuals. A single bout probably lasted between 10–15 minutes, or 20 at most.”
Featuring:
- Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short.
- Many people confuse the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Immaculate Conception is the Roman Catholic belief that Mary was herself conceived without original sin.
- A fatwā is a religious opinion on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar, not a death sentence.
- Different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue by taste buds.
- People do not use only ten percent of their brains.
- The notion that goldfish have a memory of only three seconds is false. They have been trained to navigate mazes and can recognize their owners after an exposure of a few months.
- Prolonged exposure to cold weather such as rain or winter conditions does not increase the likelihood of catching a cold
- Water is not a good conductor of electricity, and is, in fact, a good electrical insulator. It is impurities in water that allow for good electrical conduction
This is your chance to double check before speaking. Also, to carefully store this knowledge to play smart-ass with your friends.
Via Nick Douglas.
