Rafil Kroll Zaidi in Harper’s:
Knees in Asia are the most likely to have a fabella, and knees in Africa are the least. The humerus can be used to determine the sex of a Thai skeleton. A French courtship researcher retracted his paper titled “High Heels Increase Women’s Attractiveness,” and female Instagram influencers were found to face criticism for seeming both too real and too fake. Male green-veined white butterflies use volatile flower compounds to create the anti-aphrodisiac pheromone they transfer to females during mating to make them unattractive to other males. The loudest known avian vocalization was observed among male white bellbirds of the northern Amazon, who scream their crescendo directly at females perched next to them; the study’s authors expressed uncertainty as to why the females put up with the risk of hearing damage. Researchers denominated three essential categories of arrogance and found that narcissists are less prone to depression. Escapism predicts problematic online gaming. Scientists offered a path to freedom for an all-male colony of wood ants who were trapped for years in an abandoned Polish nuclear bunker but had continued to thrive because of cannibalism. Doctors expressed concern that men might unnecessarily second-guess medical advice by soliciting opinions from Reddit users about photos of their diseased penises. Itchiness makes Europeans about twice as likely to contemplate suicide.
Children find bearded men strong but unattractive and apply the attribute of “brilliance” preferentially to men, but not if they are black. Reward-based laboratory experiments for assessing animal cognition may not test animals’ actual intelligence.
More here.