Science!!!

**adgy-san** · September 27th, 2013, 09:39 AM

Squirrels hell-bent on destruction of American electric infrastructure | BoingBoing

Using a Google news alert, he's cataloged 50 squirrel-caused power outages in 24 states — and that's just since Memorial Day. These aren't small outages either. Several of them have cut power to thousands of people at a time. Back in 1994, a squirrel took out the Nasdaq. These are kamikaze raids and they've led to an interesting phenomenon — technology developed specifically to protect our infrastructure from furry, tree-hopping rodents.

**adgy-san** · September 27th, 2013, 09:53 AM

The Science of Snobbery

Tsay took the actual audition recordings of the top 3 finalists from 10 prestigious international classical music competitions and asked a group of participants to select the winners. One group watched a video audition, the second group listened to an audio recording of the same audition, and a final group watched the video audition with the sound turned off.

As her study participants were untrained in classical music, Tsay expected them to do no better at choosing a winner than random chance. This proved true for the first two groups, who chose the winner less than 33% of the time. But to everyone’s surprise, the amateurs did significantly better than chance when watching only a silent video.

Tsay then replicated the experiment with professional musicians and found the same results. Despite their expertise, the musicians also did no better than chance at picking the winner based on audio or video recordings. But when they watched a silent video recording, they too performed dramatically better.

**adgy-san** · September 27th, 2013, 10:08 AM

Evolution Of Trypophobia A Fear Of Holes - Business Insider

Up to 16% of people (18% of females and 11% of males) become viscerally upset after looking at images of clustered holes, according to the first ever study on the condition known as trypophobia. These clusters of holes are common in nature, also including honeycombs and clusters of soap bubbles.

One sufferer reports: "[I] can’t really face small, irregularly or asymmetrically placed holes, they make me like, throw up in my mouth, cry a little bit, and shake all over, deeply."

It turns out this strange revulsion could be rooted in biology, according to the study by researchers Geoff Cole and Arnold Wilkins, of the University of Essex, in the journal Psychological Science.