Snapshot · Stuff You Should Know
Deoxygenated blood is not actually blue — veins appear blue because blue light cannot penetrate as deeply as red light, so blue light is reflected back to the eye.
Shane and Matt discussed that scientists still don't fully understand why yawning is contagious, with mirror neurons being the leading but unconfirmed theory.
In a dataset of ~1.2 million people, reaction time declined slowly from the 30s onward, but processing speed remained relatively stable until about age 60, then dropped sharply.
White matter makes up approximately 60% of the human brain — a higher proportion than any other species — and its degradation with age is one of the best predictors of cognitive decline.
Studies comparing Bolivian hunter-gatherers to industrialized populations found a bell-shaped curve between caloric availability and brain volume — both chronic caloric restriction and caloric excess shrink the brain.
Environmental exposures cannot be studied with RCTs in humans — you cannot randomize people to breathe polluted air for 20 years — leaving researchers reliant on flawed observational data.
Living near a highway simultaneously increases particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, noise, and nighttime light — making it nearly impossible to isolate which specific exposure drives health harm.
Unlike a genetic marker like Lp(a) which can be measured once and assumed stable, environmental exposures vary by where you live, work, commute, exercise, and how your home is ventilated — making zip-code-level estimates very noisy.
Environmental exposures are invisible (except light), accumulate slowly, and can take years or decades for health effects to appear — making them uniquely difficult for the public to evaluate and creating strong polarization.
Completely untrained people shown just 5-second video clips can detect psychopathic personality traits with accuracy reasonably correlated to trained psychologists with full case files.
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