Par avion?

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

Nature publishes a study on minocycline (remember that name, stupid men, it’s a kind of tetracycline), which not only kills germs but also keeps men from trusting attractive women just because they’re attractive:

Here we show that minocycline also reduces the risk of the ‘honey trap’ during an economic exchange. Males tend to cooperate with physically attractive females without [...]

Smithsonian unfolds an ugly story archaeologists have uncovered of the first “successful” English settlement in America – at Jamestown, where settlers got so hungry, they apparently ate a 14-year-old girl:

“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation [...]

Wired (via CNN) is sizing up the new guy on the mound – a mechanical brain designed to outsmart pitchers:

Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball — or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take [...]

Healthline doesn’t seem to be jumping to any conclusions here… just remarking that if you’re American-born, you’re more likely to have allergies than if you’re one of the hardy souls born elsewhere who then moves to America:

Foreign-born U.S. children have lower odds of developing allergic diseases like asthma and food allergies than children born in the U.S., according [...]

Click to embiggen slightly

The robot is in trouble! We’ll have to help the robot breathe!

This educational illustration comes from the National Institutes of Health “History of Medicine” collection. The Red Cross and World Health Organization used it to train people in first aid.

This photograph probably saved lives.

New Scientist has more on the possible discovery of two cosmic neutrinos near the South Pole:

In June last year the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole reported the sighting of two candidate neutrinos, found somewhat by accident as the team was combing through the data. Bert and Ernie (YT: Bert and Ernie Cookies in Bed), as they [...]

LA Times reports on the latest low-budget, off-the-shelf NASA experiment, sending three smartphones into orbit:

The three Google-HTC Nexus One smartphones are circling Earth at an altitude of about 150 miles and will burn up on re-entry within the next two weeks, NASA said. The smartphones, which are encased in 4-inch metal cubes, are running the Android operating system.

The [...]

Alas, no song will be posted today. It will be forthcoming, as will a penitential cover.