Science!!!

Choose your cutlery carefully: what you eat with changes how food tastes - Science Sushi | DiscoverMagazine.com

In a study published today in the open access journal Flavour, Harrar and Spence show that even something as overlooked as our cutlery can change our perception of foods.

Eating with a heavy spoon made participants feel the yogurt was cheaper, less dense, and generally less likeable, even though they rated it as sweeter. Literally, the feel of a spoonful of yogurt altered how rich the yogurt tasted. The authors suggest that this was in part due to prior expectations: because plastic spoons are usually light, the heavier spoons clashed with expectations, and that mental discontinuity affected the taste of the food itself.
 
BBC News - Mouse cloned from drop of blood

This week, scientists cloned a mouse from cells found in a drop of mouse blood. That's different from other cloned mice, whose creation relied on more invasive sampling from the liver, bone marrow, and lymph nodes (read: the original animal was euthanized). Cloning mice is valuable for scientific research — it's handy to have your subjects be as alike one another as possible. Now, scientists have a way to do that without having to kill the original mouse.
 
Brain-eating amoebas thrive in US lakes as global warming heats waterways | The Verge

These "brain-eating amoebas" — known to doctors and scientists as Naegleria fowleri, or N. fowleri — aren’t believed to kill often. In the US, researchers estimate that between three and eight people die from N. fowleri disease, commonly referred to as PAM (primary amebic meningoencephalitis) each year. But that might not be the case for long. In recent years, N. fowleri has popped up in unexpected locations, which some experts suggest is a sign that warmer waters — caused by brutal summer heat waves and rising temperatures across the country — are catalyzing their spread.
 
World’s first telescopic contact lens gives you Superman-like vision | ExtremeTech

An international team of researchers have created the first telescopic contact lens; a contact lens that, when it’s equipped, gives you the power to zoom your vision almost three times.

The main breakthrough is that this telescopic contact lens is just 1.17mm thick, allowing it to be comfortably worn. Other attempts at granting telescopic vision have included: a 4.4mm-thick contact lens (too thick for real-world use), telescopic spectacles (cumbersome and ugly), and most recently a telescopic lens implanted into the eye itself. The latter is currently the best option currently available, but it requires surgery and the image quality isn’t excellent.
 

Early in the article, the reporter writes this:

Three Inca children found mummified in a shrine near the peak of a 6,700-meter Argentinian volcano consumed vast quantities of corn alcohol and coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived…

In the next paragraph, the reporter then writes the following:

… researchers discovered that the children ingested alcohol and cocaine for about a year before their death…

Considering the mummies are from the late 15th to early 16th century, and the process for refinement of cocaine was not invented until the mid-19th century, it is unlikely the children ingested cocaine. The reporter either mistakenly or sensationalistically transmogrified the presence of coca into cocaine. There is a really big difference between natural coca and refined cocaine, although the cocaine is derived from the coca plant; and I have a feeling it's incorrect to transpose them.

Sorry for the rant. For some reason, I'm on a crusade against poor journalism lately most of the time.
 
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Women and sex: the myth-buster | Books | The Guardian

"With primatology, science has refused to see that females are the aggressors, the rulers, the initiators of sex. For so long, almost to a humorous extent, we have looked right past the truth; which is that the females are leaving their young, they're objectifying their mates, they're the agents of desire. The psychologist had to keep getting rid of his male monkeys because the females got bored with them!"
 
Relevant:

Who Owns Omni? - BoingBoing

But Omni seems in limbo. Even though Frommer has revealed that he physically possesses the magazine's archives, no one seems to know precisely who owns its brand and its copyrights — whatever rights the entity had in the first place. After scanned, incomplete archives of Omni appeared in the Internet Archive a few years ago, and were mentioned again on BoingBoing in April 2013, I asked myself: who owns Omni?
 
Why I Donated My Stool -- NYTimes.com

"I delivered my first donation, in Tupperware, and Gene took it into the privacy of his bathroom. I stayed, just in case I was needed, and after about half an hour, he came out and told me, with a look of wonder, that he was feeling better already. Already? We checked with Dr. Shepard, who told us that, indeed, one can feel the effects that quickly."

Oh, yes, you'll want to read that now, won't you?
 
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