Science 🧬(@science) 인스타그램 상세 프로필 분석: 팔로워 1,819,552, 참여율 1.7%

Meet nature's most weather-sensitive primate—a critically endangered monkey so anatomically unlucky that rainstorms turn into sneeze-filled nightmares.⁠ ⁠ The Myanmar snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri), discovered just 15 years ago in the remote mountains of northern Myanmar, possesses one of evolution's most peculiar design flaws: upturned nostrils that act like tiny rain funnels. When precipitation falls directly into their exposed nasal cavities, the monkeys sneeze so loudly and frequently that local hunters can easily track them during the wet season by following the distinctive sound echoing through the forest.⁠ ⁠ Local Lisu and Law Waw communities have long known these primates by names meaning "monkey with an upturned face"—mey nwoah and myuk na tok te—and report that the animals have developed a remarkable behavioral adaptation to cope with their unfortunate anatomy. During rainstorms, the monkeys sit with their heads tucked face-down between their knees, maintaining this uncomfortable position until the weather clears to prevent water from entering their problematic nostrils.⁠ ⁠ Scientists formally described Rhinopithecus strykeri in 2011 based on specimens obtained from local hunters, making it the first snub-nosed monkey species discovered in Myanmar. However, the species entered the scientific record already critically endangered, with only 260-330 individuals surviving in a tiny range spanning the Myanmar-China border at altitudes between 8,500-10,000 feet.⁠ ⁠ Habitat destruction from Chinese logging operations and hunting pressure threaten to eliminate this unique species before researchers can fully study their remarkable rain-avoidance behavior. The monkeys spend summer months in higher altitude mixed forests, descending to lower elevations in winter—a seasonal migration that makes them particularly vulnerable to human encroachment and habitat fragmentation.

Scientists have finally solved the mystery of why cute animal content dominates the internet—and it's not just about getting likes. A study from Concordia University and ESSEC Business School reveals that sharing videos of cute animals actually strengthens human relationships in ways we never understood before.⁠ ⁠ Researchers Zeynep Arsel and Ghalia Shamayleh discovered that sending animal content creates "digital affective encounters"—moments that trigger genuine positive emotions between people. ⁠ ⁠ The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, interviewed animal content creators and consumers to understand this phenomenon. What they found was shocking: people put serious thought into which animal posts they share, using them to recall shared memories and show deep personal knowledge of their friends.⁠ ⁠ The research reveals that animal content acts as a "social lubricant" online, creating what scientists call "digital affective networks"—entire relationship systems built around mood-boosting content. Someone might send a video of baby pandas falling over with the caption "You and me at our first yoga class," instantly connecting past experiences with present laughter.⁠ ⁠ This isn't mindless scrolling—it's sophisticated emotional communication. In a world where social media gets criticized for toxic content, cute animals have become our secret weapon for maintaining genuine human connections across digital spaces.⁠ ⁠ The findings suggest that your daily dose of cat GIFs isn't digital junk food—it's relationship maintenance disguised as entertainment.⁠ ⁠ Source: 10.1093/jcr/ucaf023

According to a survey of 2,000 Americans who are traveling to visit loved ones this holiday season, it takes just 3 hours and 54 minutes of socializing with extended kin for the average person to long for peace. The study was recently commissioned by Motel 6 and conducted by marketing research company OnePoll.⁠ ⁠ “It’s not just family dynamics causing stress. No matter how you travel, the experience itself can be a source of anxiety for many,” Rob Palleschi, chief executive officer of Motel 6, commented on the findings, per South West News Service (SWNS).⁠ ⁠ In the weeks ahead, respondents said they plan to stay with family for an average of 3.5 days during annual festivities, while a whopping 40 percent agreed that coordinating sleeping arrangements is one of the most stressful elements.⁠ The bedlam over beds may be justified, as participants explained that, on average, two people will ultimately be forced to sleep on something other than a proper bed during this year’s holiday celebrations.⁠ ⁠ More broadly, opinion was mixed regarding the biggest woes inherent to sleeping over at family members' homes. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they were anxious about “a lack of privacy,” while 20 percent fretted about family members eventually getting on their “nerves.” In addition, 19 percent of people worried that their presence was “imposing” in the first place, and 18 percent hoped the house wouldn’t be “too loud or busy.”⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ #familygathering #family #flu #virus #viruses #science #biology #dna

Ultrablack is a rare color that reflects less than half a percent of incoming light, a property valued in telescopes, cameras, and solar devices. Researchers at Cornell University have now created the darkest fabric ever measured, a material with an average total reflectance of just 0.13 percent. Their method draws from the magnificent riflebird, a bird-of-paradise whose feathers trap nearly all light using melanin pigments and tightly packed barbules.⁠ ⁠ Working with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the team studied how these feathers channel light inward. To replicate this, they dyed white merino wool with polydopamine, a synthetic melanin, then etched the material in a plasma chamber. The etching formed nanofibrils, tiny spiked structures that force light to bounce repeatedly until absorbed. The resulting textile stays ultrablack across a 120-degree viewing span, outperforming commercial materials that often appear shiny at an angle.⁠ ⁠ Because these nanofibrils form within the fibers, the fabric stays flexible and wearable, unlike earlier ultrablack technologies that relied on rigid or fragile structures. The process works on natural materials including wool, cotton, and silk, and the team has filed for patent protection while exploring commercialization through Cornell’s innovation programs.⁠ ⁠ The fabric’s extreme absorptivity could improve solar-thermal systems by converting more captured light into heat, and the researchers are also studying possibilities for thermo-regulating camouflage. It has already appeared in a riflebird-inspired dress by designer Zoe Alvarez, where its deep matte tone remained unchanged even when the image’s contrast and color settings were heavily altered.⁠ ⁠ #science #materials #nanotech #engineering #physics #biomimicry #solartechnology #innovation #research #cornelluniversity⁠ ⁠ Source: 10.1038/s41467-025-65649-4

Our face, hands, and fingertips are richly innervated, meaning they’re filled with tiny nerves and nerve endings that need to receive sensory information from touch in order for us to perform fine motor functions. Each of those nerve fibers is like an electric cable or telephone wire, engineered to carry different types of information between our brains and the rest of our bodies.⁠ ⁠ A body part like the fingertip is like Manhattan – filled with crisscrossing wires and cables for a dense population. Even a small event in Manhattan could disrupt electric or telephone service for many people. But our backs are more like a desolate area of Kansas, where a car could hit a telephone pole and affect service for only a few residents.⁠ ⁠ _____⁠ ⁠ That’s why the pain of common paper cuts is so exquisite – a paper cut on your finger, lips, or tongue is cutting through many more nerve endings and lighting up more pain receptors than it might on your back.⁠ ⁠ Those densely innervated areas of the body are also richly supplied with blood. Many tiny capillaries stretch underneath the skin of your face, hands, and fingers, so cutting through them with the edge of a piece of paper also causes you to bleed.⁠ However, the paper cut does not cut further into your skin. Instead, the blood capillaries are packed into the dermis layer. Since a microscopic cut does not penetrate the dermis, a paper cut typically doesn't bleed a lot.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ #nerves #nerveendings #tissues #papercut #papercuts #papercutting #science #biology

The human desire for companionship may feel boundless, but research suggests that our social capital is finite—we can handle only so many relationships at one time. Social scientists have used several ingenious approaches to gauge the size of people’s social networks; these have returned estimates ranging from about 250 to about 5,500 people. Looking more specifically at friendship, a study that used the exchange of Christmas cards as a proxy for closeness put the average person’s friend group at about 121 people.⁠ ⁠ However vast our networks may be, our inner circle tends to be much smaller. The average American trusts only 10 to 20 people. Moreover, that number may be shrinking: From 1985 to 2004, the average number of confidants that people reported having decreased from three to two. This is both sad and consequential because people who have strong social relationships tend to live longer than those who don’t.⁠ ⁠ _____⁠ ⁠ So what should you do if your social life is lacking? Here, too, the research is instructive. To begin with, don’t dismiss the humble acquaintance. Even interacting with people with whom one has weak social ties has a meaningful influence on well-being. Beyond that, building deeper friendships may be largely a matter of putting in the time. A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, an additional 40 hours to become a “real” friend, and a total of 200 hours to become a close friend.⁠ ⁠ If that sounds like too much effort, reviving dormant social ties can be especially rewarding. Reconnected friends can quickly recapture much of the trust they previously built while offering each other a dash of novelty drawn from whatever they’ve been up to in the meantime. And if all else fails, you could start randomly confiding in people you don’t know that well in hopes of letting the tail wag the relational dog. Self-disclosure makes us more likable, and as a bonus, we are more inclined to like those to whom we have bared our souls.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ #sciencefacts #biologyfacts #science #biology #friends #bestfriends

Humans have been treated as the only “rational animals,” set apart by our ability to weigh evidence and change our minds. Now a series of experiments with chimpanzees is tearing down that pedestal. At a sanctuary on Ngamba Island in Uganda, researchers have shown that chimps revise their beliefs based on how strong different clues are, in a way that maps onto formal models of rational decision-making.⁠ ⁠ In the core task, food was hidden in boxes and chimps saw or heard different hints about where it was. Seeing an apple placed in a box or visible through a window counted as strong evidence, while hearing something rattle or spotting crumbs counted as weak. When a strong clue came first, chimps stuck with their initial choice. When a weaker clue was followed by a stronger one, they switched. They were not just chasing the latest hint, they were grading evidence and keeping track of the reasons behind their decisions.⁠ ⁠ Additional experiments pushed this further. A third “mystery” box showed that chimps preferred weak evidence over none at all, highlighting a layered evaluation of uncertainty. They also treated two different weak clues as more persuasive than the same one repeated, suggesting they recognized when information was redundant. And when scientists revealed that an earlier clue had been misleading, a picture instead of real fruit, a rock instead of a snack, the chimps downgraded that evidence and changed their choice.⁠ ⁠ This pattern mirrors belief revision, the ability to track what you know, how you know it, and revise when reasons collapse. The findings suggest that chimps use metacognition to navigate conflicting information, narrowing the cognitive gap between humans and other apes. The work points to deep evolutionary roots for rational thought and strengthens the ethical case for protecting great apes and creating more cognitively rich environments for them.⁠ ⁠ Source: 10.1126/science.adq5229

In the Nordic countries, healthy eating has been redesigned as a blueprint for long life and a lighter planetary footprint. New research from Aarhus University links the 2023 Nordic Nutrition Recommendations to significantly lower risk of dying early, turning a regional guideline into a powerful natural experiment in public health and sustainability.⁠ ⁠ The recommendations are simple but structural: eat less red meat and added sugar, shift the plate toward whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, nuts, fish, and low fat dairy. Using detailed diet and lifestyle records from more than 76,000 middle aged adults in two long running Swedish cohorts, researchers built a score that measures how closely people follow this pattern.⁠ ⁠ When they compared scores with health outcomes, the gap was striking. Those who adhered most closely to the Nordic guidelines had a 23 percent lower overall mortality rate than those who did not, even after accounting for income, education, and physical activity. Deaths from cancer and cardiovascular disease were also notably lower in the high adherence group.⁠ ⁠ The guidelines were designed not only for human biology but for a warming planet. Food systems currently drive around 30 percent of human made greenhouse gas emissions, along with heavy demands on land, water, and nutrients. Because the Nordic diet emphasizes plant forward, resource efficient foods, it cuts climate pressure at the same time it improves health outcomes.⁠ ⁠ Published in the Journal of Nutrition, the study is the first to test the new Nordic guidelines as a whole package. Together, the results suggest that what is on a typical Scandinavian dinner plate today could be a prototype for diets that extend lives while shrinking humanity’s environmental shadow worldwide.⁠ ⁠ Source: 10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.06.030

Buried in coal ash, sealed inside extinct volcanoes, and growing in fern leaves, a new picture of the world’s rare earth supply is taking shape. These metals power magnets in wind turbines and electric cars, as well as smartphones and military systems, yet production remains concentrated in a handful of countries, especially China, creating geopolitical and environmental strain.⁠ ⁠ Geoscientists in Texas estimate that decades of U.S. coal burning left behind 52 billion tons of ash enriched in rare earths. Burning coal strips away carbon and other volatiles, concentrating trace elements in the remaining ash. Using national datasets, the team calculates about 11 million tons of accessible rare earths, potentially worth up to 97 billion dollars when yttrium and scandium are included.⁠ ⁠ Extraction is still experimental, but coal ash offers a major advantage, the rock has already been mined and pulverized. Recovering metals from this waste could reduce the need for new open pits and help fund cleanup of old ash ponds that threaten groundwater.⁠ ⁠ Another hidden supply lies in ancient, iron rich volcanoes. Laboratory experiments that simulate these magmas show iron rich droplets can absorb rare earth elements far more efficiently than surrounding melts. Former and active iron ore mines in places like Sweden and Chile may therefore contain overlooked rare earth resources.⁠ ⁠ Plants are part of the story too. In southern China, the fern Blechnum orientale produces nanoscale crystals of monazite, a key rare earth mineral, inside its tissues. This hyperaccumulator thrives in metal rich soils and can be harvested repeatedly, turning phytomining, using crops to pull metals from soil, into a promising green extraction strategy.⁠ ⁠ Source: 10.1007/s40789-024-00710-z

Controversial neuroscience research suggests that "gut feelings" may involve the brain receiving information from the future, with experiments indicating that brains react to negative events up to 5 seconds before they occur. Dr. Dean Radin and Dr. Julia Mossbridge conducted studies showing that subjects' brain activity changes before viewing negative images, suggesting that the nervous system may detect significant future events through non-sensory means.⁠ ⁠ This phenomenon, called "presentiment," challenges classical physics and indicates that physiological responses can precede their causes. Radin proposes that quantum mechanics might explain this, theorizing that consciousness exists outside linear time and that precognition could involve brain states entangled across time.⁠ ⁠ Research supports the idea that gut signals influence cognition. Studies have shown that interoceptive signals from the gut can affect memory and decision-making, illustrating how "gut feelings" genuinely affect choices—though mainstream science remains cautious about claiming these feelings predict the future. Notably, the CIA has declassified documents acknowledging research into these phenomena, adding unexpected credibility to the exploration of precognition.⁠ ⁠ Source: cia-rdp96-00787r000100130003-6

The Rosenthal Effect—psychology's most unsettling discovery—proved that teacher expectations alone caused randomly selected students to gain 27+ IQ points, demonstrating how beliefs about people can literally reshape their intelligence and performance through a self-fulfilling prophecy.⁠ ⁠ Psychologist Robert Rosenthal and principal Lenore Jacobson conducted their landmark 1968 study at Spruce Elementary School in San Francisco, creating what would become one of psychology's most controversial and widely cited experiments. They administered IQ tests to all students, then randomly selected 20% of children and falsely told teachers these students were "intellectual bloomers" poised for dramatic academic growth—when in reality, they were completely ordinary students chosen by chance.​⁠ ⁠ The results defied rational explanation: when students were retested eight months later, those randomly labeled as "bloomers" showed significantly higher IQ gains than control groups, with first graders improving by an average of 27+ IQ points and second graders showing substantial gains as well. The teachers' expectations had somehow manifested into measurable cognitive improvements in children who had no actual academic advantage.⁠ ⁠ Rosenthal identified the mechanism as unconscious behavioral changes: teachers provided more encouragement, gave richer feedback, taught more challenging material, used warmer body language, and allowed more response time to students they believed were gifted—all without consciously realizing they were treating these children differently. These subtle shifts in interaction created an environment where expectations became reality.⁠ ⁠ However, the study sparked fierce controversy: replication attempts since the 1980s found much weaker effects, with only 5-10% of students showing the dramatic gains Rosenthal reported, and those gains often "reset" after weeks. Critics challenged the IQ measurement validity and accused Rosenthal of cherry-picking data.⁠ ⁠ Despite methodological debates, the core insight remains profound and disturbing—expectations shape reality through invisible mechanisms.⁠ ⁠ Read More: wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

Belgian prodigy Laurent Simons just became possibly the youngest person in history to earn a quantum physics PhD at age 15—and he's already enrolled in a second doctorate to pursue his ultimate goal of defeating biological aging and creating "super-humans."⁠ ⁠ The University of Antwerp witnessed extraordinary history this November when Laurent Simons successfully defended his doctoral thesis on "Bose polarons in superfluids and supersolids"—a cutting-edge topic exploring how impurity particles behave in ultracold quantum gases and exotic phases of matter that combine superfluid properties with crystalline order. Dubbed "Belgium's little Einstein," Simons has shattered every conventional timeline for academic achievement.⁠ ⁠ His academic trajectory defies comprehension: finishing primary school at age 6 after starting at 4, graduating high school at 8, completing a bachelor's degree in physics by age 11 in just 18 months (normally requiring three years), and earning a master's degree in quantum physics at 12 while his peers were typically in secondary school. His master's research explored the fascinating analogy between Bose-Einstein condensates—ultracold gases where particles act as one quantum object—and black holes.⁠ ⁠ The research credentials are legitimate: Simons completed internships at Germany's prestigious Max Planck Institute, where he investigated the intersection of quantum optics and medical science. His doctoral research focused on understanding polarons (impurities "dressed" by surrounding particles) in exotic quantum states, work that bridges fundamental physics with potential medical applications.⁠ ⁠ His ambitions extend far beyond theoretical physics. Immediately after defending his PhD, Laurent enrolled in a second doctoral program in medical science with an artificial intelligence focus in Munich. His stated goal since age 11 has remained consistent and audacious: "After this, I'll start working towards my goal: creating 'super-humans.'" His interdisciplinary approach combining quantum physics, medicine, and AI aims toward defeating biological aging and extending human life.