via Boing Boing by Andrea James
David Lynch, Chuck Close, Susan Orlean, and a sampling of others describe the mysteries of inspiration that generate their ideas in this short but sweet film by Andrew Norton.
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Chocolate Can Protect Our Brains
via 3 Quarks Daily: Sheherzad Preisler in OliveOilTimes
A research team based at Italy’s University of L’Aquila have published a new study that says cocoa beans contain high concentrations of flavanols, which are naturally-occurring compounds that can protect our brains. The team, whose findings were published in Frontiers in Nutrition, reviewed current scientific literature in the hopes of finding out if the sustained concentrations of cocoa flavanols found in regular chocolate-eaters had any effect on the brain. What the team found was a breadth of trials in which participants that regularly consumed chocolate processed visual information better and had improved “working memories.” Furthermore, women who consumed cocoa after a sleepless night saw a reversal of negative side effects that come from sleep deprivation, such as compromised task performance. This could be great for those who work particularly stressful jobs that compromise one’s sleep as well as those with recurring sleep issues.
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10 facts about fungi
via OUP Blog by Nicholas P. Money
Featured image credit: close up fungi mushrooms by Pexels. Public domain viaPixabay
Fungi play an important role for a balanced life of flora, fauna, and humans alike. But are they important for us humans, and how are fungi related to animals? Nicholas P. Money, author of Fungi: A Very Short Introduction, tells us 10 things everyone should know about fungi, and the role they play in the world.
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Obsolete technology LEGO kits
via Boing Boing by Rusty Blazenhoff
Chris McVeigh of Halifax, Nova Scotia builds all kinds of cool things with LEGO. Recently, he's been creating kits that showcase obsolete office technology. This particular kit, which he calls "My Old Desktop: DOS Edition 2.0," features a few reminders of the 1980s office, including a rotary-dial desk phone and a beige desk computer that can be partially fed one of the miniature 5.25" floppy disk replicas.
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Ambroise Paré’s medical ‘monsters’
via Wellcome Library blog by Sarah Pipkin
In the collected works of Ambroise Paré (c. 1510–90), first published in French in 1575, a ‘Book of monsters and prodigies’ appears alongside other subjects including the setting of bones, the identification of parasites, and the treatment of wounds. Paré, one of the most important surgeons of the early modern period, evidently considered all these topics to be relevant to barber-surgeons. However his work is tarnished by a well-meaning medical tract that was reinvented into something horrifying.
Continue reading but be warned that the image immediately after the above paragraph can be disturbing.
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When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Mammals Took to the Skies
via 3 Quarks Daily: Carl Zimmer in The New York Times
A fossil of a Maiopatagium, one of two newly discovered species of gliding mammals from China that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs. CreditZhe-Xi Luo/University of Chicago
The Mesozoic Era, from 252 million years ago to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. To generations of paleontologists, early mammals from the period were just tiny nocturnal insect-eaters, trapped in the shadows of leviathans. In recent years, scientists have significantly revised the story. Mammals already had evolved into a staggering range of forms, fossil evidence shows, foreshadowing the diversity of mammals today. In a study published on Wednesday, a team of paleontologists added some particularly fascinating new creatures to the Mesozoic Menagerie. These mammals did not lurk in the shadows of dinosaurs. Instead, they glided far overhead, avoiding predatory dinosaurs on the ground – essentially flying squirrels of the Jurassic Period, from an extinct branch of mammals that probably still laid eggs.
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A Short Analysis of Chidiock Tichborne’s ‘Elegy’
via Interesting Literature
A summary of a famous Elizabethan poem
Chidiock Tichborne was only 24 years old when he was executed in the most horrifically brutal way, by being hanged, drawn, and quartered, for his role in the Catholic Babington Plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I in 1586. Tichborne’s Elegy, which he composed on 19 September 1586 on the eve of his execution and sent to his wife Agnes, remains his most famous poem, and an oft-anthologised example of sixteenth-century English verse. Commonly known as ‘Tichborne’s Elegy’, or by its first line ‘My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares’, the poem is worthy of analysis because of the skill it demonstrates but also, of course, because of the circumstances under which it was composed.
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Is there such a thing as sugar addiction?
Given the choice, lab rats favour sugar over cocaine. Does that mean we are all hopelessly hooked – and what is eating too much sugar doing to our bodies?
via the Guardian by Luisa Dillner
Oh, just the three then … Photograph: Tetra Images/Getty Images/Tetra images RF
It comes in a white, crystalline form and gives us a pleasurable high – but refined sugar is as habit-forming as cocaine or nicotine, according to a review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Animal studies show that sugar is the drug of choice for lab rats which, when given a choice of levers to pull, will switch from cocaine to sucrose in the twitch of a tail.
In evolutionary terms, we worked for our sugar fix by eating honey and ripe fruit. We then stored any surplus energy as fat for the lean times when bison were scarce. Now that sugar is available as highly concentrated sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup – both stripped of nutritional value (minerals and vitamins are lost in the refining process) – we’re hooked.
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Benedictine Dreams (And Some Strange Ideas about Counter-Culture)
via 3 Quarks Daily by Leanne Ogasawara
I admit, the only reason I picked the book up off the shelf was because of the photograph of Mont Saint-Michel on the cover.
Ah, Mont Saint-Michel. We had just returned from the legendary floating island, and I had found myself utterly obsessed by the place. A fairy castle rising up out of the mist and waters of the tidal estuary in northern France, the abbey of Mont Saint Michel is sometimes associated with the ancient Breton myth of the submerged cathedral lying underneath the sea. The myth of the sunken cathedral was the inspiration for Debussy's famous piano prelude, La Cathédrale Engloutie. Debussy often frequented Mont Saint Michel, and while the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel never sinks beneath the sea, it does become inaccessible as it is surrounded by waters twice daily. In days past, completely cut off at high tide by the strongest tidal forces in Europe; those strong currents rush in at incredible speed, "like that of a galloping horse," said Victor Hugo.
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How The Great 78 Project is saving half a million songs from obscurity
via Library Link: Will Pritchard at The Vinyl Factory
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee first put digital pen to pad on his world-altering creation – the World Wide Web – he did so with the aim, as stated on the world’s very first website, of kick-starting an initiative that would “give universal access to a large universe of documents.”
In many ways, non-profit digital library The Internet Archive, with its stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge”, is the natural extension of this founding vision.
One of the latest projects undertaken by the Archive is the Great 78 Project. The brainchild of the Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, the project is dedicated to the preservation and discovery of 78rpm records. It involves at least three different organisations, including New York’s Archives of Contemporary Music, George Blood Audio, and of course The Internet Archive, working together to manage, clean, digitise and archive around a thousand records a day.
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