Happy Friday!  Another week survived!  Perhaps you are pondering a lot of questions these days about many things like “What is the meaning of Life?” and “Do horses prefer bananas to apples?”  Well I cannot help you with the first one, but I can with the second and I have provided the links to prove it.

Enjoy!

I bet you have said “you can’t compare apples to oranges.”  Well the Connecticut Society of American Board Surgeons decided that they needed to see if these two are as different as we think.  They concluded that the only difference was in their color and type of seeds. Otherwise, they might as well be the same fruit.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2bd/12fac1e7dc1294f4c8e8fbc8bb7a6c45ee85.pdf

Have you ever been on a treadmill, doing your workout when the thought just hits you, “I wonder how shrimp would do on a treadmill?”  and “I wonder if shrimp with bacterial infections would do worse?”Me neither but it did occur to some scientists who put shrimp on a treadmill and monitored their vital signs.  They injected some shrimp with bacterial infections and put them on a tiny underwater treadmill to see what would happen.  “Results show that infected crabs and shrimp do not perform on the treadmill as well as their uninfected counterparts.”  I imagine one would get similar results with humans.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/us-government-has-spent-682570-study-shrimp-treadmill

Walking and chewing gum at the same time is one thing – walking and carrying a full cup of coffee at the same time is another.  I for, for one, know this is an essential life skill.  But perhaps I have been doing it wrong, there is research that has determined that people are less likely to spill coffee while walking backwards.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2078152015300377

It seems everyone is concerned with social distancing these days.  Which makes research on the hazards of “double dipping” chips even more relevant.  Luckily Tulane University analyzed years of flu data and found cities that had a team in the Super Bowl saw an 18 percent increase in flu deaths. They traced the cause to Super Bowl parties and, specifically, people double dipping and infecting the guac or bean dip with their flu germs. So, keep everyone six feet away from your chip dip!

https://gizmodo.com/double-dipping-at-superbowl-parties-literally-kills-peo-1756513082

Don’t you just love to see pictures of other people’s food on social media?  Neither do I.  So why do so many people bother sharing those pictures?  Apparently sharing pictures on social media makes it taste better.  At least that is what a study out of St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia determined.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/instagram-your-food-1.3481717

Perhaps while you have been self-isolating you came across a spider in your house and perhaps you wondered if that spider just might be radio-active and perhaps you wondered if said radio-active spider bit you might you be able to turn into Spiderman?  Sorry, but you can dismiss that thought. After an extensive analysis, researchers at Cambridge University have concluded that the larger a person is, the more adhesives he would need to stick to a wall, making it virtually impossible for a normal sized human being to have the characteristics of Spiderman. No matter what your spidy-sense is telling you.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/why-spider-man-cant-exist-geckos-are-size-limit-for-sticking-to-walls

I know, we all feel more connected while social distancing by checking in on Facebook.  I hate to be the one to break this to you, but your Facebook friends are not really your friends and I tell you that as a friend.  A study done by an Oxford University professor concluded that there were only 4.1 “dependable” friends out of a typical user’s 150 Facebook friends.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.150292

If you are as old as I am you might remember the Tootsie-Pop commercial where the kid goes to the wise old owl to ask, “how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-Pop?”  If you are like me, you have been waiting decades for an answer and now research comes to the rescue.  A study out of New York University has determined that the number of licks it takes to get to the center of an average-size lollipop is approximately 1,000.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-fluid-mechanics/article/shape-dynamics-and-scaling-laws-for-a-body-dissolving-in-fluid-flow/ECC951C579D5850095DAFF40CD2899BA

Have you ever given a horse a carrot and wondered if he would really rather have a banana?  Well wonder no more! Deborah Goodwin, BSc, PhD, research director of Applied Animal Behaviour Programmes at the University of Southampton has done the research.  Next time, give your horse a banana. 

https://www.smartpakequine.com/content/horse-flavor-preferences

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” ~Isaac Asimov

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