Learning! Roundup: Less Nutritious Rice, Imbalanced Sentences, Scary Velvet Ants, Out of Body Experiences, and More!

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Climate Change Leads to Less Nutritious Food

One more thing to worry about in our post-apocalyptic future: rising CO2 levels lead to decreased nutritional value in rice. If you think, "oh that's not such a big deal", then you aren't one of the billions of people whose diet relies on rice. This is a major problem, not only for the countries whose cuisine is rice-based but also poor people all over the world who can only afford to eat rice.

Sentence Imbalance

A new Harvard Law study has shown that judges who are appointed by Republican presidents give longer sentences to black people and shorter sentences to women. To be clear, neither are fair situations. Also, I am not clear on how black women fit into this assessment. Do they get lighter sentences for being female, longer ones for being black, or do the judges just split the difference?

Beware the Velvet Ant

Just so you know, the scariest insect may not be a scorpion or black widow, but an ant. The female velvet ant has a sting so painful it's called the "cow killer" and no predators. No one dares stand before her, so we probably shouldn't either.

Open Plan Offices Take Another Hit

Research never seems to bode well for the open-plan office. A new study shows that people who work in open-plan offices, intended to help people interact more, actually talk less and email more.

Keep Your Family Doctor (If You Have One)

If you have a family doctor, keep them. People who keep seeing the same doctor actually live longer. Unfortunately, this is another hit to lower-income people who may have a harder time finding a doctor to call their own.

A Predisposition to Leave Your Body

I find out of body experiences (OBEs) fascinating! We know that some people have the experience of leaving their bodies, but not what they actually are or how they actually come to be. New research hasn't helped answer those questions, but it has found that patients with anxiety and depression are more likely to experience an OBE. Hey, that's me!

Flying Spiders

A few days after my boyfriend told me about how he was sitting on a mountainside and saw a spider float/fly in front of him, tethered to nothing, and thought, "well, we're all going to die now, spiders are flying," I read this article about how spiders fly on the electricity in the air.

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