10 stories and links that I found educative, interesting or just plain weird

Why We Yawn – And Why Yawning Is So Contagious via Stephen's Lighthouse (Stephen Abram)
“Scientists haven't nailed down the exact cause of our 240,000 lifetime yawns yet, but there’s good support for the yawn as a temperature regulator.”
Did you know snakes and fish yawn? And that yawns are contagious?
Read more
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The magical incubator. How did a dim, poorly ventilated, absestos-ridden building at MIT become a hub of ground-breaking innovation?... more
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Invitation to a Ladies evening, 1897 via Retronaut by Chris


“I found this card in 2003 under the floorboards of the Vicarage of Willoughby Church, Hornsey, London when I was renovating the floor. There was a fire at the property at some point which accounts for the damage.” – Alex Findlow
See all the pictures here
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The Science of Habits, Good and Bad via Big Think by Orion Jones
A new book takes a scientific approach to how we develop different habits, whether it is the ease that comes from repeating complex behaviours like learning a musical instrument, or chemical dependencies like alcohol addiction. The book is Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business and in it the author says that by understanding how we create habits, good and bad, we can take responsibility for our behaviour and even help change the orientation of society.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
How does a poet of despair survive in rock ’n’ roll? Ideas are the engine of Leonard Cohen’s success. His ideas are old and radical and, on occasion, surprisingly persuasive... more
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Is There More to Obesity Than Too Much Food? via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza
From Smithsonian:

Obesity, it would seem, is one big “My bad”, a painfully visible failure in personal responsibility. If you regularly chow down a pizza and a pint of ice cream for dinner, and your idea of a vigorous workout is twisting off caps on two-liter bottles of Coke, well, it’s pretty hard to give yourself a pass for packing on pounds. Certainly, most doctors and dieticians still believe that being overweight is a matter of too many calories in, and not enough calories out, or put more bluntly, way too much food and way too little exercise. It’s all about overconsumption, right? End of story.
Except the plot appears to be thickening. Recent research is beginning to suggest that other factors are at work, specifically chemicals used to treat crops and to process and package food.  Scientists call them obesogens and in one study at the University of California, Irvine, they caused animals to have more and larger fat cells.

More here.
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Who Is Peter Pan? via 3quarksdaily by Morgan Meis
NBC/Photofest
Mia Farrow pointing the way to Neverland in a television production of Peter Pan, 1976

A few writers have the kind of power that believers attribute to gods: they create men and women and children who seem to us to be real. But unlike gods, these writers do not control the lives of their most famous creations. As times passes, their tales are told and retold. Writers and dramatists and film-makers kidnap famous characters like Romeo and Juliet, Sherlock Holmes, and Superman; they change the characters’ ages and appearance, the progress and endings of their stories, and even their meanings. One of the characters most frequently kidnapped by writers, dramatists, and filmmakers is James Barrie’s Peter Pan. As a result he and his adventures have become immensely famous: there have been scores, possibly hundreds of dramatizations and condensations, prequels and sequels and spinoffs. Some are interesting and even admirable, but there have also been many cheap and even vulgar versions.

more from Alison Lurie at the NYRB here.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Even if we accept the claims of evolutionary psychology, says Roger Scruton, the mystery of the human condition remains. How can we be explained as animals but understood as persons?... more
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In a brainless marine worm, researchers find the developmental “scaffold” for the vertebrate brain via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza
From PhysOrg:

The origin of the exquisitely complex vertebrate brain is somewhat mysterious. “In terms of evolution, it basically pops up out of nowhere. You don’t see anything anatomically like it in other animals,” says Ariel Pani, an investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole and a graduate student at the University of Chicago. But this week in the journal Nature, Pani and colleagues report finding some of the genetic processes that regulate vertebrate brain development in (of all places) the acorn worm, a brainless, burrowing marine invertebrate that they collected from Waquoit Bay in Falmouth, Mass.
More here.
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LSD Successfully Treats Alcoholism via Big Think by Orion Jones
A new meta-analysis of studies conducted during the 60s and 70s shows LSD was significantly better at treating alcoholism than a placebo. Neuroscientists at the Norwegian University of Science and technology found that of 536 participants, 59 percent of those treated with LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to just 38 percent of those given placebos.
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and see a great psychedelic picture that I cannot show here for copyright reasons
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