In the early nineteen-sixties, two psychologists, David Palermo and James Jenkins, began amassing a huge table of word associations, the first thoughts that come to mind when people are asked to reflect on a particular word. (They interviewed more than forty-five hundred subjects.) Palermo and Jenkins soon discovered that the vast majority of these associations were utterly predictable. For instance, when people are asked to free-associate about the word %u201Cblue,%u201D the most likely first answer is %u201Cgreen,%u201D followed by %u201Csky%u201D and %u201Cocean.%u201D When asked to free-associate about %u201Cgreen,%u201D nearly everyone says %u201Cgrass.%u201D %u201CEven the most creative people are still going to come up with many mundane associations,%u201D Nemeth says.

and “debate” approaches produce more.

They found that when these plants are attacked by tobacco hornworm caterpillars, Manduca sexta, the caterpillars’ saliva causes a chemical change in the GLV compounds the plants had produced. These modified compounds then attract predatory “true bugs,” Geocoris, which prey on hornworm eggs and young larvae.

The new estimates show that in 2008, the first year of the finance-and-food crisis, both the number and share of the population living on less than $1.25 a day (at 2005 prices, the most commonly accepted poverty line) was falling in every part of the world. This was the first instance of declines across the board since the bank started collecting the figures in 1981 (see chart)

Researchers were puzzled when they discovered that the same familiar interference patterns were observed with large-scale molecules, and not exclusively with subatomic particles.

At 24 hr retest, with all subjects having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, we found that memory was superior when sleep occurred shortly after learning rather than following a full day of wakefulness.

the language has been designed to be easy to analyze and can be parsed without a symbol table. This makes it much easier to build tools such as debuggers, dependency analyzers, automated documentation extractors, IDE plug-ins, and so on. C and its descendants are notoriously difficult in this regard.

There are two reasons for having no warnings. First, if it’s worth complaining about, it’s worth fixing in the code. (And if it’s not worth fixing, it’s not worth mentioning.) Second, having the compiler generate warnings encourages the implementation to warn about weak cases that can make compilation noisy, masking real errors that should be fixed.

The percentage of sunlight that a body in the solar system reflects back is known as its albedo

Histatins are proteins found in saliva. They are antimicrobial and antifungal proteins, and have been found to play a role in wound-closure

Secondary metabolites are organic compounds that are not directly involved in the normal growth, development, or reproduction of an organism. Unlike primary metabolites, absence of secondary metabolites does not result in immediate death, but rather in long-term impairment of the organism’s survivability, fecundity, or aesthetics, or perhaps in no significant change at all.

Flavonoids (or bioflavonoids) (from the Latin word flavus meaning yellow, their colour in nature), are a class of plant secondary metabolites.

Has nothing to do with flavor.

exposure to microbes in early life can reduce the body’s inventory of invariant natural killer

The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid.

DNA makes RNA makes proteins and never the other way around.

ribosome is the “factory” that takes amino acids and builds them up into proteins

A hypnopompic state (or hypnopomp) is the state of consciousness leading out of sleep

opposite of hypnogogia, the state leading into sleep

Eigengrau (German: “intrinsic gray”), also called Eigenlicht (“intrinsic light”), dark light, or brain gray, is the color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. Even in the absence of light, some action potentials are still sent along the optic nerve, causing the sensation of a uniform dark gray color. Eigengrau is perceived as lighter than a black object in normal lighting conditions, because contrast is more important to the visual system than absolute brightness.

The Ganzfeld effect (from German for “complete field”) is a phenomenon of visual perception caused by staring at an undifferentiated and uniform field of color. The effect is described as the loss of vision as the brain cuts off the unchanging signal from the eyes. The result is “seeing black” - apparent blindness.

The Prisoner’s Cinema is a phenomenon reported by prisoners confined to dark cells and by others kept in darkness, voluntarily or not, for long periods of time. […] The “cinema” consists of a “light show” of various colors that appear out of the darkness. The light has a form, but those that have seen it find it difficult to describe. Sometimes, the cinema lights resolve into human or other figures