This is what makes someone ‘cool', according to science
These universally recognised traits for "cool" people include being extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous.
The research, involving 6,000 adults from 13 countries and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, found that the definition of "cool" is consistent across both Eastern and Western social circles.
The study differentiates "cool" from "good", noting that "good" people are typically perceived as more conforming and traditional.
Findings suggest that global media, such as fashion, music, and film industries, have helped standardise the meaning of "cool," influencing social hierarchies and cultural evolution.
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Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Controversial but cheap supplement that millions already take beats dementia
Apart from helping you improve muscle growth, your protein powder may also protect your brain from decline and dementia. Researchers from the University of Kansas have found that consuming creatine as a supplement in any form can help improve memory and potentially reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease. Usually found in the body's muscles, creatine is an organic compound made of amino acids (simple proteins) that is also found in the brain. It is produced by the liver, pancreas and kidneys and is critical in maintaining the brain's memory, attention span, energy production and processing speed. Previous research has shown that lower levels of creatine in the brain is associated with cognitive decline. And while low creatine levels are not a direct cause of dementia, they could lead to less energy production, which may worsen a person's memory. In a new study, scientists found that patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease who took 20 grams of creatine for eight weeks showed an 11 percent increase in their brain's creatine levels and a slight increase in cognitive and memory tests. Lead author Dr Matthew Taylor, assistant professor of dietetics and nutrition at KU School of Health Professions, said: 'There has been evidence in other populations that giving a higher dose of creatine does change brain creatine levels, but seeing it change in Alzheimer's patients was really exciting. That 11 percent is a significant increase.' Alzheimer's disease is one of the most common forms of dementia and mostly affects older adults. About 7.2million people in the US 65 and older live with the condition and over 100,00 die from it annually. The Alzheimer's Association estimates that by 2050, nearly 13 million Americans will be living with the condition. Creatine supplements, typically priced about $2.40 per serving and taken by as many as 20million Americans, are usually bought by those looking to enhance athletic performance and muscle growth. They are most commonly available in both capsules and powder form. For the trial, 19 Alzheimer's patients were given 20g of creatine monohydrate, a powder they could mix into a beverage of their choice, every day for eight weeks. According to experts, the standard dose of creatine recommended for people looking to boost their muscle strength and athletic performance is 5g per day. But since natural creatine produced in the body goes to the muscles first and whatever remains trickles to the brain, researchers gave patients 20g in hopes more would travel there. The participants also underwent blood tests, MRI scans and took cognitive evaluations before taking the supplement, after four weeks and again after eight weeks to measure creatine levels and memory and cognitive improvement. Along the 11 percent increase in brain creatine levels, results showed the participant's overall cognitive abilities, including attention, memory, language, and executive functions, slightly improved. Additionally, their capacity to think logically and problem-solve also increased marginally. The participants' ability to accurately and fluently read, as well as to pay attention to a singular object also showed significant improvement. The study authors wrote: 'The cognitive improvements observed in this study are also promising, as Alzheimer's disease is a progressive disease with expected decline over time. 'We hypothesized that memory and executive function, the most affected domains in Alzheimer's disease would benefit from creatine monohydrate supplementation.' Alzheimer's disease is believed to be caused by the development of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain - which damage and kill cells. Amyloid protein molecules stick together in brain cells, forming clumps called plaques. While tau proteins twist together in fiber-like strands called tangles. The plaques and tangles block the ability of the brain's neurons to send electrical and chemical signals back and forth. Over time, this disruption causes permanent damage in the brain that leads to Alzheimer's disease. While there is no clear cause of the disease, experts believe it can develop due to genetic mutations and lifestyle choices, such as physical inactivity, unhealthy diet and social isolation. However, the scientists involved in this study also believe that low creatine levels can cause problems with the quantity of energy produced in the brain and how the organ uses it. Low energy levels due to a lack of creatine can significantly impair cognitive processes like attention, memory, and decision-making while also affecting mood and emotional regulation. This can increase the progression of Alzheimer's disease in individuals and worsen their ability to perform basic tasks. Therefore, the 11 percent increase in brain creatine levels observed in this study provides hope for Alzheimer's patients looking to slow down the progression of their condition. It remains unknown the exact relationship between creatine and dementia. Dr Taylor noted that additional research is needed to understand how the supplement can improve cognition. This not the first time scientists have uncovered the benefits of creatine supplements on the brain. A 2018 Experimental Gerontology found that taking the supplement orally may improve short-term memory, as well intelligence and logical reasoning in healthy adults. The 2025 study was published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Intervention journal in May 2025. But creatine has also come under fire, suspected of leading to water retention, bloating and GI upset, hair loss and an increased risk of kidney damage.
The Guardian
13 hours ago
- The Guardian
Cramps, fatigue and hallucinations: paddling 200km in a Paleolithic canoe from Taiwan to Japan
Dr Yousuke Kaifu was working at an archaeological site on the Japanese islands of Okinawa when a question started to bubble in his mind. The pieces unearthed in the excavation, laid out before him, revealed evidence of humans living there 30,000 years ago, arriving from the north and the south. But how did they get there? 'There are stone tools and archaeological remains at the site but they don't answer those questions,' Kaifu, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Tokyo, says. In the Paleolithic era, or the old stone age, technology was rudimentary, he says. 'I thought it was great they reached those islands with such simple technology. I wanted to experience it.' So Kaifu devised an adventurous plan that would see a team of researchers take to the sea in a 225km canoe trip from Taiwan to Japan's Yonaguni island. Yonaguni is the closest of the Ryukyu islands – a chain stretching south-west from Kyushu to Taiwan – but it lies across one of the world's strongest currents. The voyage was reminiscent of the famed 1947 Kontiki crossing by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, which proved it was possible that peoples from South Americas paddled to Polynesia. But first, Kaifu's team needed a boat. Any vessel used by the original Paleolithic travellers had long since disintegrated. The team used traditional techniques to build rafts made of bamboo and reed, but ocean tests found they were too slow to battle the Kuroshio current, which was even stronger at the time of the Paleolithic crossing. 'Through those failed experiments we gradually learned the difficulty of the crossing, but at the same time we knew the Palaeolithic people were on the island. They had succeeded, so there must be a resolution which we just hadn't found,' Kaifu says. Eventually, the team built a heavy, unstable but workable dugout canoe out of Japanese cedar, and identified Wushibi bay on Taiwan's east coast from which to launch the 'Sugime'. Crucially, Yonaguni is not visible from Taiwan's shore but can be seen on a clear day from its mountains, near Taroko. The researchers believed it likely that the early migrants had seen it, and that they were well aware of the strength and behaviour of the Kuroshio current from fishing ventures. The team of five included professional paddlers as well as the scientists, but no one who had made such a journey, let alone without modern navigation. The day they set out, the weather was not good, Kaifu recalls, with choppy seas and clouds obscuring the stars they needed to find their way. Instead, they had to rely on another ancient technique, monitoring the direction of the swell to keep their own direction stable. 'Polynesian and Micronesian people did it, and we learned the technique,' says Kaifu, who travelled on the crew's escort vessel, 'the safe place', he laughs. For 45 hours they paddled, suffering muscle aches, fatigue, cramps and even hallucinations. 'Surrounded only by the sea, clouds, and sky, they were uncertain about their position,' the report's journey log notes. But their arrival on the second night was anti-climactically untraditional. Still almost 40km away, 'they found the island by the lighthouse, which was unfortunate', Kaifu said. 'But the beautiful moment for me was the time of [the previous day's] dawn, the sun was coming up and the sky became gradually light, and we saw the clouds on the horizon. But at one point on the horizon the clouds were different, so there must be something under the clouds. That was the moment we were sure the island was there. Just like the ancient people, the ancestors, it was good to capture the island from the natural signature.' The team made the journey in 2019, with support from Japan's National Museum of Science and Nature, Taiwan's National Museum of Prehistory, and crowdfunding donors. Last week they published two papers and a 90-minute documentary on their findings, on the journey itself and on the ocean modelling of the route's treacherous currents and unpredictable weather. 'Paleolithic people are often regarded as 'inferior' among the general public, primarily due to their 'primitive' culture and technology,' the report said. 'In sharp contrast, our experiment highlighted that they accomplished something extraordinary with the rudimentary technology available to them at the time.' There is much unknown about the early migration of humans. Homo sapiens are believed to have spread across the world with large-scale maritime expansion occurring at least 50,000 years ago. A 2017 study in northern Australia found it could have been 15,000 to 30,000 years earlier than that. The team's report noted growing consensus in the scientific community that the maritime migrations were driven by intentional seafaring more than accidental drifting, but without really knowing much about how. Kaifu's team found that while the journey from Taiwan to an unseen island was treacherous and required skill, strength and a lot of luck, it was possible. Almost six years to the day since his team paddled away from Wushibi, Kaifu is excited recalling the details of their 'imperfect' journey. 'We anthropologist and archeologists who have studied human migration in the past, we draw a line on a map,' Kaifu said. 'But behind each of those lines there must be a great story. Crossing the ocean can't be represented by a simple line. I wanted to know the real story behind those migrations.'
BBC News
15 hours ago
- BBC News
The body parts evolution still can't explain
Human testicles are much smaller, in proportion, to some of our primate cousins. Evolution can tell us why. But the size of other body parts is a little bit more of a mystery. The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our history. But scientists are still puzzling over why we evolved into this particular form. Why do humans uniquely have a chin, for example? And why, relative to body weight, is a human testicle triple the size of a gorilla's but a fifth that of a chimpanzee? As I show in my new book, The Tree of Life, we are still searching for the answers to many of these "why" questions. But we are starting to find answers to some of them. The story of evolution tells us how, starting from simple beginnings, each species was built – when each of the components that make a living creature was added to its blueprint. If we climb the evolutionary tree of life, we can follow a twisting path that visits the increasingly specialised branches that a species belongs to. We humans, for example, were animals before we became vertebrates; mammals before evolving into primates and so on. The groups of species we share each of these branches with reveal the order our body parts appeared in. A body and a gut (inventions of the animal branch) must have come before backbone and limbs (vertebrate branch); milk and hair (mammals) came before fingernails (primates). There is a way we can study the separate problem of just why we evolved each of these body parts, but it only works if the feature in question has evolved more than once on separate branches of the tree of life. This repeated evolution is called convergence. It can be a source of frustration for biologists because it confuses us as to how species are related. Swallows and swifts, for example, were once classified as sister species. We now know from both DNA and comparisons of their skeletons that swallows are really closer relatives of owls than swifts. Size matters when it comes to evolution But convergent evolution becomes something useful when we think of it as a kind of natural experiment. The size of primate testicles gives us a classic example. Abyssinian black and white colobus monkey and bonnet macaque adult males are roughly the same size. But, like chimps, humans and gorillas, these similar monkeys have vastly dissimilar testicles. Colobus testicles weigh just 3g (0.1oz). The testicles of the macaques, in contrast, are a whopping 48g (1.7oz). You could come up with several believable explanations for their different testicle sizes. Large testicles might be the equivalent of the peacock's tail, not useful per se but attractive to females. But perhaps the most plausible explanation relates to the way they mate. A male colobus monkey competes ferociously for access to a harem of females who will mate exclusively with him. Macaques, on the other hand live in peaceful mixed troops of about 30 monkeys and have a different approach to love where everyone mates with everyone else: males with multiple females (polygamy) and females with multiple males (polyandry). The colobus with his harem can get away with producing a bare minimum of sperm – if a droplet is enough to produce a baby, then why make more? For a male macaque the competition to reproduce happens in a battle between his sperm and the sperm of other males who mated before or after. A male macaque with large testicles should make more sperm, giving him a higher chance of passing on his genes. It's a sensible explanation for their different testicle sizes, but is it true? This is where convergent evolution helps. If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life we find there are many groups of mammals that have evolved testicles of all different sizes. In almost all these separate cases, larger testicles are consistently found in promiscuous species and smaller in monogamous. A small-testicled, silverback male gorilla has sole access to a harem. Big-testicled chimps and bonobos are indeed highly promiscuous. Dolphins, meanwhile, may have the biggest mammalian testicles of all, making up as much as 4% of their body weight (equivalent to human testicles weighing roughly 3kg (9.9lb)). Although wild dolphins' sex lives are naturally hard to study, spinner dolphins at least fit our expectations, engaging in mass mating events called wuzzles. It was thanks to the multiple observations provided by convergent evolution that we were able to discover this consistent correlation between testicle size and sex life right across the mammals. And as for humans, we have testicle size somewhere in the middle – you can make of this what you want! But what of the human chin? More like this:• When it comes to our brains, size isn't everything• How dinosaurs reached 'titanic' size• How humans lost their fur The human chin has been fertile ground for arguments between scientists over its purpose. As with testicles, there are half a dozen plausible ideas to explain the evolution of the human chin. It could have evolved to strengthen the jaw of a battling caveman. Maybe the chin evolved to exaggerate the magnificence of a manly beard. It might even be a by-product of the invention of cooking and the softer food it produced – a functionless facial promontory left behind by the receding tide of a weakening jaw. Intriguingly, however, a chin can be found in no other mammal, not even our closest cousins the Neanderthals. Thanks to the uniqueness of the Homo sapiens chin, while we have a rich set of possible explanations for its evolutionary purpose, in the absence of convergent evolution, we have no sensible way of testing them. Some parts of human nature may be destined to remain a mystery. * Max Telford is the Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, at University College London ** This article is adapted from a piece that originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. -- For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
