Interesting Things

A bunch of fun items came across my desk.

Parasitic worms often have elaborate mechanisms to hold onto their feeding site-- the skin, intestinal wall, etc. Doctors have examined this method and are using it to keep skin grafts in place. See here.

One of the amazing things about the brain is how everything connects to everything else. We all have a problem visualizing that. Here's a solution.

We have a problem with race here in these United of States. Specifically, we have a collection of white people who just don't seem to understand how easy they have it compared to minorities. John Scalzi tackles it here in what I think is a pretty brilliant metaphor.

Ezra Klein points out that doing our taxes is hard. It doesn't have to be that hard. And there are vested interests in making it hard. See here.

We want home grown organs. We want them before we die without them. Here is a break through.

It's starting to look like every time we look we're going to find life on planet earth. Is there a "shadow biosphere?" Look here.

Here is a truly gifted set of people talking about story telling in science: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, Tracy Day, Ira Flatow, Neal Stephenson, and Bill Nye.

Finally.

Given the Boston Marathon Bombing there are two sites I want people to think about. This one is about how the brain shuts down when it's afraid. We get good marks on running when we're scared but not so good marks on making decision.

The other is about death. Caitlin Doughty is a writer and mortician living in Los Angeles. She founded Order of the Good Death to talk about, among other things, death. She puts up funny videos about serious subjects, often under the rubric Ask a Mortician. After Sandy Hook, she put up a video about how to talk to kids about death. It's pretty good. Here it is.