I’m sure you’ve all seen crude videos on the internet where Nicholas Cage or some other person’s face is superimposed upon somebody else’s body, creating a (normally obviously fake) funny illusion. However these can also be used for far more sinister purposes. Instead of pretending to have one person be someone else, they can be …
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Climate Change and our personal response
I often struggle with how much my actions actually matter in a grand scheme. It is far easier to see how relevant more personal and relationship based actions affect others, and why what I do in those areas is ‘important’, but far less when I think about my political or environmental efforts. Whether I, and …
The distributed nervous system of the Octopus
While the octopus has a fairly large brain when compared to the rest of its body size, about two thirds of its neurons are distributed around its arms, in clusters called ganglia. This means that when the octopus senses information about the environment through a sucker, it can react faster than if a signal travelled …
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Fibonacci numbers
The other day I was lying at the base of a tree, my eyes travelling up the line of trunk up till where the branches perpendicularly fought against the anti-gravitational growth of their producer. As I observed the direction of the branches, I was reminded of the beautiful phenomenon that is the fibonacci sequence. The …
Finding Nemo…’s gender?
Clown fish are sequential hermaphrodites – they are born one gender but have the ability to switch to the other gender. This is because they have both testicular tissue and ovarian tissue so they are able to develop both reproductive organs, and somehow also instinctively know how to perform the actions that is controlled …
Fallacies
A fallacy is a logical reasoning process that is incorrect. For instance, the Ad Hominem Fallacy involves rejecting an argument based on the personal characteristics of the person arguing for it. The Fallacy Fallacy occurs when the reasoner recognises that an argument is fallacious, thus determining the argument is not true and from that concluding …
Why do we procrastinate?
Procrastination is defined as the action of delaying or postponing something. This is usually a bad habit because we often tend to procrastinate important assignments and essays in favour of other more fun activities. Sometimes even mundane chores such as cleaning become more interesting than sitting down and studying. As University students we all know …
The Framing Effect and how words influence the connotations of a message.
The framing effect affects how you perceive information. Under it, people will typically pick the more positive sounding option as opposed to the negatively presented one. For instance, suppose you had to undergo surgery. The doctor offers to do one procedure that has a 50% success rate, and another that has a 50% fail rate. …
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Are honeybees better at maths than we are?🐝
A new study has shown that honeybees are able to understand numbers higher than four, provided we give feedback for whether or not they have done it correctly or incorrectly. This actually happens to be better than humans, because we tend to struggle to count anything greater than four. This sounds incorrect but if you …
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The Blob
An organism is about to be unveiled at the Paris Zoological Park and has been called “The Blob”. It is a yellow(ish) well…blob. But it’s not just any blob. This blob has nearly 720 sexes, is able to heal itself in approximately 2 minutes if cut in half, has no mouth but can detect and …
Science Scholars 2019 