News of the week (or so)

More headlines and news stories that caught my interest and will probably be brought up in some fashion during small talk some time in the future.

Scientific American | Creative People Are… – Love this list. Now to figure out how to help our children develop these qualities. Because it can’t all be nature. A lot of it is nurture as well.

National Geographic | Your Baby’s Brain Holds the Key to Solving Society’s Problems – This is an interview with the author of the book Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain. Talking with kids and babies, not just at them, is so important. Shimri and I regularly have conversations, most of them she wins. That girl’s got whit. And Shimei love to tell us all about the humorous side of life. And Iddo is constantly surprising us with her take on the world.

Scientific American | Sunset on Pluto [Slide Show] – Pluto – proving that even dwarf planets are worth exploring.

BBC | Can eating more than six bananas at once kill you? – It won’t kill you, but I know from second-hand experience that it can make you very sick. Some guys I knew tried it one night. It wasn’t pretty the next day.

BBC | Mapping Australia’s dinosaur landscape – Okay. That’s interesting about the tracks. But now I’m wondering where are all the fossilized remains? What happened to the physical dinosaurs? Did they all just walk away and die elsewhere? Why didn’t the article mention any answers to those questions? Do scientists not know those answers yet? Is someone at least trying to figure out the answers?

BBC | The most common song you can’t sing in public – I didn’t not know that “Happy Birthday” was a copyrighted song. Now I want to go sing it in public.

BBC | Army mothers pose for photo – while breastfeeding babies – Go Fort Bliss! (I used to live in that area.) The thing that gets me about these breastfeeding photos is that they got all the kids to eat at the same time. Scheduling that is amazing.

BBC | Google launches Kenya’s Samburu Park on Street View – The next time all the kids are napping at the same time I’m going to go on safari!

Scientific American | People Are More Likely to Cheat at the End – Interesting. And the ending of things does have a strange effect on us. I didn’t know that about the rats nearing the end of the maze having a dopamime effect on the brain, but I’d say it’s probably similar to the feeling the last few miles of a marathon as you near the end – if you have enough physically left you really just want to lay it all out there and finish big. You get to sit down at the end after all.

BBC | Tai Chi ‘could be prescribed’ for illnesses – I’ve been interested in taking up Tai Chi for a while now. Maybe I should look into it a little more seriously.

BBC | Homer’s Iliad performed in 15-hour London epic – How cool is that! I love that they did it. I find it interesting they made it a moving (literally) performance. They broadcast it live. I wonder if it’s still available online to watch. I wonder how many small segments I’d have to watch it in during nap times to finish it.

There were a couple of articles about the Ig Nobel awards (BBC | ‘Universal urination duration’ wins Ig Nobel prize, NPR | The 2015 Ig Nobels: Studies That Make You Go ‘Huh?’, and NPR | Harvard Honors Scientific Researchers With Ig Nobels among others I’m sure). These always make me glad my research did not involve urine or being stung by bees. This is also one of the few awards ceremonies I’d like to attend some day.

BBC | The man who bought Stonehenge – and then gave it away – Bet you didn’t know this either.

NPR | Planets Transit The Desert In 7-Mile Scale Model Of The Solar System – We look at drawings in books or small mobiles and think we understand the solar system. But it’s super hard to model the scale of it. It’s HUGE. And even then it’s only a teeny tiny portion of the galaxy, which is a speck of dust in the universe.