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Page 79 - Technology Facts

The technical term for the pins and needles feeling you get when part of your body "falls asleep" is 'paresthesia'.

This word comes from the base words ‘para’, which means “altered” or “abnormal”, and ‘aisthesis’, meaning “perception”. Most people are familiar with this sensation - it commonly occurs when a person has slept on their arm or left their legs crossed for too long. The feeling is caused by sustained pressure on a nerve. Paresthesia is typically fleeting, but if it lasts a long time or occurs frequently a medical condition is likely to blame. Chronic paresthesia can be caused by a neurological disease or traumatic nerve damage.

A young man witnessed his girlfriend being murdered on webcam!

The identity of the man has not been made known to the public, but in the early morning on April 15th, he watched helplessly from the other side of the world on webcam as his girlfriend, 23-year-old Quan Liu, was killed. Liu was a Chinese scholar studying English at York University in Toronto. That fateful morning, she was chatting online with her boyfriend (who was 11,000 miles away, back home in China) when she went to answer a knock at her apartment door around 1:00 AM. A still-unidentified man asked to borrow her cell phone, and the boyfriend witnessed a scuffle between the pair that left his significant other dead. The assailant proceeded to disconnect the laptop and stole that, her webcam, and her cell phone.

The killer has been identified as 29-year-old Brian Dickson, a man who lived in an apartment in the same building as Liu. Oddly enough, though Dickson has been charged with first-degree murder, a cause of death has yet to be established. As far as we know, this marks the first time a murder has been witnessed on the Internet, though there have been several instances in which suicide has been carried out in real time online.
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The name for PEZ candy comes from the German word for ‘peppermint’!

The name for PEZ candy comes from the German word for ‘peppermint’!

In fact, PEZ were never intended to be candy at all. They were originally invented as an Austrian breathmint back in 1927 and marketed as an alternative to smoking! Because they initially were only peppermint-flavored, the mints were named using letters from the German word ‘pfefferminz’. In the early ‘50s, PEZ made the journey across the Atlantic to try and find a niche in the U.S. candy market. In order to broaden its appeal, fruity flavor varieties were added, as well as the character-themed dispensers the company has become so famous for. The initial selection of dispensers was rather sparse, as it only included a robot, a space gun, and Santa Claus. As the styles grew more diverse, PEZ dispensers soon became a hot collectible item due to their ability to reflect trends in popular culture over the years.

Check out more on the history of PEZ at (their company website)!

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A new type of plastic has been invented that can repair itself using ordinary sunlight!

Scientists have created a special kind of elastic polymers that are highly reactive to the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. The newest prototype is designed so that when it is broken, the separated ends chemically bond together with just a minute’s worth of exposure to UV rays. The light energizes ions in the polymer, making them react together extremely quickly. The downside is that the polymer gets to extremely high temperatures of 220 degrees Celsius (428 degrees Fahrenheit) during this process, making it potentially unsafe.

For the scientifically inclined, you can learn more about this polymer works here.

Men with ring fingers that are longer than their index fingers are likely to have been exposed to more testosterone before birth.

The correlation of this digit ratio to prenatal hormone levels has long been common knowledge, but a recent study has taken this information a step further. A recent study published in Discover Magazine claims that women tend to be more attracted to men with higher ring-to-index-finger ratios. Or in other words, the longer the ring finger in comparison to the index, the more attractive a man’s face is rated. A interesting thing to note, however, was that women in the study did not show a preference for smells or voices of these males with longer ring fingers. This implies that such characteristics are more dependant on circulating levels of adult testosterone than levels of the hormone imparted on males while still in the womb.
(source)

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