Eclectic Living
I like me some Dutch people. I lived in Holland for half a year back in the '90s for a "study" abroad during college. Mostly I just drank beer and played soccer and ate Chinese food with my Dutch roommate Huub ("Wil je chinees" he would ask me: "Do you want to Chinese?" I always... Continue Reading →
Do you wax nostalgic about the days when we were a primordial ooze floating in the ancient ocean? Me, too. But how did that ooze come together to start forming beings that could reproduce themselves? No one's quite sure how those first complex molecules, like RNA, formed. Was it magic? Abracadabra, let there be life! Well,... Continue Reading →
How much does language shape culture? Does English lead to more efficiency because of how precise it can be (with, by some estimates, more than twice as many words as the next verbose language)? Or does English delay learning because of its Byzantine and vermicular rules?* Is Spanish the opposite because of its relatively straightforward structure?... Continue Reading →
As visitors to the Cottage are aware, we like to get dirty. Another thing we like is the potential that crowdsourced science has to rapidly improve our knowledge. Here's an opportunity to combine the two. The Natural Products Discovery Group is offering free soil collection kits, which they will then analyze for fungal compounds that... Continue Reading →
I'm not much of an aural learner, so in college I generally didn't garner much from lectures. In physics, I made it to class about three times (five, if you count the exams), preferring to learn from the textbook. The professor was incredibly dry, but he was a smart guy. At one point, after one of the... Continue Reading →
Mice have occasionally entered the Cottage (both figuratively and literally), but the current study was one in which mice were not being poked and prodded (or stretched, as the case may be).* The gist of this study (and I'm sure you've already heard about it on Facebook or The Huffington Post) is that somebody measured 15,521... Continue Reading →
Our heroic little fuzzy friends, mice, have taken another one for the team (our team, not theirs). Scientists recently fed mice a diet of emulsifiers commonly found in many of our processed foods. Turns out these emulsifiers may be emulsifying the mucus lining that protects our gut lining. This could be via direct action or... Continue Reading →
It appears the folks at the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee have been frequenting Poppa's Cottage, and taking our advice to heart (so to speak). Their new guidelines have finally eased some of the former restrictions on fat and cholesterol, and have more harshly implicated simple carbs and sugar (a.k.a. yayo) in our growing (literally) health... Continue Reading →
As mentioned in a recent post, we mostly-hairless apes are genetically sucky actors when it comes to economics. In many ways, we display similar irrational behavior to our relatives the capuchin monkeys. Capuchins, like us, don't want to give up something we already have, even for more than we would be willing to pay for... Continue Reading →
"I think we have reason to believe that the mind is equipped with a battery of emotions, drives, and faculties for reasoning and communicating, and that they have a common logic across cultures, are difficult to erase or redesign from scratch, were shaped by natural selection acting over the course of human evolution, and owe... Continue Reading →
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