Learning! Roundup: Holding babies, supporting and centring people of colour, life-saving bananas, and more!

Photo by Laura Lee Moreau

Holding Babies

We all know that babies need to be held, and new research says that whether or not babies are held can actually impact their genes.

Supporting and Centring People of Colour

This list of seven ways to support and centre people of colour is fantastic! I especially appreciate the second point on finding your own points of oppression in your life, and this note: "White folks, your identities of oppression are a window to, not a mirror of, the oppression people of colour experience."

It's such a natural human phenomenon to want to say "ME TOO!" when someone expresses something we feel we have a toehold on, but it's so unhelpful when we're talking about oppression. Using my experiences as a window, instead, lets me say (to myself), "As a woman with curly hair I have experienced strangers grabbing and playing with my hair and how annoying that is - I can only imagine how much worse that feels if it that experience is constant and your hair is such a highly policed thing."

Life-Saving Bananas

Scientists have created bananas that are orange in colour and rich in vitamin A that could save the lives of thousands of children every year.

Congenital Aphantasia

It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I really struggle to have visuals in my mind. Where other people seem to be able to clearly imagine something and look at it as if it's real, I can sort of conjure something like a two-dimensional photograph. Turns out, I have congenital aphantasia! Of course, this means I find some of the explanations in this article on what it's like to be "blind in the mind" kind of offensive (I am very introspective and descriptive and HAVE an imagination, thankyouverymuch, it just doesn't deal in pictures), but it's still interesting to read about!

Love (at first sight) is a Lie

The first paper to attempt to study the phenomenon of love at first sight has concluded not only that it's usually simply lust, but that it's also usually one-sided.

Fraternal Birth Order Effect

I remember learning in psych in university that a family with many boys had an increased chance that the youngest male sibling would be gay - the fraternal birth order effect. Now they are closer to understanding why, with evidence that some women build up antibodies against a protein on the Y chromosome with each male son they have and that women who had gay sons with older brothers had the highest level of these antibodies.

Of course, correlation does not mean causation!

Nature Sounds

Listening to the sounds of nature (running water, birds, wind in trees) is gaining more and more documentation as something that relaxes and rejuvenates us. To the point where, if you play an ambiguous, fuzzy sound for someone and tell them it's running water, they will be more relaxed than if you tell them it's just white noise.


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