5 Cool Things:
10/26/23
Hi, this is Greg Powell. I hope you'll enjoy one or more of these interesting topics from the world of business and beyond. Dan Powell, my son and collaborator, has researched the articles and written the summaries, so this is not a boilerplate message. We'd like to give you a weekly break to learn about something cool or, better yet, 5 Cool Things
The History of Trick-or-Treating Goes Back Centuries (Smithsonian Magazine)
Along with the traditions of carving pumpkins, putting fake plastic spiders everywhere, and scaring the bejeezus out of ourselves, Halloween is the time of year when children travel house to house in elaborate costumes, gathering candy and other treats. Why is trick-or-treating a harvest time tradition? Apparently, the dressing up part of Halloween goes back some 2000 years, to an ancient Scottish and Irish belief that dressing like a demon would allow them to blend in with the real demons emerging to walk the earth. Later, in the 7th century, the Catholic Church converted the pagan rituals into a holiday where poor people, and eventually children, would travel to wealthy homes praying to honor the dead in exchange for food. The “trick” part of trick-or-treat came in only recently, after a wave of Halloween pranks in the 1920s. Read more…
Doppelgangers Share Similar Genetics and Behaviors, study Discovers (Big Think)
There’s at least one doppelganger out there for everyone — so they say. It can be very uncanny, even uncomfortable, to meet someone who looks similar to you, but there’s another thought that might give you pause: it seems that looking alike can mean thinking alike, too. A study of 25 pairs of lookalikes found significant similarities in genetic makeup, despite the sample DNA not coming from shared ancestry. In addition, people who looked alike tended to share other physical characteristics, like weight and height. And even behaviors like smoking, or the educational level of the study participants, seemed to be linked. Read more…
The Quest to Understand Tornadoes (ARS Technica)
In the 1990s, the movie Twister popularized the world of tornado research, and immortalized images of scientists in trucks chasing a swirling storm, eyes peeled for the ominous funnel in the distance. These days, research methods have improved with the use of drones and computer modeling, but some questions remain: what kinds of storms create tornadoes? And how do they get their spin? Unsurprisingly, clues point to the influence of topography in helping to form a funnel cloud — evidenced by the large number of tornadoes in the American plains. However, tornadoes can also form in the American southeast, where they grow along a line of storms called a squall line instead of from storm supercells. “We have no clue how these work.” Read more…
Salt Taste is Surprisingly Mysterious (Knowable)
Most people love pleasantly-salted food — in fact, salt drastically improves flavor — but there is absolutely such a thing as too much salt. The human sense of taste registers two types of salt flavor, and one of them lets us know when the concentration is too high. This "salt alert" represents one of the biggest gaps in the scientific knowledge of taste, as experts don’t exactly know how we detect saltiness. However, we do know that salt is essential for life, being necessary for the electrical signals in our bodies, and our bodies can automatically regulate the salt content in our blood through cravings for salt or repulsion from salty foods. Through studies on mice, recent research suggests that too much salt might trigger taste buds that normally respond to sourness. Read more…
It Uses A.I. It Goes on Your Head. Can It Induce Lucid Dreams? (Slate)
Can AI technology help us dream better? Inducing and maintaining lucid dreams, wherein one is conscious within a dream, is an arcane practice that involves many months or years of diligent work. What if technology could jump-start the process and give us the keys to the world of our own imaginations? Prophetic, a new company launched with millions in funding from venture capitalists and technical experts, plans to launch its “Halo” device in 2025 — even though the company admits that it hasn’t yet induced a lucid dream. The technology is predicated upon studies that show lucid dreams can be created using electrical waves; the major leap required is to demonstrate that AI can tune sound waves to accomplish the same result. Read more…
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