Regina Barber

Interesting.

She's an icon.

However, there are some kinds of disgusting things that people can get used to, like the contents of their kids' diapers.

Scientists call this habituation.

When you're repeatedly exposed to something, you're less sensitive to it.

Yeah.

So to study that very question, the research team recruited 99 parents and 50 non-parents.

And they showed them two photos at once on a computer screen.

On one side, a photo of something neutral, like a stack of towels or a clean sink.

And on the other side, photos of gross things like vomit on a sidewalk and, of course, dirty diapers.

Aw.

This is the study's lead author, Edwin Dahlmeier, who published these results in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

You can hear Elsa on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.

And for more science stories just like this one, follow Shortwave on whatever app you are listening to.

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The universe that you and I see with our eyes, things that make up matter like galaxies, stars, planets, grass, that's only 15% of the universe's total mass.

The rest is called dark matter.

This is mass in the universe that doesn't interact with light.

Astronomers know that dark matter is there, but they don't know what it's made out of.

That's Jorge Moreno, a computational astrophysicist, cosmologist, and professor at Pomona College in California.