• Why must the Monkey subject poor Timmy to the horrors of his variegated fluids? The gods themselves, they do not know.

• In celebration of his new memoir, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, eric kandel, recounts many formative episodes from his life in science: The Search for Memory.

• Science Musings by Chet Raymo: That Cottage of Darkness.

• The Space Review: Orbital vacationers will want to go outside. Good point.

• Scalping in the French and Indian war.

• The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world: Living without Numbers or Time.

• Monkeys drink more alcohol when housed alone, and some like to end a long day in the lab with a boozy cocktail, according to a new analysis. Drunk Monkeys Mirror People. And here I thought it was the other way around.

• New research suggests dolphins know one another’s names, which is to say new research suggests dolphins have names.

• Elaborating on Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis 17 years after its initial publication, or “Are western values universal or are they the temporary success of a hegemonic culture?” via.

• Evolution has done its best now it’s time to call in the engineers. pop-mech looks at human upgrades.

• Check out the (once) largely secret project to develop a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit. Neat pics. via.

• Design Observer offers: It Takes a Nation of Lawyers to Hold Us Back on the decline of sampling culture across all mediums.

• Gary McKinnon, who hacked into Nasa and the US military computer networks, says he did so in search of “supressed technology,” specifically of the extraterrestrial variety. He also claims he found what he was looking for before being caught.

• Hooliganism and All-round Fighting in Edwardian London. From the journal of non-lethal combatives.

• Quote: “...a legitimate reason for the mainstream media being so dismissive to important stories is that they offer an inferior product; a product compromised by too much attention to the bottom-line and not enough attention to responsibility, honesty and objectivity.”

• Bad physics. Popular misconceptions about science as spread by grade school textbooks. From the science hobbyist. (A “hobbyist” correcting textbooks?)

• Drawn! points us toward Vivianite “a portal for those of you who are interested in painting and painting related fine art.” Nice stuff.

• A nuclear waste vault in New Mexico will long outlive our society. Experts are working on elaborate ways to warn future civilizations.

• Why are some animals so smart? Why humans? What favored the evolution of such distinctive brainpower in humans or, more precisely, in our hominid ancestors?

• A chat with the science-savvy writers behind The Simpsons and Futurama. via.

• An insult to paganism? Creationism dismissed as “a kind of paganism” by Vatican’s astronomer. via.

• I cannot pretend to know how writing ought to be done, or what a wise critic would advise me to do with a view to improving my own writing. The most that I can do is to relate some things about my own attempts. How I write, by Bertrand Russell.

• Me no monster. Me OK guy. Me OK guy who eat cookies.

• These unripe things are now read by me in vain, Oy! Interesting post at Laputan Logic on some of the coded scientific pronouncements of Galileo and Huygens.

• Using the enki system to communicate with electric fish.

• Before communications satellites there was the Earth’s artificial ring.

• Exploring Stephen Hawking’s flexiverse.

• Is multiple personality disorder a sin!? tee hee hee. via

• “You don’t have to sit up to read a bed book!” via

• Why we haven’t met any aliens. A new take on the Fermi Paradox.

• Only 21 finalists remain in the final stretch of the public’s selection of the new seven wonders of the world. via

• It is easier for a pickled shark to pass through the eye of a needle than for a multimillionaire to make good art.

• The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been changed as recently as two billion years ago?

• The last ninja says: “Always be able to kill your students.” Wise words indeed.

• In a rush to flee the solar system? Scientists have an interstellar travel plan, but it entails a brief stint outside the known universe. via