A list of curious facts
One: The mystery of why your mosquito repellant does next to nothing—apart from possibly triggering allergies—has been solved. And here’s why. When female mosquitoes are looking for someone delicious to bite, they sniff out a “unique cocktail” of body odours that we emit. These odours stimulate receptors in its antenna.Scientists tried their best to delete these receptors—to prevent them from detecting humans. But it didn’t work. The reason: they have evolved a backup system called “amines” to make sure they never miss out on a human snack. Sucks for us, quite literally. (ScienceDaily)
Two: Speaking of weird biology, have you heard of Body Transfer Illusion? This is when you trick the human brain into extending its sense of self to inanimate objects. This happens because we have something called a “body matrix”—which is “a multisensory representation of our whole body and the immediate space around it.” As with the rubber-hand illusion shown below, our brain integrates the fake hand into our own sense of self. (The Conversation)
Three: The Dutch have been dethroned. They are no longer the nation with the tallest men in the world. That title has been passed on to Montenegro—a small mountain nation in the Dinaric Alps—where the average 18-year-old man is almost exactly six feet tall. They beat their Dutch peers by half a centimetre—or about a quarter inch. In fact, the average male inhabitants of the “Mountain of Giants”—which includes parts of Dalmatia and Herzegovina—are all above six feet tall. (Big Think)
