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Photo: Arnett Gill

Why do we LOL? Is ROFLing an innate piece of human behavior? Does our tendency to LMAO say something about us—something that separates us from the non-kekekeing species who share our planet?

For Scienceline, William Herkewitz explores the evolutionary history of laughter, a story that shows us that maybe we’re not quite so unique as we’d like to think. It’s not just that we laugh at funny things. The roots of this behavior, scientists think, go back much further and actually play an important purpose.

Herkewitz finds that various theories abound, but that the current “best guess” says that humans laugh to tell other humans not to get too fussed over something that could otherwise be regarded as scary or dangerous.

If you’re an ancestral human, says Ramachandran, and you come across what you think is a dangerous snake but actually turns out to be a stick, you’re relieved and you laugh. “By laughing, you’re communicating: ‘All is OK,’” says Ramachandran.

Ramachandran believes the “false alarm” signaling purpose of laugher explains its loud sound and explosive quality. If you want to signal something to a larger social group, they better hear it. His theory also helps explain the contagiousness of laughter — a curious quality exploited by the laugh tracks of TV sitcoms. Strangely enough, hearing the sound of laughter, on its own, is enough to elicit more laughter in others. “A signal is much more valuable if it amplifies and spreads like wildfire in the group,” says Ramachandran.

People also laugh to show pleasure, to bond with other members of the group. And in this regard, humans’ laughter isn’t special.

Our laughter, the Tommy gun staccato sound of “ha-ha-ha,” is unique in the animal kingdom. Beyond scientific anomalies like Mister Ed or Babe the pig, if you visit your local zoo you’ll be hard-pressed to find any animals making a sound you’d confuse with human laughter. But do humans, in the vast gallery of life, laugh alone? Ask Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist and veterinarian at the University of Washington, and he’ll tell you no. Panksepp studies laughter where you might least expect it, in lab rats.

“In the mid 1990’s we found [rats] have a sound — a high-pitched chirp — that they made most often during play,” says Panksepp. “It crossed my mind it might be an ancestral form of laughter.” And Panksepp, eager to investigate, dove hands-first into his theory. He tickled his rats.

What he found lead to two decades of research. “They’re just like little children when you tickle them,” says Panksepp. “They ‘love’ it.”

Dogs, too, laugh in their own way. As do primates. The work is a reminder that for all that humans are, and all the things we do, there’s actually very little that makes us special.

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Image: Aurora Michele

Having a baby can mean thinking a lot about pee. You pee on a stick to see if you’re ovulating. You pee on a stick to check if you’re pregnant. And soon, you might be able to pee to check your baby’s health. Using urine samples collected from pregnant women, researchers have developed a test that found signs of serious medical issues in the still unborn baby, including Down syndrome, premature birth, brain damage and pre-eclampsia (a disorder that can cause a mother to have seizures).

The new research, conducted by a team of Portuguese researchers lead by Sílvia Diaz, is still in the early stages. But, if the technique bears out it could mean that checking for serious complications will be as easy as peeing in a cup—an alternative to the invasive techniques, like biopsies or umbilical cord blood tests, used today.

The researchers collected urine samples from 300 women who were in the second trimester of their pregnancies. They froze the samples and waited until the baby was born. Then, they combed through the urine with a sensitive analytical technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy looking for chemicals that were related with the conditions of the babies. According to the researchers, they found chemicals that could be related to “central nervous system malformations, trisomy 21, preterm delivery, gestational diabetes, intrauterine growth restriction and preeclampsia.”

According to Chemical and Engineering News, the next step is to do bigger and better tests, looking at more mothers from a larger geographic area.

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So long, World War II shooters! Hello, French Revolution simulator. Meet Disunion, a virtual-reality guillotine simulator—a goofy project built in just a couple days by three game developers.

In the video gaming world, virtual reality is set for a resurgence. With technology improving to the point where quality virtual reality is increasingly feasible, developers such as Oculus are hoping you’ll peer into a pair of goggles instead of a widescreen TV.

But the idea of being virtually beheaded, while strange, doesn’t seem like it would be all that scary, right? Like, how different would this even be than just watching a movie? In a feature story by science journalist Ed Yong for Nature a while back, we meet Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist whose work with virtual reality is showing just how lifelike these experiences can be.

Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.

In the video above we see people playing Disunion watch their own beheading while a friend sharply thwaps them on the neck. Using that same combination of visual and tactile prodding, says Yong, Ehrsson can convince people of all sorts of things.

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person, gained a third arm, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions.

Ehrsson is trying to study how your brain understands its own body, but out of his work comes a tangential understanding of how virtual reality could work in video gaming—and a deeper understand of what people watching their virtual heads roll may be feeling.

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If you know of one of these female Mangarahara cichlids, let the London Zoological Society know. They need her help to save the species. Photo: Berlin Zoo

There are just three Mangarahara cichlids left in the world, so far as we know, and they’re all men. Two are at in the London Zoo, one is in Germany at the Berlin Zoo. The species was wiped out in the wild when the Mangarahara River in Madagascar dried up because of dams built to block the river, says the Associated Press.

The Berlin Zoo used to have a female, but she has unfortunately passed away, along with the best chance to revive the species in captivity. Now, the Zoological Society of London says in a release, they’re on a global quest to find a lady friend for their male cichlids. If you or anyone you know has one in a fish tank somewhere, they would really, really like to hear from you.

Launching the appeal, ZSL London Zoo’s Brian Zimmerman said: “The Mangarahara cichlid is shockingly and devastatingly facing extinction; its wild habitat no longer exists and as far as we can tell, only three males remain of this entire species.

“It might be too late for their wild counterparts, but if we can find a female, it’s not too late for the species. Here at ZSL London Zoo we have two healthy males, as well as the facilities and expertise to make a real difference.

If a female can’t be found, this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to sit idly by and watch a the last of a species wait out its final end. Just recently, Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, passed away. And botanical gardens around the world feature the identical faces of the last E. woodii, each of them a clone of the same male plant.

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I just have so many FEELINGS. Photo: Daniel Zedda

There’s a showdown going on in the world of music perception—a question that’s been under investigation for millenia. What is it about music—unlike other types of sounds—that causes it to carry so much emotional baggage?

Forget the message carried by the lyrics of a love song or the chorus of a party anthem. How do the rise and fall of the melody or the pace of the tempo convey emotion? Is there something inherent to music, wrapped up in the way it interacts with our brains and the way we think that causes it to make us feel so many feelings? Or is the wail of the sad trombone just a piece of cultural baggage, something we’ve picked up from societal norms?

On their respective YouTube channels, It’s Okay To Be Smart‘s Joe Hanson and PBS Idea Channel’s Mike Rugnetta square off to tackle the issue. Hanson discusses a bit of new research which shows that similar types of sounds evoke similar emotions, even across cultural barriers.

Rugnetta, on the other hand, counters with the argument that though there is potentially some innate association between a certain tune and a general sense of well being, that anything more than this simple connection is just a matter of socialization.

“While people might be able to recognize emotion in music, even music from other cultures, it doesn’t mean that they actually feel that emotion. Or, even if it does affect them, it might not affect them in the same way or to the same degree with every listen. This challenges the idea that we are hardwired to respond to music in some way,” says Rugnetta.

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Why Do People Hate Dissonant Music? (And What Does It Say About Those Who Don’t?)