Birds Sleep While Flying, Jogger vs. Car, Gender Chat Differences

Plus: Holy &@$%! Swearing is a Natural Painkiller?!

May 30, 2024

Welcome back to the Aha! Science weekly roundup, celebrating science by revealing amazing discoveries and images from our world and beyond and exploring life’s most intriguing, strange and unexpected questions. These featured articles include “friend links” to Aha! stories on Medium so you can read them even if you’re not a Medium member.

Marathons Per Gallon: Can We Run More Efficiently than Our Cars?

If you gave a runner the same calories of food equivalent to 1 gallon of gas in a Toyota Camry, can you guess which one would go farther? This is a really fun, instructive and (to me) surprising This vs. That analysis.

At the firing of the start gun, the car peels out immediately, leaving the runner in the dust. 25 miles later, with just a few thousand feet to go, the car sputters and rolls to a stop. It’s out of fuel. Three hours later, the runner still has enough energy to…
—Matt Traverso

Image by By wayhome.studio. Stock.adobe.com

Holy &@$%! Swearing is a Natural Painkiller?!

The best swear words are based on cultural taboos. And when you're in pain, uttering them can make you feel better. Our resident angry nurse dishes out a lighthearted introduction to foul-mouthed first aid.

Scientists have theorized that because swear words are taboo and emotionally charged, the very act of uttering them distracts the mind from pain. Other research suggests that swearing may trigger the body’s stress response, leading to a release of adrenaline and endorphins — the body’s natural painkillers. This can result in a temporary increase in pain tolerance, allowing the curser to endure discomfort more easily.
—Andrea Romeo RN, BN

Do Men and Women Really Communicate Differently?

Probably since people learned to converse, men have been calling women everything from chatty to mouthy. Research, however, finds that common perceptions of the gender differences in communication range from pure myth to some based in grains of truth. The writer sorts out which is what. And guys, please don't interrupt.

One variation of this belief maintains that the sexes communicate differently due to their prehistoric roles. In ancient times, the story goes, men were hunters, required to stand silently for hours while stalking big game. Meanwhile, the women gathered nuts and berries, happily chatting up a storm. … . I’ve noticed that in the workplace — where the men almost always outrank the women — males consume more than their fair share of air time. But at home — where women hold the reins on household management — the tables are turned.
—Kathleen Murphy

Plastic Recycling’s Persistent Problem … Solved?

Collecting and sorting recycling materials is costly for municipalities. It's a lot cheaper to put it in the landfill. Plastics are particularly tricky—different types need to be reprocessed in entirely different ways. This scientists explains new technology, using artificial intelligence and machine learning, that aims to solve the problem by more easily and accurately identifying and sorting all the different plastics.

There are seven types of common plastic. You can identify them by the little recycling symbol on the bottom of almost all plastic containers. These numbers help identify the chemistry behind those plastics. … Sorting these plastics is incredibly important. Different plastics with some similar characteristics often can’t be mixed because they require different melting procedures.
—Bradley Sutliff

How Can This Seabird Get Enough Sleep When It Spends Weeks in the Air?

Evolution comes up with some crazy solutions. For the frigatebird, which is not equipped to land or take off from water, this means power napping while in flight, as it flies thousand of miles over the ocean. Exactly how they pull it off remains a mystery, however.

On land, frigatebirds spend more than half their time sleeping. However, in the air, they averaged less than one hour per day. The duration of sleep episodes in the air was also very short, averaging 10 seconds at a time.
—Eliot Bush