Apr 28 2023 - Rare Human Features vs. Non-Human Mummies

 

It must be a real work effort to come up with these crazy headlines.  They compete for attention in a scrolling war. These are the two that got my attention on Bing today.   We may know some of the rare body features - they have come up before:  Elizabeth Taylor's double row of eyelashes.  That condition is called Distichiasis.  What about tetrachromacy where a person has a fourth cone cell to identify colour and allows for more colours to be seen than in normal trichromatic. There are people with an extra rib near the neck.  Five percent of people have an extra hole near the ear and is considered proof that once all living things had gills. And those people who sleep less and work more like Margret Thatcher and Winston Churchill had the DEC2 gene.  It allows them to go through a sleep cycle in less time than most of us.  In the opposite ring is the headline on non-human mummies.  This isn't news.  There are thousands of mummified cats in tombs.  They have found lizards, birds, crocodiles and fish.  What about the mummified foetus of a male child between 22 and 28 weeks. It had a rare birth defect so the skull was deformed and the brain almost non-existent. It would have been a stillborn birth, and the child mummified.  Only one of six or eight of these have been found.  But the number of mummies overall is large. A child-looking mummy turned out to be made of plant matter, and was meant to represent Osiris, the lord of the underworld and god of the dead.  Grain mummies have been found before.  Do you know how many mummies have been found in Egypt.   It is estimated that 70 million mummies were made in Egypt over the 3,000 years of their civilization.  These are of all sorts - human and animal. How many human mummies?  The number is 45 when it comes to Pharaohs.  There are many more of common people in graveyards.  More than 1,700 mummies were unearthed at one site and the estimate is a million similar bodies buried in shafts cut into the limestone rock.  So my vote goes to the Egyptian Mummies.  This is a mysterious and interesting story in our distant past. Here's a passionflower today.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Oct 3 2020 - And they get paid for this

 

Scientists have figured out the funniest jokes ever.  What kind of scientists figure out funny jokes? Oxford University scientists. "Robin Dunbar and colleagues at Oxford University investigated the cognitive mechanism underlying laughter and humour. The research is published in Springer’s journal Human Nature. "   He's a smiling person in the Wikipedia entry - a British anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour.  He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.  It sounds impressive to me.  And there's more. He has formulated Dunbar's number, a measurement of the cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.  What is the number?  it is 150 - based on the ratio between brain sizes and group sizes.  This was done on non-human primates.  It was then applied to humans and found to be consistent.  Subsequent studies have disputed the number and American scientists claim their number is much higher - 290.  The excellent article is HERE. According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants. So now it seems worthwhile to find out the world's most popular jokes. The study comes from someone who has thought about us carefully. They took the 100 Funniest Jokes of All Time (HERE) as their input data. Their result is the 50 jokes that we think are the funniest.   That seems straightforward.  They must have used more than the 100 funniest jokes because one article identified some of the jokes that the researches determined "just didn’t work" and "you should NEVER say at the pub": ‘If I ever have twins, I’d use one for parts.’  ‘Animals may be our friends. But they won’t pick you up at the airport.’ ‘Contrary to what most people would say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It’s a shark riding on an elephant’s back, just trampling and eating everything they see.’  ‘I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.’ Two pretty Passion Flowers today. There are 400 species of this beautiful flower, but only Passiflora edulis is known as passionfruit.

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Passion Flower

This is Passiflora Caerulea, a delicate and complex beauty of the tropical garden.