It’s a well-known fact that yawning is contagious and can spread around a room in a matter of seconds, but it turns out the phenomenon is more common among women.

During tests, researchers found that while men and women yawn spontaneously at equal rates, women are more likely to yawn in ‘reply’ to another person’s yawn.

Yawning in response to someone else is a recognised sign of empathy, which suggests that women are more empathetic and attuned to others than men.

The research was carried out at Pisa University in Italy.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the internal emotional states of others, and previous research has already shown that women are better at it than men.

For example, research has revealed women more often mimic the facial expressions of others, showing they are picking up on the other person’s state of mind.

A team led by Elisabetta Palagi, set out to examine whether women are more likely to unconsciously mimic another person’s yawning.

To test their theory, the experts secretly observed people in hundreds of work and social situations over a period of five years.

They particularly noted if subjects ‘returned’ another person’s yawn within three minutes.

The authors, writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, defined yawning scientifically as ‘an involuntary sequence of mouth opening, deep inspiration, brief apnoea [stopping breathing] and slow expiration’.

While they said men and women yawned spontaneously at equal rates, they discovered that once someone had yawned, female participants were more likely to yawn as well.

Explaining why they think women are more likely to unconsciously mimic somebody else’s sleepiness, the researchers said that having a close emotional bond with the ‘trigger’ yawner – if they are friends or relations – makes a person more likely to pick up on their mood than that of a stranger.

The rates of contagion were significantly lower between acquaintances than between friends and family members, and significantly higher in women than in men.

The phenomenon has been seen in other social animals, such as chimps, dogs and wolves.

Did the early universe have just one spatial dimension? That’s the mind-boggling question at the heart of a theory scientists say they are on the brink of solving.

The theory was first proposed by physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues from the University of Buffalo in 2010. They suggested that the early universe – which exploded from a single point and was tiny at first – was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three, which is the world in which we live today. The theory, if valid, would address important conundrums facing particle physicists.

Now, in a new paper in Physical Review Letters, Stojkovic and colleagues have come up with a test that could prove or disprove the “vanishing dimensions” hypothesis. Because it takes time for light and other waves to travel to Earth, telescopes can, essentially, look back into time as they probe the universe’s outer reaches. Gravitational waves can’t exist in one or two-dimensional space. So Stojkovic reasons that a planned gravitational observatory (LISA) should not detect any gravitational waves emanating from the early universe.

Stojkovic says the theory of evolving dimensions represents a radical shift from the way we think about how our universe came to be. The theory also suggests that space has fewer dimensions at very high energies of the kind associated with the early, post-big bang universe.

If correct it may help to address the incompatibility between quantum mechanics (used to describe the universe of the very small) and general relativity (good at describing the universe on a large scale.) It could also explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up with the addition of a fourth dimension.

There was once a guy who was very much in love with a girl. This romantic guy folded 1000 pieces of paper cranes as a gift to his girl. Although. at that time he was just a small executive in his company, his future didn’t seem too bright, they were happy together. Until one day. his girl told him she was going to Paris and would never come back. She also told him that she can’t visualize any future for the both of them. So they’d better go their own ways there and then一heartbroken, the guy agreed.

When he regained his confidence, he worked hard day and night, slogging’his body and mind just to make something out of himself. finally with all these hard work and with the help of friends, this guy set up his own company.

“You never foil until you stop trying,” he always told himself,” Imust make it in life!”

On a rainy day, while this guy was driving, he saw an elderly couple sharing an umbrella in the rain walking to some destination. Even with the umbrella, they were still drenched. It didn’t take him long to realize they were his ex-girlfriend’s parents. With a heart in getting back at`’ them, he drove slowly beside the couple, wanting them to spot him in his luxury sedan, he wanted them to know that he wasn’t the same anymore, he had his own company, car, condo, etc. He had made it in life.

Before the guy can realize, the couple was walking towards a cemetery, and he got out of his car and followed them… and he saw his ex-girlfriend, a photograph of her smiling sweetly as ever at him from her tombstone… and he saw his precious paper cranes in a bottle placed beside her tomb.

Her parents saw him. He walked over and asked them why this had happened.

They explained. She did not leave for France at all. She was stricken ill with cancer. In her heart, she had believed that he would make it someday, but she did not want her illness to be his obstacle. . .

Therefore she had chosen to leave him.

She asked her parents to leave his paper cranes by her side, if one day the destiny brings him here, he could take some back home.

The guy just wept. The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting right beside them but knowing you can’t have them and will never see them again.