What We Learned This Week
Welcome to "What We Learned This Week," a regular feature where we share all the most interesting nuggets of information we picked up in the past week.
The Science Of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men
We'd like to think that we've evolved culturally since the days of Reconstruction. We've elected a black president, interracial relationships are no longer scandalous and nearly everyone thinks Donald Sterling is an asshole. But only white people on Fox News really think we live in a prejudice-free utopia. While we may no longer think of ourselves as overtly racist, a large and convincing body of scientific research shows that our unconscious instincts are.
Scientists believe that about 10 million years ago, human ancestors began gathering and consuming the rotting, fermented fruit that fell onto the forest floor. Eventually, this behavior led to us crawling around on the floor of the local watering hole, crying, burping, looking for our keys. Evolution!
You've practiced in your socks on hardwood floors. You've embarrassed yourself at weddings whenever a Michael Jackson tune comes on. Now, thanks to this great animated infographic from Animagraffs.com, you can walk backwards with the best of them. Please don't ask us how to do the Thriller dance. It's so long.
CDC: Circumcision Benefits Outweigh The Risks
In a long-awaited federal guideline released this week, the CDC said that the benefits of circumcision outweigh its risks, but stopped short of telling parents to have their sons circumcised. For us, including this article in this post was a personal decision, but eventually, it made the cut.
First thing's first: a polygraph is not a "lie detector." The machine merely records your heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and electro-dermal activity for indications of physiological stress, which can be indicative of lying. Fool your body and you can fool an interrogator. It's a lot easier than it sounds. Just bite your tongue and think of a nice, cold beer.
The UK Banned A Bunch Of Sex Acts In Porn
In an utterly baffling ruling this week, the British Board of Film Censors abolished a long list of sex acts in British-produced pornography including female ejaculation, caning, spanking and facesitting (which they called "life endangering"). Most couldn't help but notice that the banned acts usually give women more pleasure than men.
How To Stop Car Windows From Steaming Up
Do you own a car and a cat? Then you probably have everything you need for this simple trick. No, you won't be using the cat to wipe up the fog.
What Teens Are Doing These Days
Perhaps the best thing that Business Insider does each year is grab a bunch of teenagers and stick them on a stage in front of supposed tech influencers and make them answer questions about the tech they like, and more importantly, the tech they dislike. This year, we learned that teens are "totally over Vine" and that "email is still a thing." Totally.
How Dogs Understand What We Say
It's very clear that dogs understand our tone, inflection and body language when we speak to them. But until recently, it wasn't known if they paid attention to the meanings of words. To figure it out, a graduate student tested the reactions of 250 dogs to commands that had both meaningful and meaningless words in them. When dogs hear meaningful words, 80% turn their heads to the right. When the words are meaningless, but emotional, they turn to the left. Next time your dog shits where it shouldn't, be sure to scold them in their right ear.
If You Want To Change, You Should Do It Before You Turn 30
Before we turned thirty, we believed we could change and now that we're older we believe the same thing. Science be damned.
Never forget that the entire business of the restaurant industry is to make lots of money by feeding you crap that is much cheaper for them to make than it is for you to buy. Examples include treating cheap farm-raised Asian shrimp with formaldehyde to make it look more expensive, renaming gross fish (Patagonian toothfish) something fancier (Chilean sea bass) so you'll actually eat it, calling absolutely every overpriced burger "Kobe beef" and purposely pouring foamy beers to make a keg last longer. Don't forget to tip your grievously underpaid servers for bringing you all this overpriced crap.
What Happens To All The Animal Blood?
In the month of September, the U.S. slaughtered 8.83 million pigs containing about 114.79 million pints of blood. So where did it all go? In a remarkable twist on the usual American manufacturing process, very little of it went to waste. Some of it went back to feeding other animals, some of it went to human food delicacies, and some of it got transferred into other species for medical purposes in a scary process called xenotransfusion.
100 Years Of Beauty In One Minute
From flappers to iPhone tappers, here's a century's worth of hair and makeup.