Learning! Roundup: Tylenol Numbs More Than Just Your Pain, Laws Changing Biases, and More!

Did you know that taking acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, can reduce your empathy?
Photo by Pina Messina.

Numbing the Pain

Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol, may numb more than our own pain. New research suggests that people who take acetaminophen are more indifferent to other people's pain and pleasure. All those people railing against our over-medicated society probably had no idea that their Children's Tylenol is part of the problem!

Legally Changing Biases

We all know that discrimination does not just end when legislation changes. People are still racist, sexist, and homophobic even though it's not legal to act on it. However, new research does show that legalizing gay marriage in the United States did reduce homophobia. Researchers guess that when it became legally acceptable for gay people to get married, people's perceptions of what is normal may have begun to shift.

Microplastics in the Air

We all know about microplastics in the ocean and how they are clogging up fish gills and doing all sorts of terrible things, but did you know that they are also in the air, ultimately littering our mountains? Will we EVER LEARN that ruining nature means ruining a giant, interconnected system of things where we can never fully anticipate the outcomes?

Zombie Pigs

Researchers hooked the brains of dead pigs up to a system called BrainEx and it completely restored their cellular function. Now, their consciousness did not return, just the cellular function. Which, I believe, brings us one step closer to zombies?

Your Cheating Face

Turns out that both men and women can recognize a that a person is a cheater just by looking at their face - but only if that person is a man. For whatever reason, a man's proclivity to cheat really is written all over his face.

The Receptionist Delivers!