The 2001 discovery of the seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus, the first known upright ape-like creatures, was yet more proof of humanity’s place among the great apes. And yet Mike Pence, then a representative and now US vice president, argues for the opposite conclusion.

For him, our ideas about our ancestors have changed, proving once more that evolution was a theory, and therefore we should be free to teach other theories alongside evolution in our classrooms.

How to respond? The usual answer is that we should teach students the meaning of the word “theory” as used in science – that is, a hypothesis (or idea) that has been proved through repeated testing. Pence’s argument will then be exposed to be what philosophers call an equivocation– an argument that only seems to make sense because the same word is being used in two different senses.

Just words

Evolution, Pence argues, is a theory, theories are uncertain, therefore evolution is uncertain. But evolution is a theory only in the scientific sense of the word.

And in the words of the National Academy of Sciences, “The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.”

Attaching this label to evolution is an indicator of strength, not weakness.

If you take this approach, you have failed to understand the purpose of Pence’s rhetoric, or why it is so appealing to creationists. Pence is an accomplished politician, and knows exactly how to appeal to his intended audience. He is also an accomplished trial lawyer, which makes him a conjuror with words, and like any skilful conjuror he has pulled off his trick by distraction. Pence has drawn us into a discussion about words, when our focus should be on the evidence.

I would suggest the opposite approach. The problem is not really with the word “theory” at all. Students will have learned its meaning in the same way they learn meanings in general: by seeing how the word is used.

They will have heard of atomic theory, which no one has seriously doubted for over a century. And what about the theory of gravity? Finally, they may have seen how Darwin himself uses the expression “my theory”, although at the time it was neither comprehensive nor well supported (there were huge gaps in the fossil record), to refer in a very general way to his linked ideas about mutability of species, common descent, and the power of natural selection.

So if anyone says, “Evolution is a theory”, don’t give them a lecture on the meaning of the word “theory”. If you do, you’ve fallen into the trap of making it seem that how we define words should affect how we see reality. You will be fighting on ground of your opponent’s choosing, since arguing about how to apply words is the stock in trade of theologians, preachers and lawyers like Mike Pence.

The correct response is to say that evolution is a theory – like gravity is a theory – and then redirect attention to the evidence. And that evidence is overwhelming.

Evolutionary ammo

Start with family relationships. Carl Linnaeus showed how living things can be classified into species, genera, families and so on, and Darwin pointed out that this is exactly the structure we would expect from a family tree.

All dogs are canines, so dogs share an ancestor with foxes; all canines are carnivora, so dogs share a more remote ancestor with bears; all carnivora are mammals, so dogs and sheep are, albeit more remotely, related, and so on.

Then look at the discovery over the past few decades of family relationships at the molecular level, and the fact that the molecular family tree matches that based on anatomical resemblances.

Observe the fossil record. Once lamentably full of gaps (Darwin was among the lamenters), it is now densely populated. A century ago, it still made sense to point to the “missing link” between humans and pre-human apes. Now we know of several different hominin species living alongside each other, and the problem becomes one of distinguishing our grandparents from our great uncles. And yes, there are missing links in the chain, but without evolution we would not have a chain at all.

And then there’s biogeography: for example, why marsupials are only found in South America and Australasia, and except for a few species that made their way across the Isthmus of Panama, are never found elsewhere.

Plus we can actually observe evolution, and study it in the field or in the lab. The emergence of pesticide resistance is evolution in action, as shown in the justly famous Harvard/Technion demonstration“evolution on a plate”. So is the delightful Russian experiment of breeding tame foxes. Artificial selection, just as much as natural selection, is evolution in action.

And finally, and most convincingly, we must look at the way that these different lines of evidence mesh together. We can apply biogeography to the fossil record, and link it to what we know about the movements of the continents. Using the methods of molecular biology, we can identify and time the mutations that led different species to diverge from their common ancestor, and match the timing against the fossil record.

Thus the fossil record, deep anatomical resemblances, and DNA evidence agree in showing that whales, for instance, are closely related to hoofed mammals, diverging from them in the Eocene period. There are many other examples of such consistency.

Then, and only then, pause to explain how a scientific theory is an interlocking connection of ideas that explain things about the world, and that evolution is one of the most successful examples. And challenge the Mike Pences of this world to spell out exactly what they would like to see taught alongside the Theory of Evolution – and why.

SEE ALSO: 7 strange and surprising ways that humans have recently evolved

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NOW WATCH: There's a place off California's coast called the 'Red Triangle' where over 1/3 of great white shark attacks happen

It may feel satisfying to pop a pimple and let all the gushy substance flow out. However, by popping a pimple, you are doing more harm to your skin than you might think. 

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We know that dinosaurs ruled the Earth many millions ago, but how they walked has been a mystery.

Our new research shows that the movement of some dinosaurs has a lot in common with some of today’s ground-dwelling birds. We looked at theropod dinosaurs, which were typically bipedal (two-legged), walking on their hind legs like Tyrannosaurus rex.

In our study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, we took measurements of 211-million-year-old theropod footprints from a quarry at Culpeper in Virginia, in the United States, and compared them to similar measurements for locomotion in humans and 11 species of ground-dwelling bird such as the quail, emu and Australian bush turkey.

This is the first time that locomotion in the three groups of bipeds has been compared on a level playing field. In particular, we focused on a parameter called step width, which measures how widely spaced the left and right feet are during locomotion.

We compared measurements of step width against the speed of the animal, measured directly for the modern species, or by using stride length as a proxy for the extinct theropods.

From walking to running

In all three groups, step width decreased with increasing speed. In other words, as the animal moved faster, the left and right feet were placed closer towards the body midline, and at the fastest speeds of locomotion, the feet could even cross over the midline.

So this told us that the extinct theropods that made the footprints were at least following the same general principle seen in modern bipeds.

Interestingly, however, the way in which step width decreased with increasing speed was different between the three groups.

In humans, step width shows an abrupt, precipitous decrease at the transition from walking to running. In other words, as soon as we start running we suddenly bring our feet much closer towards the body midline.

But in both the modern birds and the extinct theropods, no such abrupt change was observed. Instead, the step width decreased gradually with increasing speed.

This pattern of similarity and contrast suggests that the extinct theropods were moving more like modern birds than humans.

Furthermore, a gradual or continuous change with speed has been previously observed for many other measurements of locomotion in birds, such as stride length and step frequency.

Birds therefore have what is called a “continuous locomotor repertoire” – that is, walking and running are not distinct gaits (as they are in humans), but instead they transition seamlessly from one to the other.

The extinct theropods that made the footprints were probably also using a similarly continuous locomotor behavior.

A better understanding

This research changes our thinking about theropod movement, in three main ways.

First, using a continuous locomotor behaviour could have been beneficial to theropods by allowing them to run just that bit faster while maintaining stability, thus reducing bone and muscle stresses.

Second, the unique locomotor behaviour that characterizes modern birds today may actually have been inherited in part from their theropod ancestors, showing more similarities between birds and dinosaurs than previously recognized.

And third, this study helps to paint a better picture of what extinct theropods were like as living animals. We now know that side-to-side limb movements were important for theropod dinosaur locomotion to increase stability while walking, and that theropods did not simply use human-like walking and running gaits.

This locomotory gait found in dinosaurs and birds may also be important for improving visual acuity by increasing head stability, particularly in the vertical direction.

This is important if we wish to create biomechanical models of theropod locomotion, such as one of T. rex, to address questions such as maximum speed capabilities or endurance.

It’s also important if we want to make sure that these types of dinosaurs are portrayed accurately in film, animation, computer simulations and other forms of popular culture.

SEE ALSO: A dinosaur tooth discovered in Appalachia suggests big horned dinosaurs may have lived in the eastern US

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• Google has fired an engineer who wrote an internal memo blaming biological differences between men and women for gender inequality in the tech industry.
• Scientific evidence does not support the claim that differences in personality, preferences, or tendencies between genders is based on genetics or biology.
• Business Insider went though the memo point by point to fact-check the engineer's claims. 

A Google engineer has been fired after writing a memo asserting that biological differences between men and women are responsible for the tech industry’s gender gap.

“We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” James Damore wrote in the manifesto, which was first reported by Vice’s Motherboard and later released in full by Gizmodo.

The 10-page document criticizes Google initiatives aimed at increasing gender and racial diversity, and argues that Google should focus more on "ideological diversity" to make conservatives more comfortable in the company’s work environment.

In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai cut his vacation short and wrote a memo criticizing Damore’s manifesto for advancing harmful gender stereotypes. "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK," Pichai wrote.

Experts have been quick to cite numerous scientific meta-analyses of differences between the sexes, most of which suggest that men and women are alike in terms of personality and cognitive ability. Here are the specific claims Damore made in his manifesto, and the real science behind them.

Biological gender differences

Although some differences between men and women have been observed by scientists, they are mostly physical ones. Current research generally does not find evidence that variations in preferences, psychology, or personality stem from genetic or biological factors. Rather, they’re primarily attributed to culture and socialization.

In his manifesto, however, Damore suggested the gender differences he lists do have biological components. One justification he gives for this belief is that the differences he mentions are “what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective” and are “universal across human cultures.” 

Damore didn’t cite any sources to back up his reasoning. However, a 2001 analysis of responses to a prominent personality inventory test found that “contrary to predictions from evolutionary theory, the magnitude of gender differences varied across cultures” — a direct contradiction to his argument.

A strong 'interest in people rather than things'

One of the main biological differences between men and women, according to Damore, is that women are more open to feelings and “have a stronger interest in people rather than things.”

He went on to suggest: “These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing.”

Throughout his memo, Damore linked to many Wikipedia pages as justification for his claims — but neither news media organizations nor scientists accept Wikipedia as a credible source of information, especially when used in policy recommendations.

To back up the “people over things” hypothesis, Damore cited a study published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass in 2010; however, that work never says the gender differences it lists have a proven biological mechanism — only that there's a possibility one might exist.

In fact, the study acknowledges: “Although most biologic scientists accept that sexual selection has led to sex differences in physical traits such as height, musculature, and fat distributions, many social scientists are skeptical about the role of sexual selection in generating psychological gender differences.” 

A 2000 review of 10 studies related to gender differences in empathy also suggests men and women don’t have innate differences in this area. The researchers found that such distinctions were only present in situations where the subjects were “aware that they are being evaluated on an empathy-relevant dimension” or in which “empathy-relevant gender-role expectations or obligations are made salient.” In other words, differences had to do with how people responded to expectations of them, not any inherent abilities.

Adam Grant, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has also highlighted the fact that differences between men and women’s professional preferences are not genetically determined.

“The data on occupational interests do reveal strong male preferences for working with things and strong female preferences for working with people,” Grant wrote in a LinkedIn essay responding to Damore’s claims. “But they also reveal that men and women are equally interested in working with data.”

A tendency towards 'gregariousness rather than assertiveness'

In the memo, Damore suggested that women are biologically prone to express their extraversion as gregariousness instead of assertiveness, and to be more agreeable than men.

That difference, he claims, “leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.”

Again, Damore didn’t cite any evidence for this part of his argument. A 2005 analysis of 46 meta-analyses of gender differences suggests it’s false.

According to the American Psychological Association, one experiment in that analysis involved participants who were told that they would not be identified as male or female. Under those conditions, “none conformed to stereotypes about their sex when given the chance to be aggressive.” The researchers found the opposite to be true, in fact: “women were more aggressive and men were more passive,” they wrote.

And a meta-analysis of leadership effectiveness published in 2014 suggests that when it comes to others’ evaluations of leaders (as opposed to the leader’s own perception), “women are rated as significantly more effective than men.” When looking at self-ratings, however, “men rate themselves as significantly more effective than women rate themselves.”

That suggests that context and learned expectations are responsible for some observed gender disparities.

Neuroticism and anxiety

Damore also suggested that women are biologically prone to feel higher levels of stress and anxiety, and posited that difference might contribute “to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.”

The only source he gave for this information is Wikipedia. However, the misconception might have stemmed from analyses of the Revised NEO Personality inventory (the prominent personality test mentioned above).

On the test, according to a 2001 secondary analysis, women reported themselves to be higher in neuroticism. But those responses are based purely on self-perception (which is heavily influenced by social and cultural factors) so it’d be problematic to consider that a biological difference.

A search for work-life balance instead of status

“Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average,” Damore wrote.

As evidence for this, he cited a 2006 paper published in the British Journal of Guidance and Counseling.

That article highlights the fact that more women value a balance between their professional and home lives than men. It also suggests that men are more likely to make their careers their first priority. However, nowhere does that paper suggest that these preferences come from biological or evolutionary differences between the sexes.

In fact, it makes this caveat: “They are differences of degree, with large overlaps between men and women. They are not fundamental qualitative differences, as often argued in the past in order to entirely exclude women from ‘male’ occupations such as management, the military and the professions.”

Gender expectations of men

Damore does make a couple of valid points about the gender expectations of men, and the way these might contribute to the tech industry’s gender gap.

He suggested that because men are often judged based on their status in the professional world, that pushes “many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail.”

Furthermore, Damore noted that “men are still very much tied to the male gender role,” and wrote that allowing men to express traits or pursue goals that are traditionally thought of as “feminine” would help alleviate some of the gender-gap problems.

Although he doesn’t cite any sources for these claims either, it seems logical that gender expectations and stereotypes are partially responsible for the types of roles men seek out in the workplace.

Pichai also acknowledged the validity of Damore’s complaints about perceived intolerance of conservative viewpoints among Google’s employees.

“There are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint),” the CEO wrote in his statement. “They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK.”

Damore’s views, however, were not the reason he was fired — rather, it was because portions of his manifesto violated Google’s code of conduct.

According to Reuters, Damore is now pursuing legal action against Google, though labor law experts suggest his case could be an uphill battle.

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NOW WATCH: Neil deGrasse Tyson reveals the biggest misconceptions people have about the universe

Researchers just extended the life of middle age mice by injecting them with stem cells from newborn mice. This research could lead to anti-aging solutions for humans. 

Speaking of the research, Mr Dongsheng Cai said: "All these basic fundamental aspects of life are controlled by the hypothalamus. So it's really in a leadership position. So when hypothalamus function is in decline, particularly the loss of hypothalamus stem cells, and this protection against the aging development is lost, it eventually leads to aging."

"If we can translate what we have seen in animals to humans, I think humans can function better during a later stage of aging, say eighties, nineties, even hundreds, centenarians. So they could have better functions and their life quality could be better, more improved."

Produced by Jasper Pickering. Special thanks to Leon Siciliano. 

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It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86% European, and … 14% Sub-Saharan African.”

The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100% white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Panofsky and Donovan presented their findings at a sociology conference in Montreal on Monday. The timing of the talk — some 48 hours after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. — was coincidental. But the analysis provides a useful, if frightening, window into how these extremist groups think about their genes.

Reckoning with results

Stormfront was launched in the mid-1990s by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His skills in computer programming were directly related to his criminal activities: He learned them while in prison for trying to invade the Caribbean island nation of Dominica in 1981, and then worked as a web developer after he got out. That means this website dates back to the early years of the internet, forming a kind of deep archive of online hate.

To find relevant comments in the 12 million posts written by over 300,000 members, the authors enlisted a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, to search for terms like “DNA test,” “haplotype,” “23andMe,” and “National Geographic.” Then the researchers combed through the posts they found, not to mention many others as background. Donovan, who has moved from UCLA to the Data & Society Research Institute, estimated that she spent some four hours a day reading Stormfront in 2016. The team winnowed their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.

About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky said.

But some took a more scientific angle in their critiques, calling into doubt the method by which these companies determine ancestry — specifically how companies pick those people whose genetic material will be considered the reference for a particular geographical group.

And that criticism, though motivated by very different ideas, is one that some researchers have made as well, even as other scientists have used similar data to better understand how populations move and change.

“There is a mainstream critical literature on genetic ancestry tests — geneticists and anthropologists and sociologists who have said precisely those things: that these tests give an illusion of certainty, but once you know how the sausage is made, you should be much more cautious about these results,” said Panofsky.

A community’s genetic rules

Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe are meticulous in how they analyze your genetic material. As points of comparison, they use both preexisting datasets as well as some reference populations that they have recruited themselves. The protocol includes genetic material from thousands of individuals, and looks at thousands of genetic variations.

“When a 23andMe research participant tells us that they have four grandparents all born in the same country — and the country isn’t a colonial nation like the U.S., Canada, or Australia — that person becomes a candidate for inclusion in the reference data,” explained Jhulianna Cintron, a product specialist at 23andMe. Then, she went on, the company excludes close relatives, as that could distort the data, and removes outliers whose genetic data don’t seem to match with what they wrote on their survey.

But specialists both inside and outside these companies recognize that the geopolitical boundaries we use now are pretty new, and so consumers may be using imprecise categories when thinking about their own genetic ancestry within the sweeping history of human migration. And users’ ancestry results can change depending on the dataset to which their genetic material is being compared — a fact which some Stormfront users said they took advantage of, uploading their data to various sites to get a more “white” result.

J. Scott Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who has studied consumer use of genetic tests and was not involved with the study, said the companies tend to be reliable at identifying genetic variants. Interpreting them in terms of health risk or ancestry, though, is another story. “The science is often murky in those areas and gives ambiguous information,” he said. “They try to give specific percentages from this region, or x percent disease risk, and my sense is that that is an artificially precise estimate.”

For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable) ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members. Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups, in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these test results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one “that allows them to say, ‘No, we’re really diverse and we don’t need non-white people to have a diverse society,'” said Panofsky.

That’s a far cry from the message of reconciliation that genetic ancestry testing companies hope to promote.

“Sweetheart, you have a little black in you,” the talk show host Trisha Goddard told Craig Cobb on that day in 2013. But that didn’t stop him from redoing the test with a different company, trying to alter or parse the data until it matched his racist worldview.

SEE ALSO: I got my dog’s DNA tested and what I learned shocked me

DON'T MISS: What a genetics test can — and can't — tell you about your biology

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Smart people tend to perform better at work, earn more money, be physically healthier, and be less likely to subscribe to authoritarian beliefs. But a new paper reveals that a key aspect of intelligence – a strong “pattern-matching” ability, which helps someone readily learn a language, understand how another person is feeling or spot a stock market trend to exploit – has a darker side: it also makes that person more likely to learn and apply social stereotypes.

Previous studies exploring how a person’s cognitive abilities may affect their attitudes to other people have produced mixed results. But this might be because the questions asked in these studies were too broad.

In the new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, David Lick, Adam Alter and Jonathan Freeman at New York University decided to home in on social stereotyping. “Because pattern detection is a core component of human intelligence, people with superior cognitive abilities may be equipped to efficiently learn and use stereotypes about social groups,” they theorized.

To explore this, they conducted a total of six online studies involving 1,257 people recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website. In the first two studies, volunteers saw pictures of aliens that varied on four dimensions (colour, face shape, eye size, ears), with most of the blue aliens  paired with an “unfriendly” Behaviour (like “spat in another alien’s face”) and most of the yellow aliens paired with a friendly behavior (like “gave another alien a bouquet of flowers”). The volunteers also completed items from Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, which assesses pattern-matching ability.

A subsequent memory test involved the same participants attempting to pair previously seen faces with their earlier behaviors, but there were also some new blue and yellow faces that actually they hadn’t seen before.  Participants who were better at pattern-matching were more likely to attribute unfriendly behaviors to new blue aliens than to new yellow aliens – suggesting that they’d learned colour–behaviour stereotypes more readily, and applied them.

In studies three and four, volunteers were instead shown realistic pictures of male human faces. The displays were manipulated, so that most of the faces with a wide nose (for some participants) or a narrow nose (for others) were paired with negative behaviours – like “laughed and jeered at a homeless person”. Most of the faces with the other nose type were paired with friendly behaviours – like “sent flowers to someone who was sick”.

After viewing the faces, the volunteers played a trust game involving sharing money. They were led to believe this was an unrelated interlude in the study. Before the game began, they chose an avatar from a large group of faces to represent them online. They then played 12 rounds of what they believed was a real game, each time with a different partner who was represented by their own avatar.

In fact, the volunteers weren’t playing with real partners, and the experimenters manipulated the “partners’'” avatar photos, so that some had wider noses, and some had narrower noses (there were also female “partners” whose nose width did not systematically vary). The team found that volunteers who did better on the test of pattern detection gave less money to partners whose avatars had a nose width related, in the earlier trial, to unfriendly behaviour.

However, when these volunteers were given new information that contradicted the stereotype they had implicitly developed, the better pattern-detectors were also quicker to update their stereotype – to reverse their biases.

In a final experiment, the team used a real-world set of stereotypes, relating to traits they believe are often associated with men (such as being more authoritative) and with women (such as being more submissive). After counter-stereotype training – effectively being told that being authoritative is more associated with women rather than men, for example – good pattern-detectors showed a stronger decrease in stereotyping.

“To our knowledge, these findings are the first to systematically demonstrate that cognitive ability is associated with greater stereotyping,” the researchers write, before adding, “people with superior pattern detection abilities appear to act as naive empiricists, both learning and updating their stereotypes based on incoming information.”

While existing research tends to focus on the benefits of intelligence, these “findings join a small body of work guiding the field toward a more balanced understanding of the consequences of human aptitudes,” they note. For example, it’s also been suggested that superior, misguided, pattern-matching may play a role in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

SEE ALSO: You may be stereotyped if you use these words

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NOW WATCH: Scientists debunked this age-old stereotype about blondes

There's something disconcerting about darkness in the middle of the day.

You get a taste of that feeling when a storm suddenly rolls in overhead, but a total solar eclipse, like the one a 70-mile-wide swath cutting across the US will see on August 21, is a far more shocking moment.

Dusk will suddenly begin as the moon temporarily moves in between Earth and the sun. For those in the zone of totality, where the sun will be fully blacked out, a night-like darkness will fall. The world will become cool.

Even the animals will take note. Some report that they start acting like it's night, running around in wild ways, or that they stop to observe the event — though much of this is based on anecdotal reports, not well-documented studies. No one knows exactly what most of them will do, but at least some reaction is expected.

"It has been reported during many eclipses that many different animals are startled by totality and change their behavior thinking that twilight has arrived,"according to NASA. 

There are only studies on a few different kinds of animals. At least one type of orb-weaving spider has been seen to begin disassembling its webs at the start of the totality, as if it were the end of the day, according to one study. Orb weavers typically destroy their webs and rebuild new ones each morning — they started rebuilding when the sun came back out.

Chimpanzees in a research center at least seemed fascinated and gathered together to seemingly gaze in the direction of the sun during an eclipse, according to another study.

Some people have reported that animals like cows will return to their barns, though that behavior has not always appeared when studied.

Birds have been observed to suddenly go silent as the moment of totality arrives, according to a story published in Audubon.

"Most songbirds will treat it as nightfall, as long as they’re in the 100 percent in the eclipse pathway," ecology professor Scott McWilliams told Audubon. "Diurnal songbirds will become quiet; nocturnal birds the opposite. Thus, for the most part, silence will follow the darkness."

Owls are likely to be active, and bats might take to the sky as well, according to the Nashville Zoo.

The zoo and a number of other organizations encourage people who want to observe animals and report their behavior to do so on an app created by the California Academy of Sciences called iNaturalist.

Some anecdotal reports are even more fascinating. Observers have said that giraffes and llamas begin to run around, appearing to be confused by whats happening and stopping when it ends.

Even more intriguing is what animals in the ocean may or may not do. Some scientists have said they've seen dolphins and whales rising to the surface in groups at the beginning of a total solar eclipse. "The smarter animals freak out," Douglas Duncan, director of the University of Colorado's Fiske Planetarium, told Time.

As for the sharks? Do creatures that have been around for more than 400 million years take note when the sun suddenly disappear? As shark scientist David Shiffman recently noted on Twitter, we don't really know.

SEE ALSO: How to photograph the solar eclipse without damaging your camera

DON'T MISS: Check out all our solar eclipse coverage

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NOW WATCH: All the nasty things inside a pimple — and why you should stop popping them

In a plot that sounds like something out of a low-budget horror film, scientists have recently uncovered ancient, enormous viruses in ice that some say could wake up as the Earth's climate warms.

Before they begin to threaten our health, however, some of these newly-unearthed viruses may offer important clues into some of the most enduring biological mysteries — including where such viruses came from in the first place.

This week scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia found a microorganism in the lakes off the coast of Antarctica that could offer clues as to how the first viruses — which include HIV and even the virus that causes the common cold — came to be. They believe they may have broken out of some of the oldest cells on Earth. The findings are detailed in a paper in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Deep in the lakes of a group of rocky, coastal islands near the south pole, the researchers uncovered an organism that resembles a bacterium, but is not. In reality, the lifeform belongs to a separate class of life known as Archaea, a type of single-celled organism that typically thrives in harsh environments. The most intriguing finding, however, came from even further inside the organism's cells — where a scientists uncovered a tiny piece of self-replicating DNA.

Fragments like these are known as plasmids. Typically, they carry bits of genetic material that could be of use to the cells they live inside. This plasmid, however, was a strange specimen. Instead of remaining trapped inside its host cell like most plasmids, the plasmid (which they named pR1SE) was able to break free. By encasing itself in a protective bubble made of fat, pR1SE could hop out of its host cell — maybe even looking for other cells to occupy.

It's a behavior that is eerily similar to that of viruses.

"pR1SE looks and acts a lot like a virus. But it carries genes that are found only on plasmids, and lacks any telltale virus genes. It is a plasmid with the attributes of a virus," wrote Michael Marshall in a recent article for New Scientist.

In other words, pR1SE could be the missing link between tiny bits of DNA and viruses, potentially solving one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the past century.

SEE ALSO: Ancient, giant viruses are being unearthed in Arctic ice that's at risk of melting

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Business Insider UK spoke to British neuroscientist Professor Tim Bliss about some simple tips that will help to improve your memory. 

Professor Tim Bliss said, "It's something which of course one has always asked and actually it's a very difficult question to answer.

There are one or two tips perhaps. Rehearsing things counts. When you're learning, it helps to learn not in one great block. Split what you're trying to learn into a number of mini blocks and space them in an hour or so apart and then try to rehearse things before you go to sleep. 

It's pretty clear that during sleep memories get consolidated and so what's most recently learned is likely to be consolidated the best during sleep so that's a couple of tips."

Produced by Jasper Pickering. Special thanks to Leon Siciliano.

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Residents of the Houston area affected by Hurricane Harvey have spotted an unusual risk in the floodwaters: colonies of fire ants that have joined together to form floating rafts.

Fire ants are an invasive species native to South America, and they've successfully colonized the southern US. Whenever a major storm blows through, bringing flooding, these ant rafts appear.

To escape floodwaters, the venomous insects quickly link together, with the queen and larvae at the center of the raft. The ants mesh themselves together tightly enough to trap air in the middle, with the ants on the bottom knitted so tightly that water can't get through.

The raft mutates as it goes, with ants traveling across the top and joining the stationary layer on the bottom, according to one study of the dynamics of these structures. The authors of that study wrote that some of these rafts may have more than 100,000 stinging ants.

Fire ants can survive in these structures for weeks or even longer, though they're constantly seeking new dry land to colonize as they float.

For that reason, boaters need to be careful to avoid the rafts. The ants will climb onto a boat and can even climb aboard via a stray oar if given the opportunity, according to a publication by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

While an isolated sting is painful, it's usually only serious for people with an allergy. But a whole colony can deliver real damage.

The National Weather Service is warning people in Texas and Louisiana to avoid the flood water for other reasons as well — it may carry an electric charge from downed power lines, or hide dangerous debris.

As for the ants, they're just trying to escape too, but if you come across a colony, steer clear.

SEE ALSO: Climate change may have made Hurricane Harvey more intense — here's what we know

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NOW WATCH: Pilots flew straight into Hurricane Harvey and caught this incredible first-hand footage

Shaving hair from our faces, legs, armpits, and other parts of the skin is a daily routine that millions if not billions of people follow.

However, many shavers around the world believe a pervasive myth about the practice: that hair grows back stronger or thicker after being razored off.

"That's not been demonstrated to be so," Kurt Stenn, a biologist who's studied hair for more than 30 years, told Business Insider.

We asked Stenn about the notion during a video shoot, since he's a hair follicle scientist who recently dove into the mechanics, evolution, culture, and history of the subject in the book "Hair: A Human History".

Stenn said it's easy to see why people believe the myth. When people shave their hair after awhile, he said, the hair often feels very thin.

"But then they see the hair comes back thicker," he added. "In fact the bottom portion of the hair shaft that's shaved is already thicker."

This thicker part of a hair follicle's shaft is the first to emerge from shaved skin, giving the appearance and feel of thicker-growing hair. Yet this thick base naturally wears down into a thinner tip over time as the hair continues to grow.

However, there may be at least one interesting ramification of closely shaving your skin when it comes to hair growth.

"If you roughen it up, the hair will be stimulated to grow back," he said, adding that it's just not yet proven the hair grows back thicker.

"Scientists have tried to demonstrate, to test this idea, and some scientists claim that this occurs," he said. "But usually the science is not very good. I don't think it's ever been demonstrated clearly that cutting or roughing your skin causes the hair to come back thicker — it comes back quicker."

Like the rest of us, Stenn isn't growing any younger and would love for this to be true.

If it were, he added: "Then balding should go away. It doesn't."

Watch the full video debunking the myth below.

Grace Raver contributed to this post.

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MADRID (AP) — A paternity test has disproved a Spanish woman's claim that she is the daughter of surrealist artist Salvador Dali, the deceased painter's foundation announced Wednesday.

The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation said in a written statement that the Madrid court that ordered the DNA test informed it that Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old tarot card reader, has no biological relationship with Dali.

Abel has long alleged her mother had an affair with Dali and claimed she had the right to part of his vast estate. The foundation said it was happy the "absurd" claim had been resolved.

Calls to Abel's lawyer rang unanswered.

A judicial spokesman told The Associated Press the court has not made the test results public but has informed the parties in the lawsuit. He spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with court rules.

The high-profile paternity claim led to the exhumation of Dali's embalmed remains so genetic samples could be taken. Forensic experts removed hair, nails and two long bones in July.

The foundation said the painter's remains will be returned to his coffin, which is buried in the Dali Museum Theater in the northeastern Spanish town of Figueres, Dali's birthplace. Dali died at age 84 in 1989.

Abel claimed her mother had an affair with Dali while working as a domestic helper in Figueres.

SEE ALSO: Salvador Dali's body was exhumed for a paternity test — and forensic experts found his mustache still intact

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Sex is everywhere.

Ads. Tinder. "Game of Thrones." Flowers in a garden.

But just because we see it everywhere doesn't mean that we can definitively explain why it's everywhere.

Sexual reproduction is a costly endeavor: You need two parents to reproduce, and the male half of a sexually reproducing species is fundamentally incapable of directly producing offspring.

Given the Darwinistic and cutthroat rules of natural selection and the high evolutionary cost of sexual reproduction, why sex continues to exist, and why so many different organisms reproduce that way, is a fascinating and difficult question.

Bio 101

Before we jump to the research, let's run through a refresher of the terminology.

Reproduction is the process by which organisms (parents) produce new organisms (offspring.)

There are two types of reproduction: asexual and sexual. With asexual, a given organism can reproduce by itself (without the assistance of another organism). Examples include budding— in which a new organism develops as a growth from the original organism — and cloning. The key thing about asexual reproduction is that the offspring is identical or extremely similar genetically to the parent.

Meanwhile, sexual reproduction requires two organisms, a male and a female. The male fertilizes a female of the same species to create offspring. The key thing here is that the offspring's genetic composition derives from both parents, meaning it is not identical to either parent. A simple example: A child could have the hair color of one parent but the eye color of the other.

So what's the big problem with sexual reproduction?

Natural selection is ruthless and efficient, but sexual reproduction is not the most efficient way of reproducing. After all, in asexual reproduction, all the organisms can reproduce, while in sexual reproduction, only half of the organisms can reproduce — the females.

In less abstract terms, two hydra can both reproduce asexually, which gives you two offspring. But a human female and a human male together only create one offspring (excluding the possibility of having twins, etc.) since the male cannot directly create offspring.

"This is a huge cost in evolutionary terms, so there must be something very valuable about [sexual reproduction]," Robert Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and the mind behind a computer study of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, told the Evolution Institute a few years ago. "The fact that sex is so universal means that it must be something that large animals and plants have in common."

A look at the reproduction of yeast

So what gives?

As noted above, sexual reproduction leads to genetic variation in the offspring. And so it's possible that sex, although costly in terms of the rate of reproduction, could help the offspring organism adapt to an environment better than its parents. (Anyone who took biology in high school likely remembers the example of the peppered moth during the Industrial Revolution.) This makes intuitive sense, but the trick is actually getting empirical evidence.

There are a few organisms that reproduce both asexually and sexually, which makes them the prime candidates to test the benefits of sexual reproduction. One such organism is yeast.

Yeast reproduce asexually when there's an abundance of food. But if there's not enough food, then they reproduce sexually.

Back in 2005, a team of researchers led by Matthew Goddard, then a postdoc at Imperial College London, genetically engineered yeast so that it would continue to reproduce asexually in dire circumstances. This, then, allowed them to compare how yeast that can reproduce sexually fare in tough conditions compared to those that could only reproduce asexually.

And here's where it gets interesting: under normal conditions, both yeasts did equally well; but in the harsher conditions, the yeast that could sexually reproduce adapted more quickly and survived better.

"Our results indicate that sexual reproduction can provide a selective advantage during adaptation to new environments," the team wrote in Nature. "A challenge now is to understand the nature of the mutations that underlie adaptation and to extend these techniques to larger plants and animals."

Parasites?

Another stunning idea about sexual reproduction came from a paper produced by William Hamilton, Robert Axelrod, and Reiko Tanese back in 1990, which explored the idea of sexual reproduction as an adaptation helping organisms resist parasites.

"Darwinian theory has yet to explain adequately the fact of sex. If males provide little or no aid to offspring, a high (up to 2-fold) extra average fitness has to emerge as a property of a sexual parentage if sex is to be stable," the team wrote in the abstract.

"The advantage must presumably come from recombination but has been hard to identify. It may well lie in the necessity to recombine defenses to defeat numerous parasites."

As Axelrod explained at the Evolution Institute:

"Parasites evolved to mimic our cells so that our immune system wouldn’t attack them. As a result, they can evolve around thirty times faster than we can since their generation time is so short. If you were to reproduce asexually it would mean you’d have an offspring that was almost identical to you, so the parasites that are adapted to you would also be adapted to your offspring. However, by reproducing sexually our offspring are quite different from us. Therefore, the parasites have to start all over. [Hamilton's] idea was that sexual reproduction is an adaptation to resist parasites. It is just a brilliant idea."

Here, too, offspring appear better set up for survival because of sexual reproduction. However, what's notable in this theory is that offspring do not evolve just for an advantage to a changing environment — as with the yeast example — but rather just to survive as other rival organisms also change and therefore threaten the survival of the their species.

Why do males still exist?

One final interesting thing to think about is why men continue to exist if their primary contribution to reproduction is sperm. A possible explanation is sexual selection: Males competing for females, and females choosing among males.

In research published in Nature in 2015, a team from the University of East Anglia, led by professor Matthew Gage, evolved replicate populations of flour beetles over several years under controlled conditions. The only difference between populations was the intensity of sexual selection at each adult reproductive stage — which ranged from 90 males competing for 10 females to the "complete absence of sexual selection, with only single males and females in monogamous pairings, where females got no choice and males experienced no competition."

And after seven years they found that populations with stronger sexual selection were fitter and more likely to survive than those without:

"Lineages from populations that had previously experienced strong sexual selection were resilient to extinction and maintained fitness under inbreeding, with some families continuing to survive after 20 generations of sib × sib mating [Editor's note: sibling x sibling]. By contrast, lineages derived from populations that experienced weak or non-existent sexual selection showed rapid fitness declines under inbreeding, and all were extinct after generation 10."

"Multiple mutations across the genome with individually small effects can be difficult to clear, yet sum to a significant fitness load; our findings reveal that sexual selection reduces this load, improving population viability in the face of genetic stress," they added.

Ultimately, it's important to note that it would not be appropriate to oversimplify or extrapolate from any of these studies. And, moreover, none of this even begins to touch on how sexual reproduction came about. However, it is still fascinating to consider the evolutionary benefits from sexual reproduction.

SEE ALSO: Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson talks about math, nuclear rockets, and astounding things about the universe

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It may soon be time to update the old adage about eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full.

A growing body of research suggests that when we cut the amount of the food we would eat on a typical day by as much as a third or half, we enjoy benefits including more energy, less illness, and potentially longer lives.

Most of the comprehensive research on this strategy, called calorie restriction, has been done in animals, so its conclusions must be taken with a grain of salt. But some humans have gone full-steam ahead with their own research — on themselves.

In Silicon Valley, trendy calorie-restricting clans meet regularly for meals to break 14-36 hour periods of fasting. Followers of the fad say it helps them focus, increases their productivity, and speeds weight loss.  

Many intermittent fasters simply give up one meal each day, an easy way of cutting roughly 30% of their daily calories.

The latest study on calorie restriction, published this month in the journal Nature, was conducted on mice and primates. Its results suggest that eating less could help slow the spinning gears of our biological clocks by interfering with an important genetic process called methylation, which is likely linked with aging. Researchers compared the cells of mice and primates who were either fed normal diets or calorie-restricted ones, and found that the restricted eaters had significantly fewer markers of the methylation process. In other words, their cells appeared "younger."

The measuring tool the researchers used for their study — methylation — is far from a perfect means of determining age. There's still a lot we don't know about the process, such as whether it effects all types of cells equally and if it can be used as a metric across different kinds of animals. Nevertheless, the study authors came away with some hopeful findings.

Rhesus monkeys in the study whose diets had been restricted by 30% for two-thirds of their lives (beginning in middle age) had cells that appeared, on average, seven years younger than their actual age. Mice in the study whose diets had been restricted by 40% for nearly their entire lives had cells that appeared two years younger. Taking into account the differences in the animals' average lifespan (rhesus monkeys live for about 25 years while mice live anywhere from 2-3 years), the results for the mice were more pronounced than those for the monkeys.

"Calorie restriction, which prolongs lifespan in mice and monkeys ... resulted in a significantly younger 'methylation age'," the researchers wrote in their paper.

That finding builds on several years of research in other animals on the potential benefits of calorie restriction. Researchers studying fruit flies, mice, rats, and worms have found that slashing calories (usually by about 30%) can double or even triple lifespan.

Still, a fly is not a human.

With that in mind, some scientists have moved onto tests in animals that are more like us, such as primates. In these animals, the research on calorie restriction and life extension has still been promising, although researchers haven't succeeded in going as far as tripling any monkey's lifespan. Several recent studies, including one important paper published in January in the journal Nature, have shown that dieting rhesus monkeys not only live longer than their non-dieting counterparts, but are also healthier and less prone to disease.

So how might these results translate to people? We don't know yet. In the meantime, biohackers, techies, and other trendy eaters will continue their intermittent fasting. Whether the benefits of the habit can be chalked up to real biological changes — or are simply the product of the placebo effect — remains to be seen.

SEE ALSO: Fasting could prevent aging and transform your body, but it goes against everything we think of as healthy

DON'T MISS: There’s new evidence that Silicon Valley’s favorite diet could help you lose weight, but it comes with a catch

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how the American diet has changed in the last 52 years

Florida's floodwater is full of bacteria.

In the wake of hurricane Irma, more than 28 million gallons of treated and untreated sewage spilled into 22 counties across the state, according to pollution reports filed with the state's Department of Environmental Protection. 

To put it simply, "the sewage conveyance systems aren’t working the way they were designed to work,"Rachel Noble, a professor of marine biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Business Insider.

Bacteria from poop can cause diarrhea once they enter the stomach. As disgusting as that sounds, it isn't the biggest health threat facing Floridians after the storm, Noble said. 

"As long as people are not eating and drinking items that have been in floodwater and they're following any boil advisories for municipal water sources, they should be okay with washing hands and regular hygiene," she said.

Instead, she is worried about another microbe that poses more serious risks called Vibrio.

Unlike fecal bacteria that make you sick only when ingested, Vibrio bacteria pose a rare but potentially deadly risk to anyone with an open wound. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, five people died and 22 lost limbs as a result of Vibrio infections. The microbes thrive in the open ocean, but storms and floods sweep them into urban areas where they can pose unforeseen risks to people.

"For Vibrio, open wounds and scrapes are a major concern. If people with those are exposed to floodwaters and things that came in contact with flood waters, they need to be vigilant about red infection wounds with cellulitis, they need to be seen, and they need to not sleep on the wounds," Noble said. "These things can progress over a 10 hour period to a point of no return requiring amputation."

Noble recommended that anyone who came into direct contact with floodwater and is experiencing infection-like symptoms keep a close eye on any open wounds. She advises looking out for any areas that get "hot and angry," or red and raised. Symptoms like fever and chills can also be a warning sign for Vibrio infection, she said.

Other floodwater contamination risks include industrial chemicals and solvents, as well as tetanus, an infection caused by bacteria in soil, dust, and manure that can enter the body via a cut or puncture wound.

Richard Bradley, the chief of emergency medical services and disaster medicine at the University of Texas' McGovern Medical School, told Time that because the bacterial count in floodwater gets so high, the chance of getting a skin infection is serious.

"Floodwater mixes with everything below it," he said. "If it covers a field with pesticides, it picks up the pesticides. It can also carry animal waste from fields and forests."

Yet another problem in flooded areas is unexpected wildlife, since snakes, insects, and other wild animals can be drawn to the water or swept up in it.

"Storm activity definitely increases the potential for snakebite as the snakes get flooded out and seek higher ground," Bryan Fry, an expert on venomous snakes at the University of Queensland in Australia, told The Washington Post.

Other dangers persist even after floodwaters recede, since wet environments in houses and buildings are ideal for mold. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, close to half of all inspected homes had visible mold, according to the CDC. Mosquitoes and other pests are also attracted to standing water.

Regardless of where you are, the ways to keep yourself safe are the same: ensure you've gotten your vaccinations, wash your hands frequently, and let your doctor know if you have any cuts or open wounds that have come into contact with potentially dangerous water.

SEE ALSO: Scientists warn that floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey still pose a lingering threat — here’s what to watch out for

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NOW WATCH: This time-lapse shows Hurricane Irma slamming Miami Beach

An advertising campaign for the new season of "American Horror Story" has been giving people panic attacks with its disturbing, hole-covered imagery, and the underlying cause is a rare but intense feeling of disgust that scientists are still trying to figure out.

Trypophobia, this fear of clustered holes, bumps, and similar patterns, affects around 15% of the general population. 

Some researchers think that the fear is an evolutionary instinct ingrained in humans to avoid dangerous, hole-covered formations in nature, like bee-hives or other poisonous structures. 

In this season of "American Horror Story: Cult," actress Sarah Paulson's character suffers from trypophobia, and as CNN notes, her overwhelming fear in the first episode of holes in her souffle and a piece of coral in her therapist's office has also affected viewers with the same condition.

One woman, Jennifer Adresen, told CNN that she had a "full-blown panic attack" with nausea upon seeing the show's promotional posters for the first time. 

Many people have since taken to Twitter to complain about the show's preoccupation with holes as a triggering mechanism. Some have even diagnosed themselves as having trypophobia. 

"American Horror Story: Cult" airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.

SEE ALSO: This photo deeply disgusts some people, and scientists are trying to understand why

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NOW WATCH: We played the highly-anticipated new Super Mario game and were blown away

Today’s new “smart” materials range in purpose — a new polymer resin self-heals holes in space habitats, and carbon nanotube yarn can generate electricity — but they all depend on superficial coatings that turn old substances into novel tools. That’s a problem because the more they are used, the less functional they’ll become because of natural wear and tear.

Researchers are hopeful that they can solve that issue by building functionality directly into the fundamental building blocks of those materials, and it looks like they’re well on their way. In a paper published Thursday in Science, a team of researchers report that they made natural glow-in-the-dark cotton by growing it in a way that the plant incorporates fluorescent molecules into its very fibers.

“Fluorescence and magnetic properties were our proof-of-principle — the applications are now open,” lead author Filipe Natalio, Ph.D., tells Inverse. “Current approaches for smart textiles use coatings. In our approach, the functional molecule will be weaved together with other building blocks, like glucose, into functional threads.”

Natalio and his team managed to do this by synthesizing compounds called glucose derivatives, which acted as a molecular “glue” to connect the fluorescent molecules to the outermost cell layer of the cotton fibers. In the same experiment, they used these “vascular connections” to attach molecules that conferred magnetism to the cellulose fibers they were attached to.

Natalio, a scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, used to work on targeted drug delivery and biometrics before he became interested in producing smart materials. He’s excited about potential applications, like turning natural materials into a means to store data — especially a raw material like cotton, which he says he chose for this experiment because of its “economic importance and long relationship with humans.” If scientists can produce fibers with tailored properties, Natalio reasons, then they can change society’s “long-standing view of natural fibers.”

In the future, he envisions an array of self-sustaining hydroponic greenhouses, where scientists can simply add the functional molecule of choice into their plant’s water container and watch their smart plants grow.

“After some time, you can collect your fibers — be they blue, red, fluorescent, or magnetic,” he says.

What Natalio thinks will comprise the “new era of material farming” is the concept of chemically manipulating a biological system — whether it’s cotton, flax, or bamboo — and reaping the end product for its tailored properties. He’s careful to point out, however, that this isn’t genetic engineering, unlike, say, those bunnies that were bred to glow in the dark.

SEE ALSO: Millions of glowing tropical sea creatures have started to appear in the Pacific Northwest

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Business Insider spoke with John Bradshaw, anthrozoologist and author of The Animals Among Us, about the differences in personalities between dog owners and cat owners. 

Mr Bradshaw said; "People refer to themselves as dog people or cat people and I think that the temptation is to think that means that that’s the kind of pet that they have but when people have studied this, they found that actually there isn’t really any great relationship between them."

"I think what some people mean when they say they’re a dog person is it means they are masculine and decisive whereas when people say they’re a cat person maybe they’re more independent and perhaps a bit more feminine. So they’re not necessarily talking about the animals themselves, they’re talking about the way they project their own personalities on the ideal cat or the ideal dog."

"There is a small difference in personality between the average personality between dog owners and cat owners but it’s comparatively small."

"Cat owners are supposed to be a little bit more neurotic than dog owners are, for example."

"But there is an enormous amount of overlap and I think that’s really the key point, is that the choice of animal is much more to do with a lifestyle choice than a personality thing, that any kind of person can bond with either species. It just may be easier for somebody who lives in the country to have a dog or somebody who lives in the city to have a cat."

You can find out more about Dr John Bradshaw's book here.

Produced and filmed by Jasper Pickering. Research by Fraser Moore. 

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Business Insider spoke with John Bradshaw, anthrozoologist and author of "The Animals Among Us," about why dogs are far more responsive to humans than cats are.

Bradshaw said: "Cats are somewhat less responsive than dogs to their owners. There are obviously exceptions there are very responsive cats but this essentially stems back to their evolutionary lineage."

"Dogs are descended from wolves which are very social animals so right from the word go, they’ve had a basis for understanding the body language of the animals around them, whether the animals around them are other dogs or indeed whether they’re humans."

"Cats had a different starting point they were originally solitary predators and they only really became sociable with one another probably during domestication, so perhaps only 5,000 years ago or something. So they have much less of an evolutionary basis for understanding our body language, for understanding our intentions and so on."

You can find out more about John Bradshaw's book here.

Produced and filmed by Jasper Pickering. Research by Fraser Moore. 

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