Another in our series of links to articles you may have missed and will wish you hadn’t. In no special order …
Do you, like me, suffer from earworms? Scientists think they’ve found some ways to get rid of them. Which is good ‘cos I’ve had Caravan in my head since before Christmas!
Someone has just discovered that breast milk is amazing stuff, and actually rather important. Well who would have guessed!
Now just how weird is the natural world? Very; especially when you find that fruit bats menstruate like women and have oral sex. A few years back researchers discovered that Australian fruit bats indulged in fellatio. Now apparently they have cunnilingus too. How cool is that?!
What would scientists do without big hospital scanners? They’re now using CT and MRI scans to look at diseases in ancient human remains. Here’s a summary of the findings on eight mummies.
Just to confirm even further that scientists are a strange bunch, here’s the low-down on a few experiments they’ve been running for a lifetime or more.
Did you see al those reports of the huge DDoS war on the internet? Yep, so did I. But was my internet affected? Nope. And neither probably was yours. Turns out that the whole thing was much over-hyped and largely a marketing con trick.
Why do people get upset by technical neologisms? We invent new things, so we have to invent new ways to be able to talk about them. And unlike the French we don’t regulate the language.
First it was the horsemeat scandal/fraud. Now it appears that the fish supply chain is fraudulent too — it appears too widespread to be accidental.
Once in a while you really do get something for nothing. Many of the big names in English Folk Music are coming together to create a single archive and making it available free online.
After around 400 years we have cranes nesting in England again.
So this week the BBC touted some researchers’ new British class calculator which was, I suppose, passingly amusing if only for it’s apparent erroneousness. The Heresy Corner does the demolition job.
Brad Warner, American zen teacher and punk rocker (who generally talks sense) has some brief comments on burqas, hijabs, niqabs and nudity. He admits it’s a bit unstructured so hopefully he’ll develop his ideas.
And finally, you can generally agree Scicurious is going to come up with something interesting. On Friday there was a dissertation on the conformation of male (human) balls and how this was reflected in the sculpture of the ancients. But no-one knows why the anatomy is the way it is, or why some of us don’t conform to the norm.
