#3. Why Do Your Fingers Prune When You Take a Bath?
Everyone knows how to tell when bath time is over: you suddenly notice the bath’s gone chilly. However, when we were younger, there was a slightly more liver-friendly way to know when to get out of the tub: when your fingers started pruning. As a kid, you probably just assumed this was the first sign that your body was about to start melting. And for the longest time, science’s answers weren’t much less stupid.
However, it looks like they’ve finally cracked this particular nut: A new theory suggests that pruning not only has a function, but is a straight-up evolutionary advantage that allows us to grip wet items more tightly. You may have noticed that the wrinkles that form on your fingers resemble treading on tires and other high-friction materials. The point of treading is to increase surface area and thus friction, and that’s what scientists think pruning does, too.
In the modern world, this helps us with holding on to the soap and, well, that’s basically it. But back in caveman days, pruned fingers may have been a huge survival advantage for our ancestors living in wet and humid climes. The extra gripping power provided by nutsack-textured fingers meant they had a surer grip on the spears and other weapons they used to fend off hungry beasts.
The pruning response doesn’t work with fingers where the nerve had been severed, which heavily implies that pruning is an intentional response from your central nervous system, which knows a thing or two about keeping your ass alive.
#2. Why Do You Always Pee More When It’s Cold?
Ever come in from a hot day to a cold blast of air conditioning and immediately have to piss? Or jump into a swimming pool full of cold water and start peeing your little heart out, even though you didn’t have to go before you dove in? If you’ve never noticed it before, you will now — it’s a known scientific phenomenon. So enlighten us, science: Why do we pee more when it’s cold?
It’s all because of the cold diuresis phenomenon, which increases your urge to pee at an exponential rate as the temperature drops. The colder it gets, the harder the piss seems to push against the inside of your organs. It’s hard to ascertain why it is that the bladder goes into overdrive when the temperature dips, presumably because nobody capable of finding out cared all that much, but the leading theory has to do with how when you’re cold, your blood vessels shrink, especially in your extremities.
As a consequence, blood tends to draw deep within the confines of your body, where it can remain nice and toasty and let the appendages deal with that whole “freezing” thing. A side effect of blood’s retreat tactics, however, is that all the scrunching of veins and arteries drastically drives up your blood pressure. This sends the kidneys into full alarm, and they try to compensate by dumping water.
Our universe is full of secrets, and you don’t have to go far to find them. Some of the most complex enigmas of our daily lives happen within the confines of our very own bodies, which is why the reason hair turns gray can be more interesting to us than, say, what makes black holes tick.
Luckily, scientists are also bothered by these little everyday secrets our bodies hold, and they have set out to find answers. As a result of their tireless work, we now know the answers to some age-old mysteries, such as …
1. Why Does Your Voice Always Sound Disappointing When Recorded?
It’s happened to all of us at some point. We go through life secure in the knowledge that our voice sounds so cool, until one day some friends pull out a recorder and captures our smooth, honey-dripping Barry White sounds on tape. But man, are you in for a surprise: When played back, that sweet, sweet voice of yours sounds like something very different, and that something is pure, distilled harshness.
The pitch is wrong. The tone is wrong. If you’re a dude, your voice sounds way higher than you ever expected. If you’re a lady, your lush soprano suddenly grows a beard and twists into a deep-pitched imitation of itself.
But why do we invariably think our recorded voices suck monkey balls compared to what we hear when we speak? Like most things involving humans, it comes down to who we want to bone. Guys prefer girls with higher voices, and Girls prefer guys with deeper voices. Deep pitches are attributed to bigger bodies, and we as a society have deemed big guys to be the best mates. Higher pitches, on the other hand, give us the sense of small bodies, and again, humanity as a whole tends to feel ladies should be smaller than guys. Therefore, when a guy talks, he hears his voice boom through his skull like a subwoofer in the back of a beat up Bonneville. Ladies’ voices are high and feminine in their own ears, and all is well in the world.
When we hear it through a recording, we realise how far off our real voice is from the sexy ideal.