More links to items you probably missed and maybe didn’t want to. As so often lots of geeky stuff in here, but there isn’t too much really hard science to hurt the brain.
First off … dogs. Why is it dogs smell so terrible especially when wet? Spoiler: It ain’t the dog!
And so to cats … Cat owners need to be more aware of their moods and how they affect their pets.
And while we’re talking felines … just why do cats love boxes so much? It may be stress-related, but then again …
Meanwhile, and with no Pavlovian connexion, deep in the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University there’s a bell. It’s been ringing for at least 175 years. Using the same battery! And no-one knows how or why!
Scientists think they have found the underlying cause of addiction. The result is very surprising and not at all expected.
Now listen up all you extroverts, here are 15 reasons why us introverts are different, and it isn’t just that we’re being miserable! So give us a break, do!
So many of us are short-sighted, which would seem to be a massive evolutionary disadvantage that should have been bred out by now. So why are we short-sighted?
Yay! Wellness! What we all strive for. But André Spicer and Carl Cederström in New Scientist suggest that wellness programmes are actually counter-productive.
Since my post-grad days I’ve had a great admiration for the skills of glass-blowers — they can make things you can’t even draw! Here are four cameos of far from average technicians.
So how long dies it take to actually train a doctor? The Guardian‘s Vanessa Heggie looks at the history of medical training.
And so to more modest things …
From the realms of “no, don’t even go there”, a French court has decided that Nutella is not a girl’s name. Duh!
Stuff! We all got stuff. Indeed we all got too much stuff. And too much stuff is a hazard.
And so we meander into the byways of London with a look at some of the capital’s secret shafts and their disguises.
But wait! Why is there an elephant in Waterloo Station?
While you’re working that out, Diamond Geezer has looked at London’s five hedge mazes — that’s proper mazes in which you can get hopelessly lost.
Just to prove the effectiveness of a freezer, researchers discovered a 100-year-old box of photographic negatives frozen in a block of Antarctic ice. And they managed to recover the images!
And finally I leave you with a brilliant Cornish solution to the global warming generated rise in sea levels.
Toodle-pip!
Haemoglobin is best known as red blood cells’ superstar protein — carrying oxygen and other gases on the erythrocytes as they zip throughout the bodies of nearly all vertebrates. Less well known is its presence in vegetables, including the sugar beet … In fact, many land plants — from barley to tomatoes — contain the protein … Scientists first discovered them in the bright-red nodules of soybean roots in 1939 but have yet to determine the proteins’ role in plants in most cases … Plant haemoglobins might … serve as a blood substitute for humans someday … Or they could be exploited to trick our senses … as an ingredient in veggie burgers to make them taste more like bloody steaks.