Welcome to a shorter, sleeker collection of Interesting Stuff. There are no April Fools’ jokes in this lot, so I apologise if you were expecting some.
Anatomy and Medicine:
- New insight into how the eye carves up the world.
- How to design better uniforms for nurses.
- Cancer treatment involving lasers and gold nanospheres.
Anthropology and Archaeology:
- New theory on the evolution of bipedal motion.
- Shell as a material for prehistoric tools.
- Control versus strength: the human-chimp tradeoff.
Astronomy and Physics:
- With all these images of spring on Mars, there’s no excuse for Martian haiku to lack seasonal reference.
- A theory that dark energy decays into dark matter.
- Cool stars lack chemistry for life as we know it.
Biology and Palaeontology:
- Cane toads versus meat ants.
- I knew about slave-making ants from reading Charles Darwin. Now I learn that the slaves rebel.
- Nice video about digging for dinosaurs.
Brain Science:
- A couple of articles on therapies to help stroke victims regain visual awareness, one involving music and the other visual exercises.
- Neurobiology of voluntary amputation and related phenomena.
- Several interesting articles on the topic of autism, one on what young autistic children pay attention to, one on a theory of autism involving the part of the brain known as the locus coeruleus, and one on a link between autism and the daily cycle of cortisol.
- You can not only run out of self-control; you can run out of other people’s self control.
- Schizophrenics not fooled by hollow mask illusion.
Entertainment and Whimsical:
- Elephant and dog video.
- We all know exams require chocolate, but this could be even truer than we thought.
Linguistics:
- From this article, I learned some things I didn’t know before about Chinese characters.
- Announced this month on Suzette Haden Elgin’s blog is a webpage to go with a recent book release. I find the topic somewhat intriguing.
Technology:
- Health risks of nanotechnology.
- I mentioned the mosquito laser in my previous edition. Here’s more.
- The latest in microscope technology.
- Dewdrop security system.
- Battery made from engineered viruses.
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You are welcome to add your thoughts.