Category Archives: links

history, links, science

Your Interesting Links

OK boys and girls, here’s the next instalment of links to items you may have missed the first time round.
And as from this issue, these link posts will be monthly, on around the last day of the month (or maybe a day later).
So here we go …
Science & Medicine
Let’s start with a look at some science myths that just refuse to die. Own up: how many of those did you believe?
You would expect, wouldn’t you, that medics would by now understand the menopause and how to alleviate its worst symptoms for those women worst affected? Seems that isn’t the case and the menopause isn’t well understood at all.
We hear a lot about “evidence-based medicine”. But is there any evidence that “evidence-based medicine” is any better than any other variety?
You need to be fit to go into hospital. Yes, really! Apart from the rise in hospital-acquire infections, it seems that the environment is physically and mentally debilitating.
So who has needed a hangover cure in the last few days? Here’s a bit about the possible underlying causes of hangovers, which again are still not well understood.
Sexuality
Possibly only the French would dare put on an exhibition called Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution 1850-1910. Kim Willsher reviews for the Guardian.


Now here’s a brave teacher who believes in what I have always said: we would be better off being open and honest and discussing sexuality etc. This really should be the norm.
Hair. Why do men grow it on their chins but (apparently) insist women remove it from their genitals? Could we be about to see a resurgence of pubic hair?
Environment
George Monbiot (yes, him again!) has a rant about the environmental damage caused by agriculture and the growing of our food.
Social Sciences & Business
Cheating (generally, not sexually). We all do it — some more than others. But we all do it to some extent if only in pursuance of our personal myth.
Talking of cheating, it’s estimated that 3% of £1 coins currently in circulation are fakes. To counteract such forgery the Royal Mint will be issuing a new 12-sided £1 coin in 2017.
Londonist proposed 15 ways in which London’s train network could be improved, and all without building a single foot of new track. Some of them do seem to be incredibly simple to do!
Art & Literature
Is there really any point in collecting books? Howard Jacobson has a view.
History
This really should be called London Curiosities, but they all have some historic basis …
Londonist, again, hunts out London’s top 10 moats. Oh yes, there really are that many moats in London, although not all are historic.
And one more from Londonist, this time London’s top 10 tunnels and catacombs.
Being English we do like our cup of tea (or a large mug in my case!). So why didn’t I previously know about Twining’s teashop and museum. Must add this to the 2016 bucket list.

And finally in this section, an old favourite. Caroline’s Miscellany gets a look round the long closed Down Street Station.
Food & Drink
Most of us probably drank some champagne over Christmas, or maybe to see in the New Year, so here’s a little of the chemistry that makes champagne work.
Alice Roberts writes about choosing to be a vegetarian, although she eats fish for health, and actually likes the taste of meat.
Shock, Horror, Humour
And in our final sections, Ipswich’s most famous cat burglar, Theo, relapses into his thieving ways.

And lastly, Londonist (yes, them again) investigates the 10 rudest museum exhibits in London.
More in a month’s time!

links

Your Interesting Links

Another round of links to interesting items you may have missed.
Science & Medicine
In a series of three articles an Australian vet looks at why it might better for your pet not to be fed twice a day from a bowl.
Why do some guys with dark (or blonde) hair have ginger beards?
Sexuality
OK, so just why do women fake orgasms? The cynical inner me says it’s the same reason they wear make-up: vanity.
So you don’t want to have children? That’s fine. Not wanting kids is entirely normal and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Environment
An ancient Chinese ginkgo tree drops an ocean of golden leaves. Some gorgeous photographs.


And more stunning photography, this time of some city-dwelling leopards highlighting just what amazing urban wildlife is out there.
Social Sciences & Business
Who said meditation was a con or a waste of time? Not when it transforms one of San Francisco’s toughest schools it isn’t.
OK, so what do you reckon is the best department store in London? Londonist investigates and you might be surprised at the answer.
And here’s another rather surprising thing … What is the single best interview question you can ask? Certainly some food for thought for those of us who have to hire staff.
Leading on from that here’s an interesting piece about how we make big decisions (indeed all decisions; we just don’t notice so much with the small ones).
How good at you at influencing people and getting them to do what you want? Here are some psychological tricks you can use.
Art & Literature

So is this picture (above) really a Leonardo worth £100 million or a forgery? A convicted forger says he did it but the experts think it is the real thing. Here are two reports, one from the Daily Mail the other from the Guardian. Whichever it is I don’t agree with the Guardian reporter’s thesis and I would have thought a few basic scientific tests should prove if it is definitely forged.
Richard Branson is worried about the rise of online messaging and wants to bring back the pen so we can all write “thank you” letters.
History
Next year the British Museum is promising us another blockbuster exhibition: Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds. The Independent fills in some background.
And talking of Egypt, back before WWI there was a proposal to build a pyramid in Hyde Park. IanVisits takes a look.
Shock, Horror, Humour
IanVisits (again) has found a awesome rubber-band powered steam train.
[NSFW] And finally at the bottom of the barrel we bring you a Soviet erotic alphabet picture book from 1931.

history, links, natural history, science

Your Interesting Links

So here we are then with another round of links to items you may have missed the first time round.
Science & Medicine
It seems that humans are not the only animals who have personal names, but we are probably the only ones who gossip.
Its well known that dogs will eat anything, but why are cats such fussy eaters?


The more we look at them, the smarter crows turn out to be. But are they smart enough to fall in love?
Talking of being smart, it appears that those of us who sleep late are smarter and more creative.
But then you die. Here’s what happens to your body after death.
Meanwhile it seems health experts are explaining drug-resistant bacteria so poorly that people aren’t believing them.
Sexuality
Just beware the rodeo! The sexual positions most likely to cause penis fractures.
But avoid that and researchers have worked out that the happiest people have sex just once a week — and it’s good.

This article on sex for the elderly shows just how tricky it is to maintain the well-being of people in care.
Environment
George Monbiot in the Guardian tells us there’s a population crisis, but it isn’t the one we usually think of.
Meanwhile one way round the population crisis would be to make humans smaller.
You’ve probably heard of guerilla gardening, well now here’s guerilla grafting — activists are grafting fruit-bearing branches onto ornamental city trees. Excellent idea!
Social Sciences & Business
The class system is dead; long live the class system. Apparently the UK is still class ridden, but in today’s society the classes are different.
Why the internet is like a series of lead pipes. Very interesting comparison.
From pipes to streets. Clever cartographers add fictitious trap streets to their maps. Here are some trap streets in London.
Art & Literature
[NSFW] A Japanese museum is aiming to confront the taboo of shunga head on. Is it art, is it pornography, or could it be both?
The British Library is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland with a new exhibition. IanVisits takes a look.
History
In another new exhibition the Wellcome Collection is featuring Lukhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibet’s Secret Temple. IanVisits again takes a look.
Returning home again, did you know that, once upon a time London was the motor manufacturing centre of the UK?
People

Nothing highly salacious to leave you with this time, so here’s the obituary for Roy Dommett (with accordion, above), a true British eccentric. The video is just excellent! [With thanks to Bruce for alerting me to this.]

history, links, medical

Your Interesting Links

So here we are again with another round of links to interesting (or amusing) items you may have missed previously. I’ve decided to try splitting the items into sections, starting with the scientific and ending with the more light-hearted.
Science & Medicine
Let’s start off with the most important question ever … Are Cats Domesticated?
I think this next item could well be a top nominee for “research of the year” and maybe even an Ig Nobel. The headline reads: Old Mice Drinking Champagne Three Times A Week Navigate Labyrinths Better.
And so from one of cats’ main prey items to another — birds. It seems that there are some interesting mechanisms underlying the colour of birds’ plumage, and it isn’t all down to pigmentation.
So what do we really know about nutrition? It seems that in really scientific terms the answer is “not a lot” because most of the studies which have been done are of such poor quality. Aaron Carroll takes the studies apart.
It’s a bit late for Halloween now, but here’s a piece on some of the chemistry of blood.
Why do germs spread better in winter, when one would think that the cold weather would kill them off? Scientists are at last unravelling the actuality.
There is no hope. We are all doomed. It seems that the changes in our sense of humour as we age may be the early signs of losing our marbles altogether.
Touching. Some like it, others don’t. And we all have areas where we don’t like to be touched. Research has recently mapped out this awkwardness with being in physical contact with other people.
Excuse the question, but have you had a good shit lately? The chances are that none of us have, as scientists are telling us we’ve been doing it all wrong — at least since the advent of the flush toilet. But I have to ask how this is new news? It is something I’ve known for about 40 years and was based on research then!
Many (maybe all) of us are not a single genetic being; we have some level of chimerism. We likely all contain our mother’s cells; maybe our older siblings’ cells too; and mothers may also contain their children’s foetal cells. But it seems, that at least for mother, this may be a good thing.
And these cases of chimerism come to the fore where paternity tests throw up unexpected results. Oh, and maternity tests!
Anatomical question of the week … Why is the human vagina so big?
Sexuality
One American father has done his kids proud by following the Dutch model of sex advice. And guess what? It’s a model that works.
Social Sciences & Business
Seems the culture of overwork is erroneous and that working fewer hours really would make us more productive. Now why did I fairly strictly control the hours I spent in the office?
Time. We seldom have enough. But where does all your time go? [Long read]
Language
We have countless words for colours and even sounds, but why do most languages have very few words for smells?
History
The Tampon: A History. [Long read]
OK, so it was invented by the Sumerians, but what is Cuneiform anyway?
He was a mathematician, magician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, alchemist and spy; and he lived during the reign of Elizabeth I. Who was he? Yes he was Dr John Dee. London’s Royal College of Physicians is putting on an exhibition about John Dee, from 18 January 2016.


The Dutch have made a truly stunning find. A trunk of over 2500 undelivered 17th century letters, many from ordinary people giving often unrecorded details of everyday life.
Another in IanVisits’s series on “Unbuilt London”; this time how to turn St James’ Park into a giant roundabout.
Coming even further up to date IanVisits (again) takes a trip through the tunnels of London’s mothballed Post Office railway.

Food & Drink
Those of you who will be roasting a giant sparrow for Christmas dinner might need to get your oven ready now.
There’s coffee, and then there’s the perfect cup of coffee — as explained by a Chemistry teacher.
Shock, Horror, Humour
Having been on the receiving end of one, Harry Mount considers the secret brilliance of Prince Philip’s “gaffes”.
That’s all, folks!

amusements, history, links, science

Your Interesting Links

So soon already here’s another rag-bag of links to interesting articles you may have missed the first time round …
Quite a long time ago Scientific American posted an interactive Periodic Table, but they have been doing some updates to it. Click the element for some basic information. May be helpful for those with yoofs studying chemistry.
So ladies, what if everything your doctors told you about breast cancer was wrong? Find out some of the realities ad decide for yourself whether you should have that mammogram. [Long read]


Staying with jiggling lady-parts … here’s why scientists are saying you should throw your bra away.
Moving down the body, Belgian sexologist Goedele Liekens is on a mission to sort out prudish British sex education. And not before time, says I.
In another medical piece, scientists now think that anything up to 25% of our genes work in sync with the seasons. And that may mean our central heating and artificial lighting are screwing our physiology which expects winter to be different to summer.
Here are just two of many recent pieces which have looked at the sleeping patterns of hunter-gatherers and compared them to our modern habits. Seems they aren’t so different as we thought. First from the estimable Ed Yong in The Atlantic and the second from IFL Science.
And now for the obligatory piece about our feline companions. It seems our cats aren’t so emotionally distant as we think and they do seem to be able to sense our moods.
So at last to the history section …
It’s right what they say: you don’t know what you’ve got until you look. An historian has found the earliest known draft of part of the King James Bible hidden away in a Cambridge college.
Those of us who live in London love to moan about London Transport. But have you ever wondered what London’s public transport was like in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries?
Back in the 17th century lots of amateur natural philosophers (what we would now call scientists) were experimenting with lenses and looking at the microscopic world. Mostly they didn’t understand what they saw and had to get artists to try to draw it for them.
Returning to London, here’s a brief history of Georgian London (1714-1830).

And finally here’s something totally mad … A Steampunk-themed café filled with kinetic sculptures has opened in Romania.

history, links, science

Your Interesting Links

Lots of science (though hopefully nothing hard) and lots of history in this issue of links to items you might have missed the first time round.
The more scientists look, the more they realise that many of us are not just a single person but may contain elements of another. In other words many of us are chimeras and it is common amongst many species.
Meanwhile up the Himalayas biologists have found some 211 new species in the last few years: that’s 133 plants, 39 invertebrates, 26 fish, 10 amphibians, one reptile, one bird and one mammal. The latter is a noseless sneezing monkey. We still really do not know what’s out there!


We know crows are intelligent. In fact they are so intelligent that they not only recognise human faces, but they mourn their dead and will remember the identities of anyone who is a threat.
Periodical cicadas spend 13 or 17 years underground and then emerge all at once for a frenzy of singing and sex. Now scientists are beginning to understand how they keep track of time.
OK, so how small is the smallest insect? Well the smallest free-living insect is less than a third of a millimetre — almost too small to see with the naked eye. But it isn’t definitively the smallest, because even at this size it has smaller parasites living on it. Which is sort of mind-boggling.
As so often we return to the subject of nuclear accidents. Understandably there is a lot of research looking at the long-term effects of the Chernobyl accident on the wildlife and how it is doing after the people left. Somewhat counter-intuitively it seems to mostly be thriving.
Now a little light chemistry. Here’s a simple explainer of the nasty niffs our bodies produce.
OK so now a swift switch to technology. Britain’s telecomms infrastructure is in such a state that it is a wonder it ever works.
And on to even more historical technology. Archaeologists think they have probably found the wreck of Henry V’s warship the Holigost buried in mud of the River Hamble.
Another set of history nuts is proposing to build a Tudor warship on the banks of the Thames at Deptford (which was indeed a big Tudor and Restoration shipbuilding centre).
From Deptford it isn’t too far a stretch to the world of Shakespeare. And historians are now suggesting — based on decent evidence — that much of Shakespeare’s play writing was funded by some dodgy deals done by his father.

Fifty years after the death of Shakespeare we come to the heyday of Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys, who knew Deptford shipbuilding well. A new exhibition (from 20 November) at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich will explore London in the time of Samuel Pepys.
Pub quiz question: When did London first have horseless buses? Yes it is a trick question because the answer is a lot earlier than you think for it was when Charles Dickens was a teenager, back around 1827.
Around the same time there were several proposals to straighten out the River Thames, none of which came to fruition. IanVisits investigates.
Coming into the beginning of the 20th century, here is a collection of colour photographs of Russia in 1907-1915, before the Revolution.

IanVisits again, this time taking a look in the WWII tunnels under Clapham Common.
My penultimate choice is a bit more serious. Here is Michael Shermer, of Skeptic magazine, on Do We Need God? Unsurprisingly his answer is “no”. Equally unsurprisingly I agree with him.
Finally here’s the best offer you’ve had all year (again from IanVisits) … Get felt-up at an erotic show in Soho.

links

More Links …

So soon already we have another collection of links to items you missed the first time round.
This first item will worry many people. According to scientists there are only three things preventing the world from converting to 100% nuclear energy: money, the political will and public acceptance. And it could be done in about 30 years which would likely be enough to put a big dent in global warming. Despite all the challenges this works for me.
We’ve known for some time that foetal cells hide in the mother’s body (and vice versa, too). But what do they do?


Eyes. They’re amazing organs. So it isn’t surprising there are lots of things to go wrong with eyes.
After all I’ve said, are you still resisting nudity? Well here are some scientific reasons why you shouldn’t.
Is peeing like a horse a reliable sign of (female) virginity, as was believed in days past? Spoiler: probably not.
While on the subject of urination, research that showed most mammals (regardless of size) can empty their bladders in 21 seconds has won this year’s Ig Nobel for Physics. Here’s the full list of this year’s awards.
Work on assessing the painfulness of insect stings also won an Ig Nobel this year for Dr Justin Schmidt who has spent much of his life rating the pain on a scale of 1 to 4 — by experiencing it himself.
Talking of pain, why is a smack on the funny bone quite so excruciatingly painful?
The best cure for pain is often sleep. But, largely due to the pressure of modern society, many of us are sleep deprived and would benefit from waking up a bit later. Certainly it is now well accepted that teenagers body clocks are our of sync with the rest of us.
Dogs have owners, cats have staff. Proven.
OK, so cats and dogs have different psychological needs, but here are twenty cognitive biases which affect your decisions. Yes, even yours!
From the top floor, let’s now take the elevator to the sub-basement. IanVisits asks: do strikes by underground staff improve London’s economy?
And now to some proper history. Well maybe a little improper … An historian appears to have found the first ever use of the word “fuck” in the record of a 1310 English court case. That’s over 200 years earlier than the OED knows about!
Rather more up to date, Londonist has been to look at the secret bunker under Churchill’s secret wartime bunker. Who knew?
IanVisits again, only this time another in his irregular series on Unbuilt London. In the 1960s there was a scheme to remove buses from central London and replace them with a monorail. It never happened, which is a shame as we could have had a rival to Wuppertal’s Schwebebahn.
Finally … If you’re anything like me, and it seems thousands of others, you detest having chefs serve you your food on chunks of wood or slate or … well just about anything except a plate. This is such a bête noire for many that there is now a Twitter feed @WeWantPlates.
And not a mention of sex!

history, links, medical, science

Your Interesting Links

OK, so here we are again with another instalment of links to interesting (well, I found them interesting) items you may have missed the first time round. There’s a long list this time, so lets start with the hard(er) stuff and then it’s all down hill.
The Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, which measures its success against a National Happiness Index, is planning to invest in the widespread use of electric vehicles. And why not, because of its mountainous terrain Bhutan has copious hydroelectric generation.


Now here is something I’ve known for a while and find quit disturbing: many widely used forensic techniques have never been subjected to scientific scrutiny but rely for veracity on the original testimony of some long-forgotten, apparent expert. Which to me means that any conviction which has relied on forensic data could well be unsafe. And yes, that includes fingerprints.
Herring Gulls. Love them? Or hate them? Either way they provide a valuable service.
How many microbes do you think there are in your house? Yep, thousands. That’s thousands of different species! Here are three stories about the research: from the BBC, from the North Carolina State University research team and from one of the study leaders, Rob Dunn.
Meanwhile in South Africa a team of very small archaeologists have found thousands of bones, apparently from an unknown hominin species, in a virtually inaccessible cave.
And so to the medical … Ovarian cancer is nasty because it is so hard to detect. But (as I have been saying for ages) if women were to lose their fear of saying ‘vagina’ the rate of early diagnosis could increase dramatically. We (everyone, men and women) just have to become more comfortable with our bodies, and talking openly about them, for the good of our health!
“What’s a uterus?” This stunning level of body ignorance and illiteracy is demonstrated in an article in the Guardian from an Australian oncologist.
Now here is a medical affliction which is really frightening: sudden death syndrome.
So what is it like to be permanently like a robot; not being yourself either physically or emotionally? It’s called depersonalisation disorder and is apparently quite common but almost totally misunderstood.
It’s a good week of strange afflictions (they’re not all diseases as such). Here’s another: aphantasia. Which is basically living without any mental images; no mind’s eye; no ability to conjure up a picture of your loves ones; nothing.
Back to the more mundane … Why is it that many of use sneeze when going from the dark into (bright) light? That’s right: no-one really knows, but there are some ideas.

On the chemistry of plums, prunes, chewing gum and constipation.
Apparently we have bees all wrong. Royal Jelly seems not to be what makes a queen bee, but it’s what the royal larvae aren’t fed (and which is fed to workers) that forces them to become queens.
We all seem to like bees but hate wasps. But some people do like wasps despite having been stung about the privy parts. Yes, I too like wasps despite never having had more than an odd sting on the arm.
A couple of weeks ago, George Monbiot created a stir by admitting to eating a roadkill squirrel. And then repeating the exercise on live TV. Seems to me this is rather more honest than getting someone else to rear, slaughter and butcher a pig for you.
Still on the wild world, there’s a fish which is older than the dinosaurs: the lamprey. And it is returning to UK rivers after 200 years. Though it is unlikely that any time soon there’ll be enough to have a surfeit of lampreys like Henry I — which is probably as well as they are quite nasty creatures.

Do you live with a weirdo? You do if you live with a cat. Here are some tales of feline oddness.
Which sort of takes us naturally onto common beliefs we get wrong.
There are many many very wet places on this planet, but which of them wins the crown for being the wettest place on Earth?
And now to the historical … Just why was Orkney the centre of ancient Britain? Long before the Egyptians built the pyramids or ancient Britons built Stonehenge.
And talking of Stonehenge … archaeologists have discovered an unsuspected huge ritual arena just two miles from Stonehenge.
Westminster is NOT the Mother of all Parliaments. The original quotation is “England is the Mother of all Parliaments”.
Ah yes, the age old mystery of the Princes in the Tower. After 500 years it should be a very cold case but some forensic historians are trying to bring it back to life.
Next up two brief pieces from the History of London website. The first on the Great Plague and the Fire of London; the other on the Civil War and Restoration.
IanVisits is running an irregular series on unbuilt London: great projects that never happened. Here’s his piece on the iron London Bridge that never was.

London took a hammering from the Luftwaffe in the Blitz and after the war it took 20+ years to reclaim and build on all the bomb sites. So why is so much of London being redeveloped now?
Finally here’s the story of the oldest known message in a bottle, and one of the longest running scientific experiments. The bottle was cast adrift in the North Sea around 10 years before the Great War and surfaced again earlier this year!
Hopefully you’ll not have to wait quite that long for the next instalment …

environment, food+drink, history, links, nudism, science

Your Interesting Links

So here we are again with another round of links to interesting items you might have missed the first time around. Again not too much heavy science but a lot of oddities …
Cats vs Dogs. Who wins? Well from an evolutionary perspective scientists have concluded that cats are better.


Since when has a Goth Chicken been a thing? Quite a while apparently as it is a recognised breed with black feathers, black meat and even a black heart. And they are highly prized.
We all know we eat too much animal protein, so it’s no surprise that the trend for replacing red meat with chicken isn’t actually helping.
George Monbiot considers evidence that obesity is an incurable disease and asks why then governments are intent on punishing sufferers.
So what is it like if you lose your sense of smell?
There are lots of medical screening tests available but which are really useful and what are the drawbacks?
Michael Ignatieff looks at the ongoing human impact of the Fukushima accident and subsequent clean-up.
So which shall be the master: the Meridian or GPS? It seems they don’t agree where the Greenwich Meridian is by a small matter of 102 metres. which is fine, apparently.
Galileo looked at a pendulum and thus begat GPS. Or how seemingly trivial observations and inventions can have long-lasting and profound effects centuries later.
And while we’re on inventions, a creative man has built a machine to feed his cat — but only when the cat hunts and finds a hidden ball and puts it in a slot machine!
Mention of Galileo makes us turn to history, but let’s start even further back in time … An English academic working in America has been looking hard at the walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber and thinks he’s spotted the bricked up entrance to Queen Nefertiti’s tomb.
Now here’s an equally puzzling conundrum. Was Shakespeare stoned when he wrote his plays? Well maybe, because pipe remains found in Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon garden have been analysed and found to contain not just tobacco but also cocaine and cannabis.

Struan Bates at www.EnglishCivilWar.org takes a further look at London’s York House Water Gate, this time as represented by various artists.
Has anyone got a couple of million to spare? If so, Dungeness is up for sale — yes, that large expanse of shingle on the Kent coast. And as it’s a very environmentally sensitive area it needs a suitable owner. Now if I can just win the lottery …

After which it is all downhill (or do I mean down the beach?) …
Guys … Do you want to increase your fertility? If so, take a tip from the Scots and wear a kilt!
Don’t want to wear a kilt? OK, so nudism is another option. Here are two items where young ladies look at the experience of social nudity: the first talks of the challenges of being a lifelong nudist and the second tackles nudity in the interests of research.
Meanwhile Amnesty International has found some sense and now backs the worldwide decriminalisation of prostitution. Is it too much to hope the politicians might now listen? Yes, I thought so.
And finally some words from a working, legal (albeit American) prostitute on the misconceptions people have about the job she has chosen for herself.
That’s all. More anon.

history, links, natural history, science

Your Interesting Links

And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more

Yes, we are doing well at present for interesting links to items you might have missed the first time round. Here is the latest instalment, and again I promise you nothing too hard by way of science!
What is it that makes wet dogs smell so? Here’s a brief look at some of the chemistry.

There are definite advantages to being female, and if you’re a cat one of them is that you can have splotchy fur.
Most moths can only make noise by rubbing their legs or wings together, but the Death’s-Head Hawkmoth has a built-in flute. They also eat honey.

We all know that seeds can last a long time just by observing what happens when you turn over an undisturbed piece of ground. But how long can seeds really survive?
And from seeds we’re now on to food … We’re often told that western society eats too much meat and we should cut back. While this would undoubtedly be good for our health, can meat ever be eco-friendly?
Have you ever stopped to think about what cooking oil you use? Well some scientists have and the results may surprise you.
Scotch eggs originated in Scotland, didn’t they? Except they probably didn’t.
Who has ever had hiccups after a meal? Or maybe some other time? But why do we hiccup?
So now to some different aspects of lifestyle. What (if any) are the scientifically proven benefits of yoga? Julia Belluz looks at all the evidence.
I wonder how many of you already know these 9 facts about breasts? No, I didn’t!
How to improve your work-life balance by doing one simple thing? You can’t? Oh yes you can! It sometimes takes a bit of discipline, but I did it many years ago and it worked for me.
Next a couple (more) items — here and here — on why family nudity is actually healthy for kids. Girls especially are more likely to grow up with a good self-body image.
And now a quick shuffle across to the history room where first we find a piece on a little known relic of early 17th century London: the York House Water Gate.
Opening-of-St-Katharines-1828

Slightly later, but still on the Thames, a piece on the creation of the St Katharine Docks and how they changed the working of the docks.
And finally, from boats to trains. Here’s the low-down on the ghost trains of Britain.