Recommended Links of the Week: MacGyver, Bitcoin Mining, Instagram and More

This week’s selection of recommended links is packed with curiosities: MacGyver, the benefits of ejaculating 21 times a month, Instagram as the death of the internet, and a man patiently mining bitcoins with pencil and paper. As you’ll see, you can’t miss these links, because they have all that and much more.

This week’s recommended links

Does ejaculating at least 21 times a month prevent prostate cancer?: "Years ago, a team of oncologists from the American National Cancer Institute, after studying 30,000 men for eight years, had concluded that ejaculation prevents prostate cancer. The result of their research, published in JAMA, was that heavy ejaculators (at least twenty-one times a month) had a three times lower risk of prostate cancer than those who enjoyed between four and seven monthly orgasms."

What to do if you come across a bear in the middle of the forest – instruction manual to survive: "Grizzly bears are not very common in Whistler. Basically, if you come across one, it's game over. It will have seen or smelled you long before you see it and it can catch you in the blink of an eye. If you've seen Leonardo di Caprio's movie The Revenant, you can imagine what will happen next. But if it's a black bear, you have a chance to survive. This is what you need to do to stay alive after encountering one."

MacGyver, the pacifist and 'nerd' hero: "MacGyver's gadgets sounded absurd, but believe it or not, there was previous documentation work, advised by the California Institute of Technology. To ensure that children wouldn't cause any damage at home, one of the ingredients of the real formula was removed from each experiment, precisely the one that would prevent the reaction. With the popularity of the series, they received thousands of letters from fans proposing new crazy experiments. The imagination of an entire generation had been set in motion."

In this Russian folk dance, the dancers float

Why Instagram represents the death of the best thing the internet had: "No medium resembles a reality show more than Instagram, the social network that proves we only need to appear to be, and where anyone (who looks sufficiently sexy or cool) can become famous. Instagram, through likes (and the dopamine they produce), whispers to us that we are all Kim Kardashians or that we can all be the conceptual artist or the popular man or woman (that we could never be in real life). On social media we are all DJs or curators of our image, but while on Facebook and especially on Twitter it helps a lot to know how to edit ourselves through text, on Instagram a person versed exclusively in images can conquer the undivided admiration of the crowds."

The man who patiently mined bitcoin by hand, with pencil and paper: "It's not fast. But it is possible. That's why this story of Mark, who did a test to see how long it would take to mine bitcoin by hand, has special merit. As he tells it, the SHA-256 hash is relatively easy to calculate by hand, although it is quite slow. The hash function is applied several times and is a bit tedious to calculate from hexadecimal digits, converting them to binary, but in a little more than a quarter of an hour it can be completed."

This is what the phone you buy in Europe costs in China: "The centers have practically all the components with which most mobile phones and tablets on the market are manufactured, allowing them to develop phones with any specification. The price of the devices, according to one of these manufacturers, is as follows (we don't include the entire catalog, but those devices with the most common specifications on the market)."

Rick and Morty with 18,365 dominoes

Why do goats have rectangular pupils, dogs round ones, and cats vertical ones?: "The pupil has diverse shapes depending on the eating habits and schedules of the different animals. We can anticipate that herbivores, generally diurnal and at the bottom of the food chain, have horizontally elongated or rectangular pupils. Dogs, humans, and large felines have round pupils, while cats, foxes – and also some reptiles – have vertical pupils. But how can we explain these differences, what are they due to, what advantages do they bring to animals that have them?"

Can we see with our ears?: "The recreation of visual images in blind people is a relatively recent discovery in neuroscience. One of the first clues that the stimuli were interrelated was obtained after observing how people blind from birth could no longer read Braille when their visual area was inhibited with magnetic stimulation: they were using vision neurons to interpret tactile signals."

Damn, science says swearing makes you damn strong: "The study is called “swearing as a response to pain” and it found that if you say swear words like “five words you would say after hitting your thumb with a hammer” instead of “five words you would use to describe a table”, your pain resistance increases. Damn, you become amazing. Except if you are both male and pessimistic, in which case no. The study does not indicate if there is a correlation and/or causality between this and the suffering of goths, however. What it did indicate is that there is a relationship between swearing and stress and emotions."

The bucket

The phantom atlas, a compendium of cartographic errors: "'The Phantom Atlas' is the title of the book published by Edward Brooke-Hitching. It contains a compendium of cartographic errors that transport the reader to places that never existed. This work, currently available only in English, covers cities, territories, mountain ranges, and islands that cartographers at some point believed existed. Thus, the book covers already mythical failures, such as the Strait of Anián, which was believed to be the route to the Northwest Passage at the end of the 16th century. It also talks about the Zeno map, from the 14th century, based on an expedition that probably never happened."

Can a person have two types of DNA? The strange cases of human chimeras: "Cases of people with two distinct types of DNA are rare and usually discovered by accident, but they are probably more common than thought, according to some experts. When they come to light, usually in the context of paternity tests or genetic compatibility tests due to health problems, they often leave experts and families perplexed. In 2002, a group of researchers published in the New England Journal of Medicine the strange case of Karen Keegan, from Boston, who when undergoing compatibility tests with her three children for a kidney transplant discovered that, in reality, two of them were not her descendants."

The ranking of the most meat-dependent countries in the world, the gastronomy-nightmares of any vegan: "Throughout history, meat consumption has been linked to the purchasing power of both people and countries. In the graph above, we can see how meat consumption increases as GDP per capita grows. Thus, we have countries like India and Bangladesh near both axes, with 3.7 and 4.1 kilos each. Although, at least in the case of India, killing a cow is not too well seen and could partly explain the low meat intake."