Another instalment in our irregular series of items you may have missed. Let’s start, as usual, with the more nerdy stuff, but today with a cartoon …
An interesting cartoon form XKCD which shows the relative (angular) sizes of various celestial objects compared with ground-based ones.
Brooke Borel on all the possible uses for cadavers and why she wants her body cut up for science

Unlike our hunter-gatherer forebears we aren’t great insect eaters. Maybe we should be as they are surprisingly nutritious. Here are seven insects we may be eating in the future. I still think I want them cooked first.
So following on from faecal transplants, scientists are now beginning to make progress on putting a mix of faecal bacteria in a pill. I think I could swallow that.
Only slightly less worryingly, someone somewhere ate a dead shrew in the interests of science. Another curiosity from the IgNobel Awards.
The octopus is weird, surprisingly intelligent and mischievous. Wired investigates.
Another interesting piece, this from the New York Times, on why superstitions may make sense after all.
Christie Aschwanden writing in the Washington Post, looks at the problems with mammograms for all and why she has decided to opt out. Yep, this is the age-old problem with screening: it picks up far too many false positives and leads to over-treatment.
So why are pregnant women warned to stay clear of just about everything? Well there might be a risk, but we really don’t know.
Another Guardian piece this time suggesting that breastfeeding, and indeed the effects of motherhood on the normal (ie. any and every) female body, won’t be treated as normal until photographers and the media are much more open about showing photographs of the same. Yes, indeed, and the same goes for the rest of our bodies — male as well as female.
And let’s also be clear that motherhood is no rest cure. Here’s one guy who is upset that everyone thinks his stay-at-home-and-look-after-the-kids wife doesn’t do anything.
Now we’ll change track. The former railways minister Tom Harris (Labour, Glasgow South) wants the government to “invest in the daily hell of commuting, not HS2” which seems to make sense to me.

So from the ridiculous to the crazy … It’s a slightly old link but here’s a piece about the Codex Seraphinianus, a modern day Voynich Manuscript.
How and why do words become unusable and an investigation of auto-antonyms.
Have you ever wondered how cats see the world? Well scientists have been working it out. Here are some examples.
And finally bizarreness of the month. Fukushima Industries just made a very unfortunate branding choice. Surely has to be a candidate for a sporting mascot!? Enjoy!