Dogs’ brains — are they symmetrical?
To the casual observer, the skull of an average dog may look more or less left/right symmetrical. But are they really? More progress has recently been made towards resolving this question. A joint research team from the University of Bari, and the University of Trento, in Italy, performed non-hazardous computed tomography (CT) scans of the…
What stars have been the most popular in the last 200 years?
If you charted the appearance of certain stars in books through the last two centuries, which ones would get the most hits? It’s an interesting question that Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) ponders on his systemic site, using Google’s Ngram viewer as his tool. Ngram lets you plug in the terms of your choice and chart…
Play Pacman, Pinball and Pong with a paramecium
Using the latest computer graphics is one way to make video games more life-like – but what about incorporating life itself into them? Physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team from Stanford University have done just that by creating versions of classic games that you can navigate by physically controlling living organisms. A game called PAC-mecium…
