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Under text saying five senses of attraction are illustrations representing taste as a mouth, smell as a nose, sight as an eye, touch as hands holding, and sound as an ear.

Five Senses of Attraction

You may have heard about “love at first sight,” but what about “love at first smell?” When we meet someone new, our five senses work to synthesize the information we encounter to see whether they might be a potential mate. Our senses can inform our attitudes in surprising ways. In this article, we discuss some interesting studies related to each of the five senses and how they contribute to romantic attraction.

A record player with a sunflower horn. the record player with the sunflower motif is repeated four times in the illustration with different colour and background each time.

Are We All Mainstream? The Science Behind Aesthetic Taste

What is your favourite shape? And your favourite piece of art? Your tastes define you; you may think that these tastes are unique and extremely personal, but science has a different hypothesis: some of your aesthetic tastes may be, to a certain point, universal.

A man looking up and seeing different colour and size spheres through a beam of white light in a dark space.

The Universe in the Dark

Let’s take a moment to imagine the vastness of our universe. All that is visible to us through our gigantic telescopes is unimaginable to our minds. Yet, all that is visible to us makes up a tiny slice of our universe – just 4 percent. The remaining is made up of dark energy and dark matter. Today, we focus on the illusive dark matter which constitutes around 23 percent of our universe. How did we discover matter we cannot see? How is dark matter different to ‘normal’ matter? Most importantly, what is dark matter? I’ll give you a hint for the last one. We don’t really know yet. Let’s forget you read that last sentence and quickly move on.

A pair of headphones with a brain in the middle. Neon-coloured sound waves are seen coming out of the headphones and making connections on the brain. The brain is lit up by the same neon colours.

Bass Goes Boom

Whether it’s the rhythmic tapping of a spoon on a plate, the clicking of a car’s turn signal, or the drips of a leaking faucet, humans find a beat wherever we go. But why is it that we are so susceptible to a single note that is repeated over and over again?

A person in a room encountering their hologram and reaching out to touch it. The person's hologram is also reaching out to touch the person.

Are You a Hologram?

It was 1915 when our resident genius Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity. As Christmas trees stood tall and families reunited for the holidays that year, Einstein received a letter from a German soldier on the Russian front. This soldier was Karl Schwarzschild, who, amongst the guns and shouts, found a solution to Einstein’s theory that directly predicted black holes.

A cartoon drawing of a frozen zombie head encased in a cube of ice. The ice is melting and forms a puddle of water on the ground.

Awakening Ancient Viruses with Climate Change

We hear about zombies all the time in movies, books, and TV shows. They often start with a corpse coming back to life and passing a virus onto others, who then get infected and pass it onto more people— and suddenly you’ve got a zombie apocalypse on your hands. But what happens when the virus itself is a zombie, resurrected from its thousand-year underground slumber? While they might not be the bringers of the apocalypse, the release of ancient viruses that were previously frozen underground is a new and unprecedented consequence of climate change that has researchers wondering if they might cause issues for us in the future.

Girl with long red hair with an anesthesia mask. Text above the girl saying "Myth or Fact: Do people with red hair require more anaesthesia"

Do People with Red Hair Require More Anaesthesia?

Most of us have become well acquainted with the term “anaesthetics”- whether it’s from personal experience, anecdotes from friends, or portrayal on TV. Even though its use has become commonplace, there are many mysteries surrounding anaesthesia waiting to be explored.

Album cover depicting a top-down view of the arctic with glaciers with mini album covers to the left depicting whales, seals, and glaciers. Text reading "Polar Sounds" and "where ecology and music collide" border the album.

Polar Sounds: The New Album where Ecology and Music Collide

Orcas and Ross seals accompanied by a violin? A bowhead whale’s call remixed as a love song? Colliding icebergs combined with synths and electric guitars? These are all songs that feature in Polar Sounds, a newly released album from the sound project Cities and Memory.

A digital drawing of planet Earth surrounded by falling pink particles. Golden rays radiate out from the planet's surface into space.

The Particle Shower That is Changing The Way We See The World

Life on Earth exists under a constant particle shower. Tiny invisible particles form in the
atmosphere and fall towards the Earth’s surface, passing through our bodies and everything around us on their way. From the Great Pyramids of Giza to Mount Vesuvius, one such particle, the muon, is being used by particle physicists to make new discoveries about the physical structures that surround us on Earth.

a baby surrounded by speech bubbles with various country flags in each bubble representing a different language. These languages include portuguese, english, chinese, arabic, german, russian, spanish, hindi, japanese and french.

Polyglot Prodigies

How many times have you downloaded Duolingo, fired up to learn Portuguese or Korean, only to give up after losing your 40-day streak? Even after 40 days, you think, I still only know how to say “Hi, how are you?” It’s easy to get discouraged, but if it’s any solace, our struggles with learning new languages are mostly biological.