Americans tend to be obsessed about how they look, especially their weight. Now there is a tool to further feed that obsession for those who may have wondered how they might compare if they happened to live in another country. When you insert your personal data into this global body mass index calculator, it returns your own BMI along with the ranges of BMI for 177 other countries in the world,

It turns out that the US is sixth in average BMI, being beaten by Micronesia, Tonga, Croatia, Samoa, and Argentina. I was wondering what it might be about these small Pacific islands that might cause three of them (rank 176, 178, and 173 respectively out of 193 countries in terms of population) to rank in the top four.

I have not been to any of these countries and so have no first hand experience but my wife who has been to Argentina says that she would never have guessed that they ranked above the US because she saw hardly any overweight people there, unlike what she sees here. This should serve as a warning that using our personal impressions (which are always based on small and usually unrepresentative samples) to infer the characteristics of entire populations can lead to wildly erroneous conclusions.

This is an interesting question. Jerry Coyne gives a list of seven pieces of evidence that, if replicated and confirmed, he would find persuasive. [Read more…]

Bill Hammack explains the workings of a common household appliance.

This slow-motion video of people getting hit by a powerful jet of air right in the face is remarkable for its demonstration of how flexible the skin on our face is when subjected to powerful winds. I would never have guessed.

I wrote recently about an article by Ed Yong about a new technique that could be of use in catching research papers where the authors have massaged their data to get positive results. Yong has now identified and interviewed the hitherto anonymous developer of this technique. He is social psychologist Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania. [Read more…]

South African Oscar Pistorius has qualified to compete in the 4x400m relay at the London Olympics. Modern technology is amazing. There is no way in looking at him walking running that would tell you that he had prosthetics for both legs below the knee, unless you look closely. [Read more…]

A press release from CERN cautiously announces the discovery of what may be the long-sought Higgs boson, with a spokesperson being quoted as saying, “The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found.” [Read more…]

The artist Nagai Hideyuki plays with our sense of perception by drawing figures on two flat pieces of paper that, when they are held at right angles and viewed from a certain direction, give the illusion of being 3-D constructions. [Read more…]

A news report on a new study says that the same genetic mutation that gave modern supermarket tomatoes their luscious-looking uniform red color is also the one that reduced its sweetness. [Read more…]