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Discovered: women can't handle pain, solving climate change with airplanes, a new gene to help Japanese rice farmers, Facebook friends are unreliable.
- Women complain more about pain than men do. If men had to have full-sized babies come out of their bodies, they wouldn't moan about it so much, suggests a new study. When looking at pain scores for 72,000 patients they found women reported feeling more pain in 39 of 47 common health problems. This could mean that men are more badass then women. Or, it could just mean they are liars. "Men may be under-reporting it, say if they are being seen by a female nurse," explains Atul Butte, a Stanford University researcher. Given our experiences with the males in our lives acting like big babies any time they get a cold, we think this reporting theory is more likely. [The Telegraph]
- Another idea for fixing our ever-warming earth. Last week, science found a molecule that could fix everything, this week we have a more complicated technique: sunshade engineering. Basically, humans would scatter sunlight back to space using high-flying airplanes to constantly replenish a layer of small particles into the stratosphere. Very high tech, but it works. "In many regions, future climate change is predicted to put crops under temperature stress, reducing yields. This stress is alleviated by geoengineering," researcher Julia Pongratz said. "At the same time, the beneficial effects that a higher CO2 concentration has on plant productivity remain active." The airplane method isn't the only scheme science has thought up to manually cool the Earth -- some thought of the brilliant idea to reflect sunlight back to space. But, these other methods have done more harm then help. [Carnegie]
- Helping Japanese rice growers effected by the tsunami. Scientists have figured out a way to speed up the time it takes to isolate certain genes in plants, like salt-tolerance. For all those rice paddy fields doused in Tsunami waters, this provides hope that those farmers will have fields up and running within a year, rather than 5-10 years. In the long term, we also imagine this discovery will prove useful as salt-water takes over the planet. [AFP]
- Facebook friends are unreliable. Internet friends are not real friends. They will stalk photos and make fun of absurd status updates, but in a time of crisis don't depend on them. A new survey found that only 13 percent of 1,000 surveyed said they had a single person to turn to on Facebook in a time of crisis. This does not surprise us. And if surprises you, it's time to reexamine what the Internet is. [The Telegraph]
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