There are two studies in particular we wanted to single out today. Not because they’re particularly weird but because you can expect them to be all over your Facebook fairly soon with a lot of attendant stupidity, and far be it from us not to prepare you.
So what flavors of stupidity will you be experiencing this weekend? Either screaming matches over sexism or screaming matches over abortion. Neither, of course, will be actually backed up by the science these people are screaming about, but hey, isn’t that what the Internet is for?
To make you hate people?
First off, on Tuesday a private company called StemCells, Inc. (creative!) announced that trials they’d conducted with rats demonstrate a possible cure for Alzheimer’s. That cure?
Injecting fetal stem cell tissues into the brain.
These aren’t pikers or fly-by-nighters, either: the company got started in 1999 and has been working towards this trial ever since. And there’s no guarantee it’ll work in humans. This has never stopped a stupid argument, however, so you might want to preemptively hide a few people now.
Secondly, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska conducted a study and found that both men and women used different parts of the brain to recognize different genders. Men are identified with “local” brain processes and women are identified with “global” brain processes.
So what’s the big deal? It means that men and women both tend to view women with the same process we use to identify objects. io9, showing a rare lapse in judgement, have already made the idiotic jump to assuming that this is why we objectify women, you know, because human thought only relies on ONE brain process!
Yeah, expect this to be everywhere, especially as douchebags try to use it as an excuse for their porn habits.
Oh, and in case you thought you were safe from stupidity, there’s also some guy who figured out how to print out an AR-15.
Yeah, maybe just… quietly retire from Facebook for the weekend.
image courtesy Paramount