WTF • Fun • Fact    ( /dʌb(ə)lˌju/  /ti/   /ef/ • /fʌn/ • /fækt/ )

     1. noun  A random, interesting, and overall fun fact that makes you scratch your head and think what the...

WTF Fun Fact 13011 – Facebook and Divorce

What’s the connection between Facebook and divorce? Well, one clue comes from a study published back in 2013 that found an astonishing 1/3 of divorce papers included a reference to the social media platform.

The relationship between Facebook and divorce

We’d be interested to know where this study stands now and if anyone looked more deeply into the results. What we do know is that in 2011, 1/3rd of all divorce filings contained the word “Facebook,” according to Divorce Online. This was up from 20% just three years earlier. ABC News (cited below) also pointed out that “more than 80 percent of U.S. divorce attorneys say social networking in divorce proceedings is on the rise, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.”

Lawyers have also seen an increase in the number of times Facebook has been used to prove infidelity during divorce cases as well as in child custody hearings.

ABC News also reported that “Despite the increase, the top Facebook mentions were the same: inappropriate messages to “friends” of the opposite sex, and cruel posts or comments between separated spouses. Sometimes, Facebook friends would tattle to one partner in a relationship about bad behavior by the other.”

How Facebook affects relationships

A 2013 study in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking also showed that Facebook was playing an important role in the end of relationships.

While Facebook might have helped some of us forge new relationships, it may not be the best use of our time once we’re in them. In fact, it may be damaging to our romantic relationships, according to Russell Clayton who performed the research and found that “people who use Facebook excessively are far more likely to experience Facebook-related conflict with their romantic partners, which then may cause negative relationship outcomes including emotional and physical cheating, breakup and divorce,” according to a press release.”

By surveying Facebook users ages 18 to 82 years old, the researcher found that high levels of Facebook use among couples “significantly predicted Facebook-related conflict, which then significantly predicted negative relationship outcomes such as cheating, breakup, and divorce.”

When it came to couples in a relationship for three years or less, Facebook proved to be a particularly large problem.

“Previous research has shown that the more a person in a romantic relationship uses Facebook, the more likely they are to monitor their partner’s Facebook activity more stringently, which can lead to feelings of jealousy,” Clayton said. “Facebook-induced jealousy may lead to arguments concerning past partners. Also, our study found that excessive Facebook users are more likely to connect or reconnect with other Facebook users, including previous partners, which may lead to emotional and physical cheating.”

If you want your relationship to last, you may want to consider being more mindful about how and how often you use social media. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Can Facebook Ruin Your Marriage?” — ABC News

WTF Fun Fact 13010 – The Invention of the Chocolate Chip Cookie

Fun fact: We have a woman named Ruth Wakefield to thank for the invention of the chocolate chip cookie in 1939. She ran the restaurant at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. She assumed adding broken pieces of Nestlé Semi-Sweet chocolate to her cookies would make the chocolate melt into the batter. But the chocolate largely maintained its shape, and the cookies became so popular that she published the recipe in a Boston newspaper.

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Even if chocolate chip cookies aren’t you’re favorite, it’s hard to claim they don’t hold an iconic place in American culinary history. According to the Nestlé website,

“It all started back in 1939. Ruth Wakefield, who ran the successful Toll House restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, was mixing a batch of cookies when she decided to add broken pieces of Nestlé Semi-Sweet chocolate into the recipe expecting the chocolate to melt. Instead, the semi-sweet bits held their shape and softened to a delicate creamy texture and the chocolate chip cookie was born. Ruth’s ‘Toll House Crunch Cookie’ recipe was published in a Boston newspaper and her invention of the chocolate chip cookie quickly became the most popular cookie of all-time.”

The original chocolate chip cookie recipe

Want to make the original chocolate chip cookie? Nestlé shared the recipe on their website:

The recipe that started it all

More than 80 years later, Nestlé Toll House’s Original Chocolate Chip Cookies are a true classic and a go-to recipe for all occasions.

Ingredients:

  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 cups (12-oz. pkg.) Nestlé Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels
  • 1 cup chopped nuts (if omitting, add 1-2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour)

Instructions:

Step 1: Preheat oven to 375° F
Step 2: Combine flour, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract in a large mixer bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets
Step 3: Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

— WTF fun facts

Source: “A timeless discovery: The chocolate chip cookie” — Nestlé

WTF Fun Fact 13009 – Cats Domesticated Themselves

If you’ve ever been owned by a cat (or have been given the honor of being allowed to live alongside one), you know they will do whatever they want to do. So it may come as no surprise that cats domesticated themselves. They just decided to move in with humans – and not much about them has changed since that day.

How do we know cats domesticated themselves?

If you’re skeptical about this and how we know it (or even what it all means), that’s fair.

Here’s the thing – when humans domesticate animals, we choose certain characteristics that we like about them, and the animals that end up allowing this kind of domestication often have certain kind of characteristics (whether it’s size, a tendency to be docile, etc.). Those characteristics are, to some extent, encoded in their genomes. So if we look at the genomes of those animals over thousands of years, we should see changes that indicate the selection of certain traits.

It’s not much different than modern dog breeding – purebred dogs are specifically bred to have specific genes that make them look or act a certain way. Their environment plays a role too, but we can see a lot of characteristics in their genomes.

Cat genomes? Let’s just say they haven’t changed much at all. And we know that because cats have been cherished and worshipped for thousands of years and therefore buried in ways that allow us to collect even their ancient DNA.

What do cat genomes tell us about domestication?

Of course, we can’t go back in time to check our work, but we can do pretty comprehensive studies on cats from all over the world and from different time periods. And that’s what a group of scientists did. They published their study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution under the not-very-catchy title “The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world.” It doesn’t sound riveting, but it’s pretty cool (especially if someone summarizes it for you).

Our favorite line comes from National Geographic’s write-up on the work (cited below), noting that “[cats’] genes have changed little from those of wildcats, apart from picking up one recent tweak: the distinctive stripes and dots of the tabby cat.”

But here’s the gist of it: The researchers looked at the DNA of over 200 cats. These cats spanned a timeline of 9,000 years, the ancient cats coming from Rome and Egypt. They found that there were two major cat lineages that came together to make modern housecats. Normally, you’d expect to see A LOT more diversity than that.

Early cats likely spread into Europe from southwest Asia around 4400 BCE and hung out with people in early farming communities. Apparently, cats just decided people were largely ok to be around, and people decided cats were ok because they killed rodents that interfered with crops. If anyone tried to do anything more to domesticate cats, they clearly failed.

It was a mutually beneficial relationship. And maybe cats didn’t even like people but just liked the rodent populations we attracted. We’ll never know. But in any case, we all just grew up alongside each other. Humans “let” cats domesticate themselves. (Frankly, our guess is that cats were in charge the whole time.) — WTF fun facts

Source: “Cats Domesticated Themselves, Ancient DNA Shows” — National Geographic

WTF Fun Fact 13008 – Financial Stress Lowers IQ

Fun Fact: “A Harvard study found that our IQs can drop by 13 points when we are under financial stress. This is in part due to the amount of brain power we use to think about any financial burdens we carry, causing distraction.”
Are you surprised to hear that financial stress lowers IQ?

***

According to Canada’s CBC News (cited below), “People struggling to pay their bills tend to temporarily lose the equivalent of 13 IQ points, scientists found when they gave intelligence tests to shoppers at a New Jersey mall and farmers in India. The idea is that the financial stress of trying to make ends meet monopolizes thinking, making other calculations slower and more difficult, sort of like the effects of going without sleep for a night.”

Financial stress and IQ

We know IQ tests aren’t reliable indicators of innate intelligence, but they can be used to measure changes in a person’s cognitive capacity under different conditions. In other words, we don’t have to compare a person’s scores to anyone else’s, we can compare their specific scores without making judgments about their overall intelligence.

CBC described the study:

“The scientists looked at the effects of finances on the brain both in the lab and in the field. In controlled lab-like conditions, they had about 400 shoppers at Quaker Bridge Mall in central New Jersey consider certain financial scenarios and tested their brain power. Then they looked at real life in the fields of India, where farmers only get paid once a year. Before the harvest, they take out loans and pawn goods. After they sell their harvest, they are flush with cash.

[Harvard researcher Sendhil] Mullainathan and colleagues tested the same 464 farmers before and after the harvest and their IQ scores improved by 25 per cent when their wallets fattened.”

What the study doesn’t mean

The study does not mean that rich people are smarter than people who are having temporary or long-term financial difficulties. It only means they have more cognitive resources to “spend.” They can think more clearly and concentrate better on other tasks since they’re not worried about money. — WTF fun facts

Source: “Financial stress can induce drop in IQ” — CBC News

WTF Fun Fact 13007 – Dead People With Facebook Accounts

Fun Fact: An estimated 30 million Facebook accounts belong to people who have died. By the year 2070, a study has estimated there will be more dead people with Facebook accounts than living users.

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Studies estimate that somewhere between 10 million and 30 million Facebook accounts belong to users who have died. Facebook can memorialize accounts if they’re notified of a death, but most people don’t think to plan for the legacy of their social media accounts. According to PopCrush, “a Good Trust survey revealed ‘some 90 percent of people here in the U.S. have no plans whatsoever” as to “what happens to the digital stuff’ after they die.”

Of course, Facebook is notoriously private about user data, so there’s no way to confirm the exact numbers.

Facebook, graveyard

According to The Guardian (cited below), “If Facebook continues to grow at its current rate, the site could have 4.9 billion deceased members by 2100…” This was estimated by Oxford University researchers.

“Even if growth had stopped entirely last year, the study finds, Facebook would be looking at about 1.4 billion dead members by 2100. By 2070, in that scenario, the dead would already outnumber the living.”

The ethical issues of dead Facebook users

You may not think it’s a big deal if a social media user is dead, but questions arise about who owns the data they’ve posted. This is especially thorny if they’ve posted something in the past that family or friends come to consider private.

The question is: who is entitled to your digital legacy?

If you haven’t left a trusted person with your passwords in the event of your death, is there anything on your social media pages that could become problematic in the future? (This might be a big problem if, for example, you spend a lot of time posting about your kids.)— WTF fun facts

Source: “Facebook could have 4.9bn dead users by 2100, study finds” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 13006 – Brain Cells Learn To Play Pong

Fun Fact: Lab-grown human and mouse brain cells living in a petri dish became sentient enough to learn to play the video game Pong.
That’s right – scientists found that brain cells learn to play Pong, the 1970s tennis-type video game.

***

In news that we don’t find even remotely comforting, brain cells grown in a petri dish have been shown to become sentient enough to learn to play video games. And we’re not kidding when we say that their next plan is to get the brain cells drunk and see what happens.

Sentient brain cells living in a dish

To be clear, these are cells that are living in a petri dish – not a person. They are human cells derived from stem cells and mouse cells derived from embryonic cells. There are 800,000 cells in total involved in the experiment.

Not only have the cells learned to play the game Pong, but they keep improving. “They played longer rallies and were aced less often,” reported The Guardian (cited below). Of course, Pong is a very simple game, which is why the researchers chose it in the first place.

The study that revealed the experiment was just published in the journal Neuron.

The researchers hail from Cortical Labs, Monash University, the University of Melbourne, and University College London.

How can brain cells learn to play Pong?

According to The Guardian, the researchers out the cells on something called the “DishBrain,” “a multi-electrode array that can sense cell activity and stimulate the cells, then gave the cells feedback on whether the paddle was hitting the ball.”

Within five minutes the cells started to communicate using electrical activity to operate the game. It sounds like sci-fi, but it’s true.

“Now the researchers will see how the cells perform when they are drunk or given medicines. They hope to use the DishBrain to learn more about conditions such as epilepsy and dementia.”

“This is the new way to think about what a neuron is,” a researcher said. — WTF fun facts

Interested? See for yourself:

Source: “Scientists teach brain cells to play video game Pong” — The Guardian

WTF Fun Fact 13005 – Board Games For The Brain

Fun fact: People who regularly play non-digital games (such as cards and board games) are more likely to score better on memory and thinking tests when they’re in their 70s.
If you’re interested in maintaining your mental acuity over time, board games for the brain may just help you out!

***

If you want to stay sharp in your 70s, games are a great way to exercise your brain. But digital games (such as video games and games on your phone) just won’t cut it. The link between mental acuity in later life and games seems to apply only to physical games like board games and playing cards.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh “tested more than 1000 people aged 70 for memory, problem solving, thinking speed and general thinking ability,” according to Science Daily (cited below). “Those who regularly played non-digital games scored better on memory and thinking tests in their 70s, the research found.”

The power of board games for the brain

Interestingly, the study also found that “People who increased game playing during their 70s were more likely to maintain certain thinking skills as they grew older.”

Scientists discovered the connection after testing their subjects every three years, until they reached age 79. They compared test results to how often people reported playing games like cards, chess, bingo, or crossword puzzles.

The team also factored in the scores from the subject’s intelligence tests when they were 11 years old and considered factors like lifestyle, economic status, and activity levels so that they could be reasonably sure that the games were the underlying factor for better memory test scores. (The participants were part of a group called the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936. They were all born in 1936 and have been tracked in a variety of ways throughout their lives.)

They found that: “People who increased game playing in later years were found to have experienced less decline in thinking skills in their seventies — particularly in memory function and thinking speed.”

Protecting cognitive health

Caroline Abrahams, Charity Director at Age UK, said of the study: “Even though some people’s thinking skills can decline as we get older, this research is further evidence that it doesn’t have to be inevitable. The connection between playing board games and other non-digital games later in life and sharper thinking and memory skills adds to what we know about steps we can take to protect our cognitive health, including not drinking excess alcohol, being active and eating a healthy diet.” — WTF fun facts

Source: “Playing board games may help protect thinking skills in old age” — Science Daily

WTF Fun Fact 13004 – You Are More Likely To Die Around 11am

“Fun” fact: Because of a gene linked to our circadian rhythms, humans are more likely to die around 11am than at any other time of day.

***

In 2012, a study published in the Annals of Neurology reported on a gene variant that affects our circadian rhythms. And that variant, it seems, could also predict the time of day you will die. And that time is around 11am.

According to a write-up in The Atlantic (cited below), the study’s authors “realized through their research that there seems to be one DNA sequence that determines, essentially, how each of us relates to time itself. And data analysis — poring through 15 years’ worth of sleep and death patterns collected from subjects in an unrelated sleep study — helped them to make the realization.”

Why do we die around 11am?

A lot of this work has to do with the ways in which we are no longer beholden to a strict social schedule as we age.

Our external environment affects our inner circadian “clocks,” which regulate our bodies’ functions This includes elements like work schedules and daylight exposure. But there’s also a genetic component to the time of day we’re most active and alert.

According to another Atlantic piece on the research that studied the phenomenon: “Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston borrowed data that had been collected 15 years ago from a sleep study at Rush University in Chicago…First, its subjects had worn a device, called an actigraph, that provided detailed information about their sleep-wake patterns. Second, the subjects were all over the age of 65 when the study was originally done. So by the time the Harvard researchers got to them, many had passed away. They had all also agreed to donate their brains to science. Because of this, the researchers knew their precise times of death. Finally, in the course of the many physical and psychological evaluations undergone by the subjects, they had also had their DNA sequenced.”

The researchers compared data from over 500 participants, looking at genetics and the time of death. They found a piece of DNA that was linked to sleeping and waking hours.

People with a more common gene variant tended to die in the late morning, around 11am.

But this doesn’t mean 11am is a more dangerous time of day. The study participants had largely died of natural causes. So the issue is that their circadian rhythms affected their bodies in a way that late morning was the most common time for them to expire. — WTF fun facts

Source: “You Are Most Likely to Die at 11 a.m.” — The Atlantic

WTF Fun Fact 13003 – The Sean O’Casey Bridge

Fun Fact: “Dublin’s Sean O’Casey Bridge is a pedestrian bridge over the River Liffey built to open up and allow ships to pass. But it was operated by a remote control that got lost in 2010. It was only in 2014, after building a new remote, that the bridge became operational again.”

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Pro tip: If you build a bridge to help pedestrians cross a waterway and the bridge needs to open up in order to allow ships to pass, make sure you create more than one remote control to operate the bridge. Otherwise, a mobile phone-sized remote could get lost for four years. And that can make things very inconvenient for shipping through the waterway. Just ask Dublin – they know all about it.

The Sean O’Casey Bridge

Irish news site TheJournal.ie (cited below) reported in 2014 that the Sean O’Casey Bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin was once again operational after engineers were able to create a new remote to operate the bridge.

Describing the bridge, the news site said, “The design includes two 44-metre-long arms, capable of swinging open when required. That operation is controlled by a hand-held remote device — but, as TheJournal.ie reported last year — that device went missing some years ago, meaning openings were no longer possible.”

The loss presumable occurred when the bureaucrats running the bridge moved offices.

Re-opening the bridge

Years of budget issues prevented a proper engineering review necessary to solve the problem, according to the news site. But in 2014, someone found the money to reprogram a new device.

Financial Advisor to the Authority John Crawley told TheJournal.ie: “Its not like a Sky box remote control.” The bridge remote required more than just an open and close button; it needed to be a secure system that no one could hack. Special engineers were required in order for it to be done right.

“An Irish-based firm carried out the reprogramming, and that aspect of the work cost around €1,800,” Crawley said. — WTF fun facts

Source: “The Celtic Tiger bridge that wouldn’t open because of a lost remote control” — TheJournal.ie