“There is no such thing as a food connoisseur penguin, suggests new research that found penguins can’t taste savory or sweet flavors. For the flightless, waddling birds, foods come in just two flavors — salty and sour — according to the new study, which is published in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology.
‘Penguins eat fish, so you would guess that they need the umami receptor genes, but for some reason they don’t have them,’ co-author Jianzhi “George” Zhang of the University of Michigan said in a press release. ‘These findings are surprising and puzzling, and we do not have a good explanation for them. But we have a few ideas.’”
In a scene reminiscent of the Hitchcock classic The Birds, a terrified baby hippo runs screaming for its mother after a a flock of red and yellow ox-pecker birds landed on its back. The hippo was seen screaming, running and twisting from side to side in a desperate bid to shake off the flock, which usually have a mutually beneficial relationship where the birds help free hippos of ticks and other parasites by feeding on them
I think we’re all forgetting what’s going to be the best part of the anime
In an experiment revealing the importance of having friendships, social psychologists have found that perceptions of task difficulty are significantly shaped by the proximity of a friend.
In their experimental design, the researchers asked college students to stand at the base of a hill while carrying a weighted backpack and to estimate the steepness of a hill. Some participants stood next to close friends whom they had known a long time, some stood next to friends they had not known for long, and the rest stood alone during the exercise. The students who stood with friends gave significantly lower estimates of the steepness of the hill than those who stood alone. Furthermore, the longer the close friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared to the participants involved in the study.
In other words, the world looks less difficult when standing next to a close friend.
my new favorite psychological study, done by Schnall, Harber, Stefanucci, and Proffitt and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
EY FATTY BOOM BOOM 