Tortoises Don T Catch Yawns
The following post is from a series about the annual Ig Nobel Prizes in science, which honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” They were awarded in September in Cambridge, Mass. Now we come to the Ig Nobel Physiology Prize. Yawns are notoriously contagious in humans and in other social animals, especially primates. In humans, yawning has been thought to do various things, including cooling the brain, increasing arousal when you’re sleepy and, possibly, helping to synchronize group behavior....