the habit of wonder

An insomniac obsessive goes in search of the perfect mattress-flipping algorithm.

If you’re just counting sheep, you’re not thinking hard enough.

Advances in tissue engineering could lead to meat grown in a lab, not raised on a farm, the BBC reports.

“With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply,” said Jason Matheny of the University of Maryland. “And you could do it in a way that’s better for the environment and human […]

A mini-robot has managed to infiltrate cockroach society. In an experiment, scientists in Switzerland used the robot to draw a group of darkness-loving roaches out into the light, according to silicon.com:

Called InsBot, for “insect-like robot”, the mechanical bug mimics the insects’ smell and movements to the point that the roaches have accepted it as their […]

An African parrot named Alex has learned to identify 50 objects and to recognize shapes and colors, according to Wired News. What’s more, he seems to have taught himself a “zero-like concept.” Humans usually don’t grasp what zero means until they’re several years old.

The internet isn’t so big, if you’re small. To find out how much children understand about the net and its complexity, researcher Zheng Yan gathered responses from 83 kids.

One five-year-old-boy said “Um, it has two computers on it. It is ten square feet large. It wouldn’t hurt you”.

The children aged between nine and ten appeared […]

Watching someone else getting an injection always makes me flinch, if only within (I’m not what you’d call expressive). That sense of inner recoil as the needle goes in is something so palpable—and yet so thin, so fleeting as to afterward seem merely imagined.

But we live in a time when the evanescent can be […]

A chemical in Teflon may cause cancer, according to the EPA (which evinces a sudden willingness to maybe actually Protect us).

Here’s how the part of GE that makes TV news reports the story:

WASHINGTON - With five kids, it seems Barbara Andrukonis always has something cooking in a pan. But it’s the chemical compound used to […]

Babies smile socially, even at just eight months of age, a new study indicates.

Each of twenty infants was left to play in a room, alone except for the baby’s mother, while researchers from Indiana University filmed the scene. Mothers were instructed to watch their babies play for half of the allotted time period and, […]

The self-absorbed handle trauma best, a study finds.

Is that why they get to be in charge of everything?

(Via Mind Hacks)

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which gives us doomsday in handy clock form, is holding a contest to design displays for its virtual museum. Winning entries will depict the eighteen settings of the clock’s hands, which have tracked worldwide nuclear anxieties since 1947.

The magazine’s board moved the clock two minutes closer to […]