Engineers Lesss Likely to Succumb to Contagious Yawning

It has always been suspected that yawning was contagious, but now it seems that this is truer for people who have high levels of social empathy.

The study by the University of Leeds concluded that psychology students were much more likely to succumb to yawning in response to other people yawning than engineering students, because they were intrinsically more empathic.

I'm not so sure about this. I work as an engineer and frequently sit in meeting where everybody is yawning.....

I wonder if any research has been done regarding empathic drinking...When I was a student this was a common phenomenon with engineering students.

Pink for Girls -It's all in the Genes (and the blouses and the skirts..)

A Study by the University of Newcastle has concluded that women prefer redder shades when given a choice. They checked more than 200 men and women to choose between different colours. Just to make sure the women were not just showing cultural conditioning, they also tested a control group of Chinese people who are not brought up to associate pink with the feminine.

Of course this does not excuse the clothes shops from only stocking pink and white girls’ clothes in their stores. I can't stand the fact that we are so limited when looking for clothes for our 7 month old daughter. I don't want to dress her up as a Barbie doll or a princess, but it is next to impossible to find clothes which do not have pink in them or cute little flowers or other 'girlie' things. My son’s clothes have animals and dinosaurs and tractors on them... much more fun.

I hope my daughter will grow up to be confident and strong and independent and not pink and fluffy and I refuse to dress her up in a way which is being imposed on me by a society which expects little girls to be little pink princesses. Luckily our first child was a boy so she gets to where his clothes.

People are always assuming she is a boy, but I don't care, because for one thing the darker colours she wears are much better at hiding the dirt/food/sick etc....

Humans do appear to be 'hard wired' to have an underlying liking for blue and this is not so biased between men and women so why can't we have girls clothes in blue...with tractors on....

Meteorites Over Västerås

Thursday night I stood in my garden and saw three shooting stars. Tonight my chances of seeing some more should be even better. It’s that time of year for the Perseids Meteor Shower, when the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle and as the debris hit’s the atmosphere it burns up to form shooting stars. The best time to see them will be from Sunday night to sunrise on Monday morning, but even tonight there will be plenty to see.

Since there is no moon just now, if the skies are clear then it promises to be a good show. It’s just a shame that its still quite light in the sky over southern Sweden, as the darker the sky, the better. I’ve been watching the Perseids every year since I was a child so they are a real pert of the summer to me.

So go out and watch the skies…