Why Do Birds Fly Into Windows?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do Birds Fly Into Windows?

Quick Answer?

The first step is to understand why birds fly into windows: It’s usually because when they’re looking at the window, they’re seeing the reflection of sky or trees instead of a pane of glass. They think they’re following a clear flight path.

More below.

The bird: majestic. Soaring. A creature of song. Muse of Alfred Hitchcock. And occasionally, apt to plunk its tiny head into your double-paned window.

More than 100 million birds are estimated to die each year as a result of flying directly into glass; even a bird that scoots away may suffer internal injuries. Despite being widely thought of as intelligent, most avian species are still vulnerable to this ignoble demise. Are they fooled by reflections of trees? Are they attacking their own reflection?

It’s a little bit of both, but that’s not the whole story. “Birds may be attempting a rapid escape when disturbed by people or predators,” says Graham Martin, B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., Emeritus Professor, School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham. “[They] probably perceive the reflections of the vegetation behind them as a safe haven.”

A bird anxious to flee isn’t likely to be able to process a lack of actual sky. In other cases, birds might interpret their own image as a rival during breeding season, but Martin believes these kinds of existential crises aren’t usually fatal. “They more likely walk up to their reflections,” he says. “Parrots, especially budgerigars, can spend a long time chattering to their reflection in a mirror hung in their cage, but it is not clear whether the bird perceives its reflection as another bird or whether the mirror is just a bright object that they take an interest in.”

Plus, bird turf wars in the air usually don’t result in high-speed impact. After a brief aerial tussle, Martin says, they take it to the ground, “When one bird can pin the other down and attack with bill and feet.”

Window collisions can be reduced if window decals or other signals (like branches) help give them some visual cues. Birds, like humans, can be guilty of “looking without seeing,” or relying on information that isn’t yet present visually. Martin believes birds are somewhat like automobile drivers in this regard: data on car collisions has shown an accident is more likely to happen when an unexpected obstacle is present, interrupting the pathway in memory.

So, if a bird flies into your window, it’s not because it’s stupid. It’s because it was scared. Or disoriented. And remember: we’re really not so different.

Additional Sources:

“Understanding Bird Collisions with Manmade Objects: A Sensory Ecology Approach,” The International Journal of Avian Science, 2011 .

mental floss

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Why Do Dogs Stick Their Heads Out of Car Windows?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do Dogs Stick Their Heads Out of Car Windows?

Quick Answer?

Why Dogs Stick Their Head Out the WindowThe reason that dogs like to stick their heads outside cars while driving is because the wind smells so good. Dogs have an incredible sense of smell with about 300 million olfactory receptors in their cute noses.

I want more?

Dogs seem to stick their heads out of moving cars almost any chance they get. What’s so great about a wind-whipped snout?

While I wasn’t able to find any scientific research on the phenomenon, a number of dog behaviorists agree that the window’s main draw isn’t the scenery or the breeze. What dogs are after are smells.

A few months ago, in a post about bloodhounds, I explained that dogs are basically walking noses. While our human olfactory membranes (a lump of tissue tucked up in the nose) are only about the size of a postage stamp and hold some 5 million olfactory receptors, or “scent cells,” a large dog has an olfactory membrane closer in size to a handkerchief and more than 225 million receptors.

As air moves over the olfactory membrane, odor molecules settle on the scent receptors and get recognized. The more air there is flowing over the membrane, the more scents the dogs can detect. So when a dog sticks its head out the window, it’s like pigging out at a hi-definition all-you-can-smell scent buffet.

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Why Do I Wake Up Right Before My Alarm Goes Off?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do I Wake Up Right Before My Alarm Goes Off?

Because your body’s internal clock is just as good, if not better, than the contraption shrieking atop your nightstand. 

At the center of your brain, a clump of nerves—called the suprachiasmatic nucleus—oversees your body’s clock: the circadian rhythm. It determines when you feel sleepy and when you feel bright-eyed. It controls your blood pressure, your body temperature, and your sense of time. It turns your body into a finely tuned machine.

That machine happens to love predictability. Your body is most efficient when there’s a routine to follow. So if you hit the hay the same time each night and awake the same time each morning, your body locks that behavior in. And that’s where things get sciency.

Beat the clock!

Your sleep-wake cycle is regulated by a protein called PER. The protein level rises and falls each day, peaking in the evening and plummeting at night. When PER levels are low, your blood pressure drops, heart rate slows, and thinking becomes foggier. You get sleepy.

If you follow a diligent sleep routine—waking up the same time every day—your body learns to increase your PER levels in time for your alarm. About an hour before you’re supposed to wake up, PER levels rise (along with your body temperature and blood pressure). To prepare for the stress of waking, your body releases a cocktail of stress hormones, like cortisol. Gradually, your sleep becomes lighter and lighter.

And that’s why you wake up before your alarm. Your body hates your alarm clock. It’s jarring. It’s stressful. And it ruins all that hard work. It defeats the purpose of gradually waking up. So, to avoid being interrupted, your body does something amazing: It starts increasing PER and stress hormones earlier in the night. Your body gets a head start so the waking process isn’t cut short. It’s so precise that your eyelids open minutes—maybe even seconds—before the alarm goes off.

You snooze, you lose

There’s evidence you can will yourself to wake on time, too. Sleep scientists at Germany’s University of Lubeck asked 15 volunteers to sleep in their lab for three nights. One night, the group was told they’d be woken at 6 a.m., while on other nights the group was told they’d be woken at 9 a.m..

But the researchers lied—they woke the volunteers at 6 a.m anyway. And the results were startling. The days when sleepers were told they’d wake up early, their stress hormones increased at 4:30 a.m., as if they were anticipating an early morning. When the sleepers were told they’d wake up at 9 a.m., their stress hormones didn’t increase—and they woke up groggier. “Our bodies, in other words, note the time we hope to begin our day and gradually prepare us for consciousness,” writes Jeff Howe at Psychology Today.

Incidentally, if you don’t wake before your alarm, you probably aren’t getting enough sleep—or you aren’t sleeping on a consistent schedule. Waking up at different times on weekdays and weekends can quickly throw your clock out of whack. Without any consistency, your body may not know when to get up. So when your alarm starts screaming, you feel dazed and grumpy.

Enter the snooze button. Since your body’s gone through all that work to rise gradually, a quick nap sends your internal clock spinning in the wrong direction. All the hormones that help you fall asleep meddle with the hormones that help you wake up. Your body gets confused. You feel groggier. And with each slap of the snooze, it gets worse. The snooze, it seems, is the worst way to start your day.

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Why Do Mosquito Bites Itch So Much?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do Mosquito Bites Itch So Much?

Quick Answer?

When you scratch a mosquito bite, this causes the skin to become even more inflamed. Since inflammation causes your skin to itch, you can get into a cycle where scratching will cause even more of an itchy sensation. In addition, by continuing to scratch you run the risk of breaking the skin and causing an infection, leading to even more of an itch.

-Debra Sullivan, PhD, MSN, CNE, COI

Tell Me More

That familiar tingle, that little pinch, that harbinger of things to come—if it’s mosquito season, you know it well. It’s a bug bite, and it’s probably about to make you (and your skin) feel pretty itchy. (And you might feel itchy just thinking about feeling itchy. Sorry about that!)

We’ve already explored why some people are more prone to mosquito bites than others— there are lots of reasons, most of which you can’t actually change—but now it’s time to examine why those unavoidable bites can make skin crawl, tickle, and just plain itch.

When it comes to mosquito bites, that telltale itch doesn’t actually come from a bite, it comes from something that’s a fair bit worse: literal blood-sucking. A mosquitos (only female mosquitos do this) uses her needle-like mouthparts (technically called a “proboscis”) to poke around on your skin in order to find the closest blood vessel, which she then uses to suck out blood as a snack (a process that makes her an ectoparasite). The itchiness comes from her saliva, which she injects into her prey both before and during the actual blood extraction process. It’s a clever tool, because her saliva serves as an anticoagulant that keeps the blood flowing during consumption.

The human body responds to foreign intrusions like mosquito saliva by creating histamines, which make the area’s blood vessels swell and create a “wheal” on the skin. That wheal is the bump that is so often referred to as a mosquito “bite.” All that swelling often disturbs nearby nerves, which then react by making your skin itch.

Don’t scratch too hard, as it will only make the irritation worse, all while the real invader has long since flown away, blood-filled belly and all.

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Why Do People Blush?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do People Blush?

Thinking about writing this post makes me blush. I know it sound weird but lets understand to what propel that behavior.

Blushing is an involuntary reaction that seems to serve no purpose beyond making an embarrassing situation even worse. However, scientists can’t seem to definitively explain this phenomenon, which is completely unique to humans.

AsapSCIENCE explains blushing as a reaction of the sympathetic nervous system and part of our “fight or flight” response. When you’re embarrassed, adrenaline is released, speeding up your heart rate and dilating your blood vessels to improve your blood flow and oxygen delivery. In humans, facial veins react to this adrenaline by blushing. But this response doesn’t happen anywhere else in your body, which is why you don’t blush all over.

Science may not be able to figure out why this reaction is so specific, but recent studies suggest that blushing has a functional purpose in social relationships. A team of Dutch psychologists discovered that people are more likely to forgive and view favorably someone who has committed an embarrassing act if he or she is visibly blushing. A test of 130 undergraduate students at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands provided each subject with the face of a blushing or non-blushing woman and a corresponding story about her “embarrassing mishap” or “social transgression.” Reliably, the blushing faces scored higher in likeability and trustworthiness.

According to these results, the act of blushing “serves to signal the actor’s genuine regret or remorse over a wrongdoing,” showing that the person recognizes the “social or moral infraction” and will probably endeavor not to repeat it. Blushing can help others predict your future behavior, assuming that you, like many others, do not enjoy being embarrassed and have learned from your mistakes. They are appeased by the involuntary act of contrition, and while you may never forget your most embarrassing moments, you can rest easy knowing that your blushing tendencies help neutralize their impact on your social relations.

If you happen to suffer from erythrophobia—the fear of blushing—you could take some drastic measures by having an endoscopic thoracic sympathectomy, which severs the nerve that triggers your blushing reflex. It seems, however, that the body has ways of showing your embarrassment even without the ability to blush, though: a common side effect of the surgery is facial sweating

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Why Do Our Best Ideas Come in the Shower?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do Our Best Ideas Come in the Shower?

Quick Answer?

Why is this the case? Showers are a safe place that provides “a dopamine high, relaxed state, and distracted mind,” factors that are ideal for the creativity and idea formation. Dopamine, critical to creativity, is released when we’re relaxed, feeling great, listening to music, exercising, and yes, taking a shower

You wanna hear more?

You’re in the shower, mindlessly scrubbing your toes when—bam!—a prophetic thought pops into your head. Maybe you finally solve that glitch bugging you at work. Or maybe you learn something terribly more important. The meaning of life, perhaps. Or what the Voynich Manuscript are.

Those aha! Moments aren’t locked inside a bottle of Irish-scented shampoo. Soaking yourself in suds, though, does have a lot to do with it. The shower creates the perfect conditions for a creative flash, coaxing out your inner genius. Oh, and it makes you clean, too.

Mind Your Mindless Tasks

Research shows you’re more likely to have a creative epiphany when you’re doing something monotonous, like fishing, exercising, or showering. Since these routines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopilot. This frees up your unconscious to work on something else. Your mind goes wandering, leaving your brain to quietly play a no-holds-barred game of free association.

This kind of daydreaming relaxes the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s command center for decisions, goals, and behavior. It also switches on the rest of your brain’s “default mode network” (DMN) clearing the pathways that connect different regions of your noggin. With your cortex loosened up and your DMN switched on, you can make new, creative connections that your conscious mind would have dismissed.

That’s why the ideas you have in the shower are so different from the ideas you have at work—you’re a pinch more close-minded at the office. Thinking hard about a problem deactivates your default network. It boosts your prefrontal cortex’s control. This isn’t a bad thing—it tightens your focus and gives you the power to stop gawking at cat pictures and hit that deadline. But it can also dig you into a creative rut. Because when you’re deeply focused on a task, your brain is more likely to censor unconventional—and creative—solutions.

Strange as it sounds, your brain is not most active when you’re focused on a task. Rather, research shows it’s more active when you let go of the leash and allow it to wander. Shelley Carson at Harvard found that highly creative people share one amazing trait—they’re easily distracted. And that’s the beauty of a warm shower. It distracts you. It makes you defocus. It lets your brain roam. It activates your DMN and encourages wacky ideas to bounce around. So when the lather rinses off, your light bulb switches on.

And Relax!

But what makes the shower different from a boring board meeting? Doesn’t your mind wander there, too?

Well, yeah. You probably have the doodles to prove it. But a shower is relaxing. It’s a small, safe, enclosed space. You feel comfortable there. (Comfortable enough to be in the buff!) On top of that, you’re probably alone. It may be the only alone time you get all day. It’s your chance to get away from any stresses outside.

When you’re that relaxed, your brain may release everyone’s favorite happy-go-lucky neurotransmitter, dopamine. A flush of dopamine can boost your creative juices. More alpha waves will also ripple through your brain—the same waves that appear when you’re meditating or happily spacing out. Alphas accompany your brain’s daydreamy default setting and may encourage the creative fireworks.

Wait! There’s more! The time you shower also plays into the equation. Most of us wash up either in the morning or at night—when we’re most tired. According to the journal Thinking and Reasoning, that’s our creative peak. The groggy morning fog weakens your brain’s censors, keeping you from blocking the irrelevant, distracting thoughts that make great ideas possible. It’s likely that your shower gushes during your creative sweet spot.

There you have it. You’re distracted, relaxed, and tired. Your prefrontal cortex slackens its power as your default network switches on, your dopamine supplies surge, and your alpha waves roll. The shower creates the perfect storm for the perfect idea.

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Why Do Spicy Foods Make Your Nose Run?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do Spicy Foods Make Your Nose Run?

Not just ‘YORUBA PEPPER‘ this time around. Hot sauces, curries, wasabi peas and other spicy treats turn you into a snot faucet. Why is that?

Capsaicin is the chemical found concentrated in the placental tissue of chile peppers and allyl isothiocyanate is an oil contained in plants like mustard and radishes (including horseradish). Plants use both of these chemicals as biological weapons against predatory animals. They irritate pretty much any soft tissue they come in contact with, which is what causes the wonderful burning sensation on your tongue. But they also cause the painful sting of post-chile-handling eye contact and a seriously runny nose. When your mucous membranes get hit by these chemicals, they become inflamed and go into defense mode. This means producing mucous to trap allergens and other undesirables, and keeping them out of your respiratory system by removing them via the nasal passage.

You might have noticed that if you’ve got a cold and are congested, the runny nose effect of spicy foods can make you feel a little better. Don’t be fooled by the healing properties of hot and sour soup and buffalo wings, though, because the relief is only temporary and really just makes things worse in the long run

Capsaicin and allyl isothiocyanate’s irritation can cause the dilator naris muscle in your nose to temporarily allow more air to enter. Receptors in your nose then tell your brain that you’re breathing easier. It’s all an elaborate ruse, though, and when the effect of the heat wears off, you’re back to your old stuffy self, with plenty of extra snot brought on by your meal to boot!

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Why Do They Click That Board Thing Before Filming A Movie Scene?

Adetunji Matthew
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Why Do They Click That Board Thing Before Filming A Movie Scene?

Mr Odunlade, We are waiting for You…. ehn ok ok, ready Action!

Clapperboards have two main purposes:

  • The slate section shows important information about the scene.
  • The clapper stick creates a visual and audio cue for the editor to use to sync up the video footage with the separate audio files.

How is it used?

  • In post production an editor would use the audio spike created by the clapper stick and line this up with the exact matching frame in the film to perfectly sync the two.
  • The slate information is used to organise and maintain footage. It shows where in the script the footage is located and an editor can easily refer back to set notes which improves workflow.

Clapperboard is great for amateur home use because they were pretty easy to use. Just point at something, hit a button and the audio and the video were recorded together in one place.

This is different than how things are done in Nollywood, where the images and sounds for movies are recorded separately. The images are captured on film by cameras, and the audio gets recorded on a separate analog or digital audio recorder (if a scene or set is particularly noisy, some productions might even have actors re-record their dialogue in a studio, in a process known as Automated Dialogue Replacement/Additional Dialogue Recording, or ADR).

The two parts have to be put back together in editing and carefully matched. To do that, it helps to have a way to synchronize the image and the sound. This where that clicky board thing comes in.

Called a clapperboard or a slate board, among other things, it’s used to make syncing audio and film easier and to identify takes and scenes. The clap or click of the board is easy for editors to pick out on the audio track and match to the visual of the clapper clapping on the film, syncing the moving picture with the sound.

The boards used to be made of actual pieces of slate, and later whiteboard, with the scene information written on them in chalk or marker. The relevant information includes the scene and take numbers, the camera angle, the date, the production title and the name of the director. The diagonal black and white lines usually seen on the hinged part that’s clapped down are there to ensure visibility.

Today, many larger productions have switched over to “digislates” or “smart slates.” These clapperboards display, in LED, a timecode generated by the audio recorder. The two are synced, and the board just has to be shown to the camera before a scene for the editors to find the same point in the film and audio tracks, no clap needed.

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