We Have Concerns

The next time a police officer in black-tinted glasses gawks at you, they may be pulling up your personal information. Railway police in Zhengzhou, the capital of central China’s Henan province, are the first in the country to start using facial recognition eyewear to screen passengers. Security personnel at Zhengzhou East Railway Station donned the new accessories ahead of the Chinese New Year tr...

We can cry out of sadness, fear, frustration, anger, or even joy. But why do streams of liquid leave our eyes? The truth is no one really knows for sure. In a scientific sense, we’re the only organisms who tear up due to our emotions. Other creatures do so merely to remove irritants from their eyes. Another interesting find is that tears formed from different emotions actually contain different ch...

The average athlete loses about a liter of sweat an hour; Alberto Salazar, an American marathoner, lost 3.7 liters per hour and 12 pounds of his total body weight during the 1984 Olympic marathon in Los Angeles. For NFL players, the number is lower than sweat champion Salazar, but much higher than their colleagues in sports like soccer or running. Larger bodies aren’t the only explanation for the...

Japanese researchers made a botanical announcement on Monday that quickly circled the world. They had developed a banana with an edible peel, allowing Japanese consumers to eat an entire banana—skin and all—the way they would an apple or a peach. So far, the edible-peel banana is little more than designer fruit. Researchers develop the fruit in weekly batches of 10, and sell them at a single marke...

Last month, Motherboard reported on a Redditor using deep learning technology to map female celebrities’ faces onto pornographic performers, with startlingly lifelike results. By scanning a bunch of images of a celebrity’s face, the software was able to imagine what they’d look like grafted into a given video—a powerful technology being used in one of the worst possible ways. The technology also o...

Any animal could feasibly provide a human with emotional support, but it doesn't mean that they all should. According to a report by the BBC, the concept artist Ventiko offered to buy a seat for her peacock, Dexter, but was denied by United Airlines because of the bird's large size and weight. It was imperative he be on the flight because, she claimed, he's her emotional support animal. Jeff and A...

Inside the brain, proteins don’t stick around longer than a few minutes. And yet, our memories can hang on for our entire lifetime. Recently, an international collaboration of researchers discovered something strange about a protein called Arc. This is essential to long-term memory formation. What they found was that it has very similar properties to how a virus infects its host. Jeff and Anthony...

For the first time, scientists say they created cloned primates using the same complicated cloning technique that made Dolly the sheep in 1996. Shanghai scientists created two genetically identical and adorable long-tailed macaques. Researchers used modern technology developed only in the last couple of years to enhance the technique used to clone Dolly, which is called somatic cell transfer. Jeff...

When Rocket Lab’s Electron reached orbit for the first time on Jan. 21, space-pointed radar noticed a mysterious object in space alongside the three satellites it launched. Rocket Lab has launched the world’s first global strobe light. Called the Humanity Star, it’s a one-meter-tall carbon-fiber geodesic sphere made up of 65 highly-reflective panels. In space, it will spin, reflecting sun’s light...

Holding back a sneeze by pinching your nose while keeping your mouth closed may cause physical injury. In one such documented case, an otherwise healthy 34-year-old man in the U.K. suffered a tear in the back of his throat after sneezing while stifling it, by sealing both airways. He explained his neck had become swollen after he tried to contain a forceful sneeze while keeping both nostrils and m...

It’s like having “an elephant stand on your thumb.” That’s how deep-sea physiologist and ecologist Mackenzie Gerringer describes the pressure squeezing down on the deepest known living fish, some 8 kilometers down. For animals that live in such extreme pressures and temperatures (1° or 2° Celsius), snailfish don’t look very robust, or armored; you can actually see the brain through the skull. Jeff...

Hampshire's Ipley Cross is a notorious crossroads where cyclists keep getting hit and even killed by motorists, despite the mostly level terrain around the place where two roads cross each other at a seemingly innocuous angle. A navigational hazard called "constant bearing, decreasing range" means that frequently, the first time a driver and a cyclist will see each other is a second or t...

The mating dance of the male superb bird of paradise is like nothing else on Earth, thanks to their feathers, which absorb 99.95 percent of light. That’s nearly none more black, and virtually identical to what Vantablack, the world’s darkest artificial substance, can absorb. And it’s all thanks to black feathers structured like a forest of chaos. Jeff and Anthony wonder whether or not Anish Kapoor...

Do gummy bears really come in different flavors, or do we just think they taste different because they are different colors? While closing your eyes, your accuracy in differentiating flavors majorly declines. This phenomenon is something that scientists are studying- and something big candy companies have counted on for years. Jeff and Anthony investigate to see just how deep the gummy worm hole r...

The mid-19th century vogue for flowing, diaphanous women's garments made from open-weave fabrics, combined with gas lighting, candles, and open fires meant that it was extremely common for women to literally burst into flames: on stage, at parties, at home. It wasn’t just the fabric, but also the shape of the dresses that caused women’s clothing to erupt in flames. The popular silhouette in the 18...

At first glance, Miles Traer seems like any other scientist, but this Stanford University geologist has an alter ego. He beats back the forces of environmental destruction and holds the super-powerful to account. Traer and two colleagues have calculated the carbon footprint for nine superheroes — and realized that Earth might be better off if they stopped trying to save it. Jeff and Anthony discus...

Despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. The majority of the time spent with your parents is front loaded in your life - most likely you only have 5 % of your life's in person parent time. Jeff and Anthony discuss why this might be okay. GET BONUS EPISODES, VIDEO HANGOUTS AND MORE. VISIT: http:...

The year was 1902. With funding and consent from Congress, Harvey Washington Wiley was about to embark on an experiment he dubbed the “hygienic table trials,” but the Washington news media called his volunteers "the Poison Squad." Wiley’s staff would put borax in their butter, milk, or coffee. Formaldehyde would lurk in their meats, copper sulfate and saltpeter in their fruit pies. Jeff...

At the University of Chicago in the early 1920s, psychology grad student William Blatz built a remote-controlled trick chair that would collapse when he pressed a switch. (It was padded to avoid injury.) Then he had subjects sit in the chair while wearing electrodes to measure heart rate and other vital signs. Blatz's goal was to "study the physiology of fear under controlled, repeatable cond...

A writing team at Botnik Studios used a ‘predictive keyboard’ – a text generator that tries to guess what the next word typed will most likely be - to create a truly hilarious piece of Harry Potter fanfiction. Anthony and Jeff take a look at the new chapter of the Potter-verse and decide if they're ready to read AI created novels. ET BONUS EPISODES, VIDEO HANGOUTS AND MORE. VISIT: http://patreon.c...

A species of Mexican fish amasses in reproductive orgies so loud they can deafen other sea animals, awed scientists have said, calling for preservation of the “spectacle” threatened by overfishing. Certainly a lot to unpack there, and Jeff and Anthony do their best. GET BONUS EPISODES, VIDEO HANGOUTS AND MORE. VISIT: http://patreon.com/wehaveconcerns Get all your sweet We Have Concerns merch by sw...

Since 2007, the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets included $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects. Jeff and Anthony discuss this state sponsored UFO investig...

Researchers from the journal Annals of Botany report that, just like humans, plants can succumb to the effects of general anesthetic drugs. The finding is striking for a variety of reasons—there’s the pesky fact that plants lack a central nervous system, for one thing. Jeff and Anthony examine the problem and come up with some theories as to what is going on. GET BONUS EPISODES, VIDEO HANGOUTS AND...

Psychologists have reported in Child Development that when four- to six-year-olds pretended to be Batman while they were doing a boring but important task, it helped them to resist distraction and stay more focused. The experts don't know exactly why this works so well, but Jeff and Anthony have a few ideas. GET BONUS EPISODES, VIDEO HANGOUTS AND MORE. VISIT: http://patreon.com/wehaveconcerns Get...

It’s usually OK to be proud of your work and lend your name to it. But most people would draw the line at signing their initials into the flesh of internal organs. Not Dr. Simon Bramhall of the UK, apparently. He pleaded guilty to charges that he etched his initials, “SB,” onto the livers of two transplant patients with an argon beam in 2013. Jeff and Anthony discuss whether this should be a crime...