Scent!
Your scent. (And mine, too). Combined with the perfumes and deodorants we employ, our scent has a great deal of influence in our lives, particularly with those we associate with. Or so affirmeth scientists from Middle Tennessee State University, Sabanci University (Turkey), and Cornell U., in “The Interactive Role of Odor Associations in Friendship Preferences,” published in Scientific Reports.
Of course, friendship decisions stem from a number of personal preferences
Unique?
You thought you were unique? Probably not, they say.
“They,” meaning computer scientists at Columbia University in New York and from SUNY Buffalo. And “they” said so in “Unveiling Intra-person Fingerprint Similarity via Deep Contrastive Learning,” published in Science Advances. Of course, as you can tell, they only claim that different fingers of the same person (“intra-person fingerprints”), thought to be uniquely different, are not so. So …
Battery!
Uh-oh! Phone battery at 38%!
That, apparently, is a magic number, according to a private research organization, Talker Research.
Americans typically start to worry about their phone’s battery when it hits 38%—the ‘panic percentage.’ (This is before any warning signs; iPhone batteries turn red only when they drop below 20%.)”
Yup, this survey has pinpointed exactly when this panic kicks in for Americans.
The surveyors did a nationwide study of 2,000 Americans on how
Rescued!
A rather strange thing happened recently in Japan. A guy was rescued off Mt. Fuji, the tallest mountain in the nation (12,400 feet). And people are mad.
Not because of the rescue, of course. But the fact that it happened … twice. To the same person! In the same week!
According to the Associated Press, a 27-year-old Chinese student trying to ascend Fuji-san developed altitude sickness (what the body suffers due to lack of oxygen at higher altitudes before it has
Coming soon …
FYI, another tome from the pen of your faithful blogger!
Coming soon … (i.e., should be available for order/purchase in May 2025).
This is essentially a biblical theology of sanctification, setting all that I am doing with preaching and its hermeneutics (interpreting the biblical text for preaching, application, life change) within the larger arena of Christian growth and the development of Christlikeness. Even if you are not all that keen on preaching, this will,
Heartbeats!
For a long time we thought heartbeats would save our identities. How, you ask?
Cybersecurity experts thought they had deepfake videos all figured out. You see, there are subtle color changes to our skins caused by the pulsation of blood through our vascular system, timed with our heartbeats. But AI wasn’t explicitly programmed to mimic these nuanced changes caused by blood flow, so fake videos would lack these physiological signals.
Deepfakes have become ubiquitous in
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.