BRAINIAC
Squirrel: it’s what’s for dinner
- And other recent highlights from the Ideas blog.
Tiny grants keep ‘awesome’ ideas coming
- It was down to two finalists: a woman who wanted to buy a couple of goats to rent out as urban lawnmowers, and a sculptor who could “no longer make a case” for sculpture and instead wanted to buy a portable welder so he could go around and fix his city.
The decline of violence
- Bad as things may seem, the modern world is actually getting more peaceful. Harvard’s Steven Pinker set out to discover why. (Illustration: Greg Klee)
3 from Harvard awarded MacArthur grants
Three Harvard professors - an economist who studies racial disparities, a physicist who probes the quantum behavior of ultracold atoms, and a clinical psychologist working to better understand suicide and how to stop people from harming themselves - are among the 22 people awarded MacArthur genius grants today.
Something in the water
- What drugs are local residents abusing? A researcher’s solution to that vexing problem suggests just how much our sewage knows about us.
What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space
- If you were to visit the moon today, in the neighborhood of the Apennine mountain range, you would find a small figurine, about the same size and shape as a Lego minifigure, lying facedown in the lunar dust.
The $100 million pond
- A bold new idea for protecting nature: Put a price tag on it.
Lose the hyphen
- Earlier this month, at a national convention of professional copy editors, the Associated Press announced a few changes to its house style. Calcutta would henceforth be Kolkata, cell phone and smart phone had become cellphone and smartphone and, CPR no longer needed the gloss “cardiopulmonary resuscitation.”
Exploring the ‘Bloodlands’
- A controversial new history traces the rise of a horrible idea: the mass killing of civilians.
