“Do not count your chickens before they are hatched”*…
We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (obtained from university students)…
From the abstract of a scholarly article published in the journal Human Nature.
Read all of the paper: “Chickens prefer beautiful humans“; get more background here.
* Aesop
###
As we spend a few more minutes at the mirror, we might recall that it was on this date in 1868 that William Davis, a Detroit fish dealer, received a patent for the first practical refrigerated rail car. Entrepreneurs looking to expand the market for agricultural goods had been trying since 1842 to ship produce and meat via rail. But these early “ice box on wheels” designs were impractical (as most worked only in cold weather). Davis’ innovation was to create a car that used metal racks to suspend meat above and between a frozen mixture of ice and salt. Davis’ design worked well as a preservative strategy; but the carcasses had a way of swinging to one side on their hooks when the car entered a curve at high speed… which led to several derailments and the discontinuation of their use. It wasn’t until 1878, and a “cooling from the top; meat stacked low” approach developed by Andrew Chase for the meat packers Swift & Co., that refrigerated cars came into continuous use.
