Color is in the eye, and brain, of the beholder
By Nicola Jones The way we see and describe hues varies widely for many reasons: from our individual eye structure, to how our brain processes images, to what language we speak, or even if we live near a body of water Read more
ICYMI: Our October 26 event
Rethinking cities in the face of extreme heat
EVENT REPLAY: Cities around the world have been experiencing record-smashing heat waves. How can cities balance the need to cool off with the urgent imperative to reduce carbon emissions? Watch our conversation with climate scientist Angel Hsu, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Slate magazine’s Henry Grabar. Watch the video
From the archives
Could controlled doses of a particular set of proteins lead to a biological fountain of youth for humans? Biotech startups are hauling in billions of dollars in funding based on “rejuvenation programming” in lab animals, reports Antonio Regalado of MIT Technology Review. But skeptics abound: It isn’t clear what, exactly, the intervention does, nor if it extends life span. To brush up on another anti-aging enterprise that’s getting close scrutiny, read our story on blood-based approaches.
What we’re reading
Spooky scary skeleton stories
Do you have to tell a prospective buyer that your house is haunted? After all, it could knock value off a property that you’d like to sell quite soon for, uh, unrelated reasons. As Christine Ro writes for JSTOR Daily, this legal conundrum’s been haunting us for thousands of years. Ro’s story is just one in a collection of nearly two dozen articles curated for the Halloween season. The Celtic origins of the holiday, how Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin came to be, and understanding Marxism with vampires are among the offerings.
Don’t ignore the clitoris
When doctors talk about female genitalia, they often focus entirely on the cervix or uterus, asking questions about cancer or fertility. But too often, they ignore the vulva and clitoris and their role in sexual health and pleasure. For the New York Times, Rachel E. Gross writes about this anatomical myopia and the damage it has done. Gross talks with women who lost the ability to orgasm after what should have been routine surgeries, as well as with doctors and researchers who’ve made remarkable strides in understanding this organ, and the handful of urologists, surgeons and activists who are advocating for change.
Winning combinations
Quantum entanglement can help players of a Sudoku-like magic squares games win far more rounds than they would without the help of weird physics. For decades, researchers have proposed that the phenomenon could help players on the same team coordinate their moves without sharing information, Philip Ball writes for Scientific American. Now researchers have shown experimentally — using laser pulses on a lab bench — that such “quantum pseudotelepathy” helps players win fully 91.5 percent to 97 percent of the time. Colorful graphics show the transformative steps from guaranteed losers to champions.
Art & science
CREDIT: SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE
Clear-headed
Octopuses could teach master classes in avoidance. Some opt for camouflage, rippling the exact colors of their environment across their skin. Other dunk themselves into the sand and avoid detection that way. Then there’s the glass octopus — which exposes parts of itself that other cephalopods don’t typically reveal.
The glass octopus featured above is entirely transparent save for a few crucial parts: the eyes, the optic nerve and the digestive tract. A team of scientists recently came across two such aquatic umbrellas via SuBastian, an underwater robot that spotted the octopuses while surveying the US Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.
Tracking down rare and see-through creatures wasn’t strictly on the agenda of the 34-day expedition, led by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which mapped some 30,000 square kilometers of the seafloor and collected over 250 hours of footage. Tasks included exploring the underwater mountains called seamounts and surveying slow-growing but predator-damaged corals. The glass octopuses were a nice bonus. Not only is the species a rare find, but it is also rarely seen alive: Most of what researchers know about it comes from dragging remains out of other animals’ stomachs. For more on the deep-sea adventure, check out this story from Boston University’s the Brink.
