All posts tagged: unique

Why evolution can explain human testicle size but not our unique chins

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our history. But scientists are still puzzling over why we evolved into this particular form. Why do humans uniquely have a chin, for example? And why, relative to body weight, is a human testicle triple the size of a gorilla’s but a fifth of that of a chimpanzee? As I show in my new book, The Tree of Life, we are still searching for the answers to many of these “why” questions. But we are starting to find answers to some of them. The story of evolution tells us how, starting from simple beginnings, each species was built – when each of the components that make a living creature was added to its blueprint. If we climb the evolutionary tree of life, we can follow a twisting path that visits the increasingly specialised branches that a …

Pilates Expert Nofar Hagag Shares How Emily Ratajkowski Sculpts Her Body With the Trainer’s Unique Method

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[ad_1] Work it out! Fitness pro Nofar Hagag has become known for her signature Pilates approach since launching in 2019, and ever since, celebs like Emily Ratajkowski, Karlie Kloss, and Brooke Shields have been flocking to her workouts. Unlike traditional Pilates classes, Hagag teaches 25 minutes on the Reformer and 25 minutes on the Cadillac —all in one session — at her studios in New York City and Miami, Florida. Courtesy of Nofar Method “Nofar Method blends the precision of classical Pilates with a creative, challenging and intuitive flow. … I wanted to create something more athletic, but friendly, that also that felt affective, personal, and transformative. … Using both the Cadillac and Reformer machines in a single class is something that’s rarely done. This unique combination allows for a wider range of movement, more variety in exercises, and a deeper, more effective full-body workout,” the former NCAA Division 1 water polo athlete tells ET. Think: Detailed technique merged with a purposeful blend of equipment; all set in an atmosphere filled with Himalayan salt crystals to engage the body …

Twin Peaks’ Mark Frost: ‘David Lynch and I had a unique alchemy that’s never been duplicated’

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[ad_1] Launched 35 years ago in the spring of 1990, the eight-episode first season shook the world of television to its core. Mark Frost and David Lynch were keen to take TV further than it had ever gone before. Speaking exclusively to RT, Frost explains: “After World War II, television set up a kind of cosy and warm conformity that was best exemplified in situation comedies. It was always the nuclear family, the dad was a sweet, loveable goofball, the kids were all adorable, and it was utterly predictable. It was all designed to sell products to those people in the audience — television was an advertising medium. “It wasn’t until the ‘60s that I perceived television can do a lot more than that, if you gave it a chance. There were little sparks that would escape every once in a while like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which blew the top of my head off. I didn’t think that sort of storytelling was possible. Believe me, I filed those sorts of things away.” Frost spent …

My new favorite headphones for swimming come bundled in a unique charging accessory

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] ZDNET’s key takeaways The Zygo Z2 headset is available for $329 You can stream all your subscription music, the headset stays firmly in place, coaching is available for a small fee, and audio quality is good in the water The headset range doesn’t support open water swimming, your phone and transmitter need to be near the pool, and the headset only works with the paired transmitter. One significant challenge to enjoying music while you swim is finding non-DRM MP3 files to load onto the internal storage of the headset, since most people today use one of the popular music streaming services. Zygo has solved that problem with its new Zygo Z2 headset, which allows you to stream audio content from your smartphone to the headset. I have been swimming with it in Colorado for the past week. Also: My favorite bone conduction headphones have 3 invaluable safety features Bone conduction headphones are my preferred type of headset for running because my ears stay open, increasing my level of safety and awareness. Bone conduction technology is …

Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

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[ad_1] A female bonobo at Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Lukas Bierhoff, Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project Bonobos combine their calls in a complex way that forms distinct phrases, a sign that this type of syntax is more evolutionarily ancient than previously thought. Human language, often described as the hallmark of our species, is made up of many different building blocks. One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences. This is made possible through compositionality, where the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of the parts. Compositionality in itself isn’t unique to humans. For example, chimpanzees combine calls to warn others of snakes. But, so far, only “trivial compositionality” has been identified in non-human animals, whereby each unit adds independently to the meaning of the whole. For example, the phrase “blonde dancer” has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer. Humans were thought to be unique in also having “non-trivial compositionality”, where the words in …

What makes the human brain unique? We compared it with monkeys and apes to find out

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[ad_1] Scientists have long tried to understand the human brain by comparing it to other primates. Researchers are still trying to understand what makes our brain different to our closest relatives. Our recent study may have brought us one step closer by taking a new approach – comparing the way brains are internally connected. The Victorian palaeontologist Richard Owen incorrectly argued that the human brain was the only brain to contain a small area termed the Hippocampus minor. He claimed that made it unique among the animal kingdom and, he argued, the human brain was therefore clearly unrelated to other species. We’ve learnt a lot since then about the organisation and function of our brain, but there is still much to learn. Most studies comparing the human brain to that of other species focus on size. This can be the size of the brain, size of the brain relative to the body, or or the size of parts of the brain to the rest of it. However, measures of size don’t tell us anything about …

We are all bad at choosing random numbers in our own unique way

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[ad_1] Picking a truly random number is harder than you think aryna Terletska/Getty Images People are generally bad at producing random actions, but now it seems that we are all uniquely bad in our own way. This makes it possible to predict how an individual will act randomly, which could have implications for data security and choosing suitably strong passwords. Psychologists already know that we struggle with randomness – ask people to name a random colour, and a majority will say “blue”, while the most frequent answer for a random number between 1 and 10 is 7. [ad_2] Source link

How a unique puppy kindergarten lab put the science into dog training

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[ad_1] “Oreo was my best friend growing up,” says Brian Hare. If Hare wanted to hone his baseball pitching skills, his Labrador enthusiastically took on fielding duties. If he decided to explore the nearby woods, Oreo was an ever-willing companion. But there was one place where boy and dog always parted company. “Oreo never set foot in our house. Not one time,” says Hare. Today, the front door is no longer closed to most dogs in higher-income countries – and many spend their days relaxing on sofas and watching TV. You would think they would be in doggy heaven. But Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, thinks the development has left them in the doghouse. For millennia, he says, we expected dogs to guard our property and protect our family at nighttime. Now, we have a different set of expectations. Not only do we want our indoor dogs to be friendly around strangers and rest quietly through the night, they should also respond to potty training, refrain from chasing other …

Royal news live: King Charles to celebrate milestone birthday in very unique way as Camilla continues recovery

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[ad_1] Princess of Wales joins King at major Remembrance event Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email King Charles will turn 76-years-old on Thursday – and will mark the special date by hosting a surplus food festival. The King will open two hubs designed to save and circulate tonnes of surplus food to mark the first anniversary of the Coronation Food Project, an initiative to support charities feeding the nation with unwanted food. It is hoped the hubs will help charities like FareShare and the Felix Project to support communities in need. Charles will tour the new facility, and take a look at a newly installed industrial freezer, which will increase capacity by 400 per cent, improving the charity’s ability to preserve more surplus food. It comes as Queen Camilla said she is “getting much better” as she arrived at a Booker Prize reception in her first public engagement since falling ill …

How artists’ unique cognitive skills enhance their drawing abilities

Published by José

[ad_1] Artists often captivate us with their ability to translate the world around them into stunningly realistic drawings. But what cognitive processes enable such skill? A recent study sheds light on this question, revealing that art students possess a unique flexibility in how they process visual information. They can switch between focusing on small details and grasping the overall structure of an object, but interestingly, they tend to start with a global perspective when beginning a drawing. These findings, published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, suggest that artists have a perceptual edge that may explain their superior drawing abilities. Creating a realistic drawing is more than just a creative endeavor; it’s a complex cognitive task that requires the artist to break down what they see into manageable parts while also maintaining an awareness of the overall structure. Previous research has indicated that artists might excel at this balance between local and global processing, but the specifics of how they manage this balance—particularly in comparison to non-artists—were not well understood. Additionally, …