science

Take a seat because that toilet isn’t nearly as disgusting as the hand towel.

TIME magazine talked to Charles Gerba, a professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona, to get the dirty truth about what’s the grosses thing in the bathroom. Turns out, you’re probably touching them in hopes of getting cleaner. But you’re wrong. Dead wrong. Nothing is safe. Germs everywhere.

via Looopism

According to Gerba, the top five grosses things are:

1. Bathroom Towel because bacteria grows in moist conditions, especially in things that, like, never get washed.

2. Toothbrush Holder — Again, because you never clean that thing.

3. Kitchen Sponge — There’s a reason you don’t like touching that thing and it’s because it’s filled with bacteria. You want something you can wash, like a brush.

4. Cellphones — You probably already knew this because Japan is putting those smart phone wipes in bathrooms.

5. Supermarket Carts — I can’t even read this quote from Gerba — too scary— so you have to: “Almost 100% of them are home to E. coli because people are constantly touching the handles after holding raw food products.”

You can read more about the millions of tiny things that’ll make you sick and kill you over at TIME, but I don’t see why you’d want to. The germs are everywhere. We’re all doomed.

via Gif Bay

After a month of the worst group text experience of your life, New Year’s Eve is here, and you and your friends have finally decided on what you’re doing – unless Jake gets back to you because Jake throws the best parties.

But New Year’s Eve never really lives up to the hype, does it? And why is that? We try so hard to make it a special night. We even might get invited to Jake’s party. He’s going to have a two-story beer bong this year. Two. Stories. It’ll be so sick.

ASAP Science actually has a pretty reasonable list of reasons why New Year’s kind of stinks.

1. Expectations — We all think that New Year’s is going to be a climactic end to our year, but it usually just ends with you passed out on your floor clutching a copy of the West Side Story soundtrack and screaming, “Why, Maria? Why?”  

   via Reddit

2. Trying too hard — To live up to the expectations of the night, we all try and make sure that the night is as perfect as possible, which is why you have got to be at Jake’s party this year. But the fact is, trying too hard to have a good time leads to a bad time.

3. Optimism Bias — Apparently, our brain is hardwired to expect positive outcomes over negative ones. How do I get some of that optimism bias?

4. Reflection — Thinking about the past year can be… sad. 

   via Warner Bros.

5. Alcohol — Reflection plus alcohol can be sadder. 

   via Skins Glee Forever

6. Cost — Between dinner and the Über, NYE can cost a ton of money. Once you factor in all the money you spend trying to bribe your way into Jake’s party, you’re pretty broke come Jan. 1.

7. The Kiss — If you don’t have someone to kiss, you’re sad. If you do, everyone hates you.

8. via GIPHY

Happy New Year! Make strong decisions!

A weird little spider that looks like a floppy hat has been named after an infamous floppy hat: The Sorting Hat from Harry Potter. Meet your new favorite spider, Eriovixia gryffindori — which is somehow a spider and not a spell.

via MTV

Introduced in a paper published in the Indian Journal of Arachnology, this “new species of cryptic, dry-foliage mimicking araneid” looks a lot like the Sorting Hat from the side and was found in “unique ‘Kans’ forestlands of central Western Ghats, Karnataka, India,” writes Nerdist. At least they didn’t name it Hufflepuffi or else we’d dismiss this spider as totally useless. Like, why does that house even exist?

The paper explains in detail why it was named after the beloved hat:

This uniquely shaped spider derives its name from the fabulous, sentient magical artifact, the sorting hat, owned by the (fictitious) medieval wizard Godric Gryffindor, one of the four founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and stemming from the powerful imagination of Ms. J. K. Rowling, wordsmith extraordinaire, as presented in her beloved series of books, featuring everyone’s favorite boy-wizard, Harry Potter. An ode from the authors, for magic lost, and found, in an effort to draw attention to the fascinating, but oft overlooked world of invertebrates, and their secret lives.

Everyone’s favorite scene in Harry Potter is where Harry is chosen to join house Gryffindor, and we also wonder why Hogwarts doesn't revamp the Slytherin program, since it keeps producing bad guys. Seriously, there’s something up with how those kids are taught. Well, now you can ask the Sorting Hat yourself, if you are ever look in the forestlands of central Western Ghats and speak spider. 

Eriovixia gryffindori; our new species named after the sorting hat from @jk_rowling books Kudos to my brilliant coauthor @INDogProject pic.twitter.com/L8U0aeXdak

— Javed Ahmed (@curiocritters) December 10, 2016

Part of what keeps this world from falling to a Planet of the Apes-type situation is humankind’s ability to speak. Language gives us an unbelievable advantage in the animal kingdom, allowing us to keep our would-be conquerors at bay.

But as it turns out, monkeys do have the physical requirements necessary for speech, they just don’t have the right brains for it. Phew. That’s a relief. Let’s just hope evolution stops right here.

According to The New York Times, “A team of researchers reported that monkeys have a vocal tract capable of human speech. They argue that other primates can’t talk because they lack the right wiring in their brains.

“‘A monkey’s vocal tract would be perfectly adequate to produce hundreds, thousands of words,’ said W. Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna and a co-author of the new study.”

via On No They Didn't

The article continues by explaining the human speech occurs due to a “complicated choreography of flowing air and contracting muscles. To make a particular sound, we have to give the vocal tract a particular shape. The vocal tracts of other primates contain the same elements as ours — from vocal cords to tongues to lips — but their geometry is different.”

So basically the only thing saving us from having our planet conquered by some apes is them figuring out how to fit a square peg in a round hole? We’re doomed.

via 20th Century Fox UK

When this woman says she’s allergic to everything, she means it.

Suffering from a rare genetic disorder called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, Joanna Watkins lives under the threat of almost everything, including her husband and all but 15 types of food. And things keep getting worse.

While she’s been in for treatments, the MCAS isn’t responding to medication nor chemotherapy. So she’s unable to really see her husband, Scott, because of chemicals people release. What’s more, her house suffered from water damage, and the couple had to move in with a friend to avoid a rapidly-developing mold problem. If she comes in contact with things like pollen or even body odor, she suffers from anaphylactic reactions, including migraines and loss of breath.

via People. 

Joanna lives within the confines of an air-locked bedroom all day everyday. According to People, “At this point, her body only tolerates a total of 15 foods (including spices). She eats just once per day and it’s always one of two meals she knows her body can tolerate: organic grass-fed beef (chuck roast cut) with water, celery and organic carrots and organic parsnips that are peeled, cored and mashed or ground lamb with peeled organic cucumbers.”

“I have been eating these same two meals for over a year of my life and they still taste good to me,” Joanna said. “I love to eat — it’s a joy for me. It’s just a gift that I can keep eating these foods.”

Still, she and her husband remain hopeful. On their GoFundMe page, they have raised over $100,000 to pay for housing renovations that would include a state of the art air filtration system.

“We have been so showered with love and support – I know I have been deeply blessed,” Joanna told People. “This is really hard and it is painful, but we haven’t been left to face it alone and that is a beautiful thing.”

via Scott Watkins

America is the land of inaccurate, outdated, and totally worthless measuring systems. While the U.S.A is one of three countries to scoff at the metric systes (along with our dudes Liberia and Myanmar), we also use a little thing called Fahrenheit when measuring temperature.

The U.S.A and its associated territories is one of five countries to use Fahrenheit (along with our dudes the Bahamas, Belizem, the Caymen Islands, and Palau), but why do we use this outdated system and where did it come from?

via YouTube

This handy video from the YouTube channel Veritasium answers at least one of those questions. Turns out it has origins a lot like Batman. When a young scientist’s parents die suddenly, he goes on the run and becomes obsessed with cool science gadgets. From there, he starts fighting crime, and by crime, I mean inconvenient and inaccurate temperature scales. Anyway, it makes sense in the video.

It’s entertaining, interesting, and as always will make you smarter than anyone in the room.

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon, and you can’t go outside to play. If you’re thinking “this day will never end,” then you’re in luck.

The Infinite Galaxy Puzzle is here, and you can do it until the end of time. Not only that, you can assemble this bad boy in any shape or direction you please. It’s a 133 laser-cut pieces of birch plywood just waiting to put together in anyway you choose. The possibilities are endless, so you have no excuse for being bored ever again.

According to Gizmodo, the puzzle is based on a “scientific curiosity called Klein bottle, which is an impossible 3D shape whose insides and outsides are mathematically identical, the intricate pieces that make up this infinite puzzle can be transferred to its opposite side by simply flipping them over.”

The puzzle costs $100 and can be picked up from Nervous System. There’s also a $50 version, which comes with 51 pieces and no image to assemble — it’s just free play.