Should You Bake in a Heat Wave?
Plus: Dogs Know How You Feel
Should I Use My Oven During a Heat Wave?
My wife and I’ve been arguing about this lately: When the heat is on outside, does it make any sense at all to turn it up indoors by using the oven? So I was pleased that this writer, who loves to bake and admits to being pretty geeky, has done that math on how much heat energy a typical oven dumps into a home, and the cost of counteractive cooling on a scorching summer day.
It makes sense that heating up an oven when it's already hot out is "bad," but no one ever quantifies how just bad it is. A person would need an awful lot of information about their oven, their thermostat, and a comprehensive definition of "bad." It would take a real deviant to track and analyze home appliance performance…
—Matt Traverso
Iron Hands: A Brief History of Imputations and Prosthetics
Hip replacements, bionic arms and legs and artificial hearts all trace back to radical new thinking during the Renaissance. A history of favoring noninvasive surgery, when amputations were seen as a last resort given the high risk of death, suddenly changed with the advent of gunpowder warfare.
Europeans went from hesitating to perform amputations and few options for limb prostheses in 1500 to multiple amputation methods and complex iron hands for the affluent by 1700.
—Heidi Hausse
Was Lucy Furry or Naked? On Human Ancestors, Nudity and Shame.
The 50-year-old depiction of 3.2-million-year-old Lucy as a very furry human ancestor might be wrong. Newer analyses, including what we know about lice, suggest she may have been mostly naked. The way Lucy has been depicted in newspapers, textbooks and museums may reveal more about us, on our views on nudity, than it says about her.
The modern quest to visualize our distant ancestors has been critiqued as a sort of "erotic fantasy science," in which scientists attempt to fill in the blanks of the past based on their own assumptions about women, men and their relationships to one another.
—Stacy Keltner
In addition to this weekly newsletter, I also post cool science news briefs and amazing new images to the Aha! Science Substack site…
