26 Characters Is Not Enoug

The US National Weather Service has begun testing new, scarier storm warnings in Kansas and Missouri, two of the most tornado-prone states.  The messages beamed to news outlets now might say a tornado will cause “mass devastation” or “complete destruction” or that a particularly foreboding twister is “not survivable.”  Until now, storm warnings didn’t clearly distinguish between run-of-the-mill gusts and deadly tornadoes.  Doppler radar in the 1990s made it possible to detect not only the contours of a storm, but also wind directions and velocities inside the storm.  Those data allow meteorologists to see how a storm system is rotating, making it easier to predict tornadoes before they actually form or touch down.  These days, the average lead time for a tornado warning is about 12 minutes.  About 3 in 4 warnings predict tornadoes that never touch down.  And whether the storm is minor or deadly, the recommendation for how to respond is the same: “TAKE COVER NOW.”  Henceforth, an automated voice will allow weather radio updates in near realtime.

The number and capability of weather satellites circling the planet is beginning a rapid decline and tight budgets have significantly delayed or eliminated missions to replace them, says a US National Research Council analysis.  That means the number of instruments monitoring Earth’s activity is expected to decline from a peak of about 110 last year to fewer than 30 by the end of the decade.  When a similar analysis was issued 5 years ago, 8 satellites were expected to be in space by 2012, tracking a variety of conditions.  Yet today, only 3 are in orbit.  Of the remaining 5, 2 failed, 1 was cancelled and 2 others won’t launch until at least next year.  The chair of the committee warns that the loss of capacity will have “profound consequences on science and society, from weather forecasting to responding to natural hazards.”

You wouldn’t know it, not right away, but there is something strange about this picture.  It’s a sunset, yes, but notice the blush of colour right above the sun — it’s blue.  And as you look up, the blue fades into a faint rose or pink.  Why?  Because it’s not on Earth.  This is a Martian sunset.  On 19 May 2005, the camera on NASA’s rover, the one named Spirit, took this picture while sitting in the Gusev crater.  On Earth, the air is mostly nitrogen and oxygen.  There’s also moisture, dust particles, smoke, aerosols, pollen, and salt (from the ocean).  The atmosphere on Earth is denser.  Martian air, by contrast, is much thinner — about 1% the density of air on Earth — plus the gases are different: there’s CO ₂, nitrogen and argon, but most important, air on Mars is rich with teeny, teeny particles of dust.  When the sunshine on Mars hits clouds of fine dust floating through the air, it breaks into different colours.  Martian dust is exactly the right size to absorb the blue wavelengths of light and scatter red wavelengths all over the sky.  That’s why, if you stand on Mars and look away from the setting sun, most of the sky is rosy pink and various shades of red.  On Mars, the beams of light streaming toward you, having lost their red waves, show the wavelengths that haven’t scattered off.  That remaining light is predominantly blue.  So when you look straight at the sun on Mars, you see a haze of blue.  Look away from the sun, and the light is red.  It’s exactly opposite on Earth.  If you happen to be camping out on Mars and see an intense blue sunset like the one in the video, though, make sure the wind isn’t blowing in your direction because, within a few hours, a sandstorm might blow your tent down.  Via Andrew Sullivan.

In the lab, researchers at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine conducted a blind study in which some cells were infected with the HIV virus and others were left uninfected.  Using a deep sequencer, which can read tens of millions of sequences per experiment, they analysed the non-coding RNA (ncRNA) — RNA molecules that do not translate into proteins — to discover if the infection could be detected in non-coding DNA materials.  The researchers were able to identify with 100% accuracy both infected and non-infected cells — all because the ncRNA was giving off significant signals.  Once considered unimportant “junk DNA,” scientists have learned that ncRNA plays a crucial role in cellular function.  Mutations in ncRNA are associated with a number of conditions, such as cancer, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease.  Researchers believe that if an ncRNA molecule significantly manifests itself during infection by a particular pathogen, the pathogen has co-opted this ncRNA to help the pathogen devastate the host.  The article doesn’t say why they think this.  Perhaps the ncRNA is a warning sentinel and the error is that some genomes just aren’t paying sufficient attention to what the ncRNA are trying to say.

Young women who want to delay childbearing can now “insure” against infertility by banking bits of their ovaries while they’re still well under the age of 30, allowing them to conceive later in life.  These pieces of ovary are frozen in liquid nitrogen — thus staying viable for many years.  When one of these women wants to have a child at some later date, she’ll have the piece of ovary put back into place, following which (it is hoped) she’ll rapidly conceive.  This is impressive and could allow women to improve their education, gain new skills and become successful in the workplace without jeopardising the chance of eventually raising a family.  It sounds wonderful — but…  Though we think of a woman losing one egg each month during ovulation, actually an egg is lost by cell death every hour of every day.  During that same period, the average male will have produced 150,000 new sperm.  But as humans age, there’s a fall-off in quality of both eggs and sperm.  Nearly all of a woman’s eggs are in the outer skin of the ovary.  A surgeon banking eggs must strip this, which could cause adhesions, making natural conception less likely and even possibly bringing on premature menopause.  When the tissue is returned, it’s possible the graft won’t take.  If it dies instead, it could become a focus for infection.  Freezing may subtly damage eggs.  Women made infertile by cancer treatment may want to take that chance as it’s possibly their only chance.  But others may wish to wait until the research into revitalising ovaries (so that they make new eggs) has had a chance to mature.

Simplified quantum mechanics: Quantum mechanics is the body of laws that describe the (bizarre) behaviour of fundamental particles such as electrons and photons.  First, these don’t behave like tiny balls, but rather like fuzzy clouds spread over a large area.  Each particle is described by a “wavefunction,” or probability distribution, which tells what its properties (such as location and velocity) are more likely to be, but not what they ARE.  Those properties aren’t discreet; a particle is distributed throughout space like a wave, and has a range of velocities.  But when you experimentally measure its location (for example), its wavefunction “collapses” and it appears in only one spot.  However, there’s no way to simultaneously measure both a particle’s location and its velocity. The more precisely you know one, the fuzzier the other one is.  Called the “uncertainty principle,” this isn’t merely a limitation of our measurement capabilities, but rather an inherent fuzziness in the state of the universe.  Also, no two electrons (among other particles) can have exactly the same wavefunction.  This forces electrons to occupy different energy levels around the nuclei of atoms, and it is what causes matter to be stable and distributed throughout space.

Joule heating is when an electric current passes through a conductor (say, a metal wire) and releases heat.  At the nanoscale, joule heating involves electrons bouncing off atoms in the conductor, causing the atoms to vibrate.  In turn, these vibrations generate heat.  So fundamental is the understanding of Joule heating that you need never have heard the term to know that it exists.  With your electric stove, you send electricity through the heating element; it heats up and passes that heat on to your tea kettle.  However, imagine if you will that you send current through your stove but the heating element remains cold to the touch while the tea kettle gets hot enough to boil water.  That’s a bit like what researchers discovered when they sent current through carbon nanotubes, conductors much like metal wires.  When they started sending the electricity through, they expected the tubes to heat up.  They didn’t — they remained cool while the material close to them — a silicon nitride substrate — got hot.  “This is a new phenomenon we’re observing, exclusively at the nanoscale, and it’s completely contrary to our intuition and knowledge of Joule heating at larger scales — for example, in things like your toaster,” says Kamal Baloch, who conducted the research while a graduate student at the University of Maryland.  “The nanotube’s electrons are bouncing off of something, but not its own atoms.  Somehow, the atoms of the neighbouring materials are vibrating and getting hot instead.”  The implications for this phenomenon in computing could be huge for keeping transistors cool.  I wonder if inside the tubes it is also cool.

A forest will soon be planted in the sky in Milan, Italy.  Construction is underway for a pair of skyscrapers that will become home to the world’s first vertical forest.  It’s thought the project will help with filtering air pollution, absorbing CO ₂, reducing noise, cooling the building, reducing rainwater runoff, saving on cooling bills, and providing green outdoor space for residents of the building located in the core of the “forest”.  [They don’t mention how they plan to prevent people walking below from being hit by any branches that might fall, nor how they plan to remove dead trees in the future.]

Robotics company Boston Dynamics created an 11-pound robot called the Sand Flea that can jump 30 feet in the air and is equipped with an infrared camera.  “The robot uses gyro stabilisation to stay level during flight, to provide a clear view from the onboard camera, and to ensure a smooth landing,” notes its website.  The Sand Flea’s name hints at the bot’s capabilities — it can move undetected and close to the ground, then spring up into the air to jump onto higher ground.  The bot has enough energy to jump 25 times and lasts 2 hours using its fuel supply and piston actuator.  The controller can choose how high and at what angle the Sand Flea jumps, while the bot’s four wheels cushion its landing.  You should watch the video if you haven’t already seen it.  This thing is COOL.

Chickens are a symbol of urban nirvana and their coops are backyard shrines to a desire city dwellers have to move ever closer to their food.  Chickens lay the majority of their eggs early in life, yet they can live on to the age of about 10 years.  A problem is that many cities severely limit the number of chickens a backyard can have, so people would prefer all their hens be layers.  But they’ve come to know and care about their chickens, who all have personalities, different ways of interacting, and make different sounds once they feel safe.  This increasingly intimate relationship has led some bird owners to make plans for their chickens’ unproductive years.  Hence a budding phenomenon: urban chicken retirement homes.  Retired chickens still have their uses: they eat pests that bother other animals, are used for breeding, to turn compost, to keep grass down, and as pets.

October in Tottori Prefecture, Japan, is the month to go squidding (or whatever it’s called).  These have been hung out to dry.  (I thought they were aprons at first.)

The Titanic, an ocean liner which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years ago, is being devoured by a monster microbial industrial complex of extremophiles as alien as one we might find on Jupiter’s ocean-bound Europa — the largest, strangest cooperative microorganism on Earth.  It appears to use a common microbial language called “quorum sensing” (which can be either chemical or electrical) by which communities of microbes detect each other’s presence and then engage in activities which aid the group.  This sunken ship’s microbes are consuming metal, creating mats of rust bigger than a dozen 4-story brownstones.  They creep slowly along the hull as they harvest iron from rivets and burrow into the layers of steel plating.  The creatures leave behind “rusticles,” 30-foot icicle-like deposits of rust, which dangle from the sides.  These contain channels to allow water to flow through and seem to be built up in a ring structure similar to the growth rings of a tree.  Mats and rusticles form a communicating super-organism funnelling iron-rich fluids, sulphur, and electrical charges through the collective of archea, fungi, and bacteria that thrives in the icy, dark, low-oxygen waters.  Researchers discovered that the rusticles are formed by a combination of 27 different strains of bacteria.  Food stored on the Titanic supplied the initial nutrients for rusticle growth.

This is a site whose aim is to help you identify and call out logical fallacies, which they say “is usually what’s happened when someone is wrong about something.  It’s a flaw in reasoning, like a trick or an illusion of thought (often sneakily used by politicians and the media to fool people).”  Fine.  Except one of the types covered, Slippery Slope, isn’t a logical fallacy at all — it’s an argument which may or may not apply in a given case.  The example offered is that if we allow gay marriage, people will want to marry their cars.  This is ITSELF a logical fallacy (a strawman, to be exact).  A better example would’ve been that, if we allow gay marriage, we’ll find the same logic ineluctably points towards allowing the marriage of adult siblings, or polygamy, a real argument about gay marriage, albeit one I don’t find compelling.  In addition, each example has a hypothetical person.  In the ad hominem example, “Sally”, or in the fallacy fallacy, “Amanda”.  For the slippery slope gay marriage example, the person is named Colin Closet; this almost has to be an attempt to imply that people who are critical of gay marriage are closeted homosexuals (and thus, that their arguments should be discounted).  That, in turn, is an ad hominem — the very next fallacy in the list.  In the case of special pleading, the example person is “Edward Johns”, who claims to be psychic. John Edward is, in fact, a celebrity tv psychic.  (They seem not adverse to making not-so-subtle digs at targets.)  A minor nit-pick: the example of the black-or-white fallacy uses a thinly veiled — and snidely worded — reference to ex-president George Bush.  Given that most of the examples don’t refer to current controversies, this choice seems more to display partisan instincts than to be a good-faith effort to explain a fallacy.  Their example: “Whilst rallying support for his plan to fundamentally undermine citizens’ rights, the Supreme Leader told the people they were either on his side, or they were on the side of the enemy.”  Bush famously said in a speech on 20 September 2001 that “...we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.  Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make.  Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.  From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”  It was an effort to compel foreign policy cooperation.  (Foreign policy is often an arena of blatant bribes and threats.)  His phrase has been quoted out of context.  However, the site’s icons are very nice — extremely well-designed.

Opened in 2003, The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas is home to pieces by important artists like Rodin, Matisse, Gaugin, and Miró.  Recently, the museum has realised that it has a burning question to answer: What does it do when a newly constructed highrise, a 42-story condominium called Museum Tower located right across the street, reflects so much heat that it’s frying the works of art in the galleries and on the lawn?  There’s no easy fix.  They can’t just move the $200-million-dollar tower and the Nasher’s garden and open roof are integral to its design.  But the highrise is increasing light to dangerous levels.  Picasso’s “Nude Man and Woman” oil on canvas has already been moved to place it out of the glare of harmful reflected sunlight.  The specially-planted trees are also under attack.  Considering there were more than 30 triple-digit temperature days in North Texas last summer, turning up the heat is undeniably detrimental to more than just the art.  No matter what happens, the ending will likely be viewed unhappily by at least one of the parties.  This isn’t an unprecedented situation by any means — I recall reading that reflected sun caused a swimming pool to overheat. In another case it melted a new car’s outside mirror.  I don’t recall how the other cases were resolved, but I suspect not altogether amicably.  In Dallas, there’s nothing in applicable building or energy codes that requires a study of sunlight reflection on neighbouring properties.  But perhaps this will be a cautionary example for future architects?

The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of 3 values: caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty.  Conservatives share those concerns (but think of fairness and liberty differently), and they add 3 more: loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity.   Those latter values bind groups together with a shared respect for symbols and institutions such as the flag.  (As Haidt uses it, loyalty cannot be characterised merely as patriotism; rather it’s a cluster of loyalty/betrayal values: anything related to tribalism or self sacrifice — patriotism is an example and so is support for a sports team or a political party.  And racism.  Haidt has referred to this as “ingrouping”.)  Some of Haidt’s most interesting material is his examination of taboos.  His team asked research subjects pesky questions: What would they think of a brother and sister who experimented with incest, while using birth control?  Or of a family that, after their pet dog was run over, ate it for dinner?  Most respondents were appalled but had trouble articulating why.  Many adults who consider themselves liberals were described decades earlier by their nursery-school teachers as “curious, verbal, novelty seekers but not very neat or obedient”.  Some research suggests conservatives are particularly attuned to threat, with a greater instinctive startle reflex when they hear loud noises.  (There’s more support, I’d guess, among conservatives for the TSA than there is among liberals.)  Conservatives secrete more skin moisture when they see disgusting images, such as a person eating worms.  We even seem to seek pets who reflect our moral outlook.  Liberals prefer dogs who are gentle but not subservient, while conservatives seek dogs who are loyal and obedient.  Little of this is a conscious or intellectual process.

Ulysses S Grant (the 18th US President) went to China in 1879 as part of his world tour upon the completion of his second term.  He visited notable Chinese Viceroy Li Hung Chang.  Richard Nixon is widely acknowledged as being the first US president to visit China.  However, he was only the first sitting US president to do so (that is, he visited as an official part of his duties).  Previous US presidents, both before and after serving in office, had already beaten him to the punch.  Herbert Hoover went before taking office; he was in the foreign legation in Peking during the 1900 Boxer siege.  The image of Grant and Li is devoid of background.  This was often done because some backgrounds were considered too confusing to be reproduced faithfully in newsprint, they were sometimes considered inappropriate for the storyline, or the original photo may have included minor underlings or servants an editor wished to eliminate.  Grant undertook his world tour to drum up political support after closing his second term in the wake of scandal.  He was well received abroad — in fact, afforded a hero’s welcome just about everywhere he went.  In China he was asked to mediate competing land claims of the Ryukyu Islands between China and Japan.  But this failed to have any effect on his domestic appeal — he lost a 3rd term nomination bid to political rival James A Garfield.  A book entitled Grant’s Tour Around The World, written in 1880 by J F Packard, can be downloaded free from Google Books.  PDF or ePub  An excerpt: “The Viceroy is known to be among the advanced school of Chinese statesmen, not afraid of railways and telegraphs and, anxious to strengthen and develop China by all the agencies of outside civilisation, [Grant] found a ground upon which they could meet and talk.  The subject so near to the Viceroy’s heart is one about which few men living are better informed than General Grant.  During his stay in China, wherever the General met Chinese statesmen, he impressed upon them the necessity of developing their country and of doing it themselves.  No man has ever visited China who had the opportunities of seeing Chinese statesmen accorded to the General and he has used those opportunities to urge China to throw open barriers and be one in commerce and trade with the outer world.”  They even accorded him the honour seating him on a chair lined with yellow silk, usually used only by the Emperor.  More than 30 years later, a Rear Admiral of the Imperial Chinese navy landed in New York to lay a wreath at Grant’s tomb.

"The United States and its European allies can no longer drive the global political and economic agenda.  The scramble to produce a coordinated and effective multinational response to the 2008 financial crisis made that clear, but the growing leverage of emerging states like China, India, Brazil, Russia and others became apparent years before US financial institutions began melting down and the Eurozone descended into crisis.  Yes, America remains the most powerful and influential country for the foreseeable future.  Its economy is still the world’s largest.  No single nation can compete with its cultural influence, and only America can project military power in every region.  But in coming years, mounting federal debt and the domestic political attention now focused on this issue will force the architects of US foreign policy to become more sensitive to costs and risks when making potentially expensive strategic choices.  At home, it’ll be harder for presidents to persuade taxpayers and lawmakers that bolstering the stability of countries like Iraq or Afghanistan is worth a bloody, costly fight.  That means decoupling support for a “strong military,” (always popular) from security guarantees for countries that no longer meet a narrowing definition of vital US interests.  Abroad, questions will arise about America’s commitment to the security of particular regions, encouraging local players to test US resolve and to exploit any weakness they think they’ve found.  Few want a global policeman, but some will have second thoughts when they realise they lack protection against a neighbourhood bully.  Still, other countries aren’t exactly lining up to fill this vacuum.” — Ian Bremmer.  Bremmer’s points are discussed in more detail in an interview with author Fareed Zakaria on Bremer’s Amazon page for his new book.

The inaugural issue of American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture features a set of articles on American exceptionalism.  My favourite?  Hilde Eliassen Restad of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs argues that exceptionalism is part of the American identity and offers a useful tool in explaining US foreign policy in any era.  “The United States is exceptional as long as Americans believe it to be exceptional,” she writes.  “Americans have always assumed that people everywhere share American political and moral ideas…  This underlies the idea that in every foreigner there is an American waiting to get out.  It is an assumption that links the otherwise unlikely grouping of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, William Jefferson Clinton, and George W Bush and their mission to reform the world in the American image” (from “Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: US Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism”).  American Political Thought features research exploring key political concepts such as democracy, constitutionalism, equality, liberty, citizenship, political identity, and the role of the state.

Shin Dong-huyk is the only person known to have escaped from a North Korean prison camp.  He was 23 at the time.  Born into a life of enslavement and torture inside Camp 14, he was starved and beaten his whole life.  At the age of 14, he overheard his mother and brother discuss plans to escape.  In exchange for food and fewer beatings, he reported their plans.  He felt no emotion as he watched his mother hanged and his brother shot — he’d been brought up to believe rules must be obeyed.  His father (fate unknown) became a prisoner for being the brother of two men who fled south during the Korean war.  His mother never told him why she had been imprisoned.  Shin’s conception had been arranged by guards who chose his mother and father as prizes for each other in a “reward” marriage.  The couple were allowed to sleep together for 5 nights.  Their eldest son was born in 1974.  After a second reward session, Shin was born 8 years later.  Through a new prisoner, Shin learned about the existence of other countries, tv, computers, and…food.  “I wanted to eat that kind of food — things unimaginable within the camp.”  Shin and the new prisoner decided to escape together, but the other man was electrocuted during the escape as he squeezed through the electric fence.  Shin suffered only burns, a small price after years of torture.  His body bears many scars — his finger was chopped off by guards who also stuck a hook through his stomach and suspended him over a fire.  He now feels guilt over his mother and brother.  “That guilt will last until my death,” he says.  An estimated 200,000 remain in the camps.

The 23 April 1912 New York Times has an obituary for a Bram Stoker.  It’s interesting what the folks of the time thought was important about Mr Stoker’s life: “Bram Stoker, author, theatrical manager, close friend and adviser of the late Sir Henry Irving, died in London last Sunday.  For 27 years he was business manager for the famous English actor, in charge of the Lyceum Theatre during Irving’s tenancy of that house…  [Stoker’s] best-known publication is “Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving,” issued in 1908.  Among his other works, mostly fantastic fiction, are “Under the Sunset,” “The Snake’s Pass,” The Watter’s Mou,” The Shoulder of Shasta,” “Dracula,” “The Mystery of the Sea,” and “The Lady of the Shroud.”  (Sir Henry who?)  Via Tim Worstall.  A great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, Canadian writer Dacre Stoker, with encouragement from screenwriter Ian Holt, decided to write “a sequel that bore the Stoker name” to “reestablish creative control over” the original novel.  In 2009, Dracula: The Un-Dead was released, written by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt.  Both writers “based [their work] on Bram Stoker’s own handwritten notes for characters and plot threads excised from the original edition” along with their own research.  An earlier book, The New Annotated Dracula, was written by tax attorney Leslie S Klinger in 2008, also utilising the previously unknown “alternate ending” to the 1897 text recently discovered in a box in an old Pennsylvania barn.  It seems Stoker left behind not only his published manuscript, but also extensive drafts and notes that provide glimpses of how his ideas about the novel evolved over several years.  And who now owns this treasure?  Why, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft…

Swaziland-born British actor Richard E Grant's first film role was the perpetually inebriated title character in Withnail and I, which has established a large cult following.  During the story, his character drinks from a bottle of lighter fluid, which the set crew had intentionally filled with vinegar prior to filming (so his reaction in the film was quite genuine).  Grant is a teetotaller.  After casting him as the alcoholic Withnail, the director made Grant drink a bottle of champagne and half a bottle of vodka during the course of a night so that he could experience the sensation of being drunk.  Grant discovered he’s allergic to alcohol, having no enzymes in his blood to metabolise it.  If he drinks, within 10 minutes he’s violently ill; this lasts for 24 hours afterward.  Grant began appearing in Hollywood films, establishing himself as a powerful character actor.  He had strong supporting roles in LA Story, The Player, The Age of Innocence, The Portrait of a Lady, Gosford Park, Corpse Bride, The Iron Lady, and others.  In 2006, he turned real-life investigator when, with the help of the BBC, he exposed a $98 million scam to sell a bogus AIDS cure.  He’s had dinner with Madonna, supper with Michael Jackson, and chats with Nelson Mandela.  Grant wrote and directed the 2005 film Wah-Wah, loosely based on his childhood experiences.  The film took him over 7 years to complete; it starred Nicholas Hoult in the lead role.  Grant kept a diary of the experience, later published as a book (The Wah-Wah Diaries), which received positive reviews from critics, many of whom were impressed at the honesty of the tale, especially in regard to his difficult relationship with the “inexperienced” producer Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar.  Grant stated in subsequent interviews that she was a “control freak out of control” and that he would never see her again as long as he lived.  In a BBC interview, he related that he received only 5 emails from her in the last 2 months of pre-production and she rarely turned up on the set at all.  She failed to obtain clearance both for song rights and to film in Swaziland.  For the last infraction, Grant was forced to meet with the King of Swaziland to seek clemency.

The brain, like all muscles and organs, is a tissue whose function declines with underuse and age.  Beginning in our late 20s, most of us will lose about 1% annually of the volume of the hippocampus, a key portion of the brain related to memory and certain types of learning.  But exercise seems to slow or reverse the brain’s physical decay, much as it does with muscles.  Although scientists thought until recently that humans were born with a fixed number of brain cells and would never generate more, they now know better.  Using a technique that marks newborn cells, researchers determined during autopsies that adult human brains contain quite a few new neurons.  Fresh cells are especially prevalent in the hippocampus, indicating that neurogenesis — the creation of new brain cells — is primarily occurring there.  Even more heartening, exercise jump-starts neurogenesis.  Mice and rats that run for a few weeks generally have about twice as many new neurons in their hippocampi as sedentary animals.  Their brains (like their muscles) bulk up.  But new brain cells can improve intellect only if they join the existing neural network and many do not, instead rattling aimlessly around in the brain for a while before dying.  One way to pull neurons into the network, however — is to learn something.  One way to make them multitask is to exercise.  When a group of 120 older men and women were assigned to walking or stretching programmes for a major 2011 study, the walkers wound up with larger hippocampi after a year (and performed better on cognitive tests).  Meanwhile, the stretchers lost volume to normal atrophy.

Why dogs don’t win at poker.

There is no snooze button.  If you unplug it, a battery takes over.  As wake-up time approaches, you cannot reset the alarm time.  It could be the world’s most exasperating alarm clock.  Once it goes off, to stop it you must get out of bed, go into the kitchen or bathroom, and punch the day’s date into a telephone-style keypad.  That’s the only way to stop the loud 'ding-ding,’ designed to sound like a customer angrily banging on a concierge bell at a hotel.  It was invented by Paul Sammut, a 25-year-old engineer who lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the US.  It’s pricey (US$350), but if you really need it, I suppose it’s worth it.

Spinal tape — a handy spinal cord on a roll.  Use this tape to seal and stick with endless sacral style.  The company also sells botany tape — a botanist’s dream: brilliant flowers to wrap with; civil engineer tape (with an endless 2-lane highway) — lay a street down on your carpet or turn a box into a village; curator tape (gilded frame) — make a gallery instantly, just add art; everything looks like a masterpiece; DNA tape — show that your package has good genes; and lepidoptera tape (oddly, no caterpillars) — wrap in vivid butterflies, catch the eye of a lepidopterist.  All tapes are 25 metres, each is US$8.

Do I really want to know?  Maybe he’s just dead tired.