…I can now close some tabs.

How our brains learned to read
Today we are readers. Evidence suggests that reading – which depends on an alphabet, writing materials, papyrus and such – is only about 5000 years old. The brain in its modern form is about 200,000 years old, yet brain imaging shows reading taking place in the same way and in the same place in all brains. To within a few millimetres, human brains share a reading hotspot – what Stanislas Dehaene calls the “letterbox” – on the bottom of the left hemisphere. [full article]

New global map of Mars suggests Red Planet once had ocean
Further, regions that are most densely dissected by the valley networks roughly form a belt around the planet between the equator and mid-southern latitudes, consistent with a past climate scenario that included precipitation and the presence of an ocean covering a large portion of Mars’ northern hemisphere. [full article]

Dark galaxy crashing into the Milky Way
Called Smith’s cloud, it has managed to avoid disintegrating during its smash-up with our own, much bigger galaxy. What’s more, its trajectory suggests it punched through the disc of our galaxy once before, about 70 million years ago. [full article]

Ripples in space divide classical and quantum worlds
The location of the boundary between the classical and quantum worlds is a long-standing mystery. One idea is that everything starts off as a quantum system, existing in a superposition of states. This would make an object capable of being, for example, in many places at once. But when this system interacts with its environment, it collapses into a single classical state – a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. [full article]

Awesome…

This is pretty neat-o…

Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings – very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total) [full article]

Lord knows how many times I’ve rewatched/listened to this. An upcoming collaboration album with The Black Keys and a slew of hip-hop guest artists including Mos Def, Q-Tip and the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Comes out end of this month and I so can’t wait.

…I need to get a more interesting life so I can blog more often. Here’s some other stuff in the meantime…

Vanished Persian army said found in desert
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C. [full article]

Mystery ‘dark flow’ extends towards edge of universe
SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That’s the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called “dark flow” is a sign that other universes nestle next door. [full article]

Time-travelling browsers navigate the web’s past
Finding old versions of web pages could become far simpler thanks to a “time-travelling” web browsing technology being pioneered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. [full article]

Flasher leads to Hamilton bus crash
Police say the strange incident happened shortly before 9am when a teenager on the Orbiter bus allegedly exposed himself to a woman passenger. She screamed, prompting the driver to phone a bus company representative, who in turn told him to drive to the nearby police station at the Flagstaff shops, River Rd.

With the female passenger still screaming, the bus driver stopped in the station carpark and – believing the bus was in neutral – activated the emergency door lock.

“Unfortunately for the driver, the bus was still in gear and it rolled into the entranceway of the station, cracking its windscreen and causing minimal damage to the building,” a police statement said. [full article]

An no, that wasn’t me.

I meant to post this on Halloween but was hallucinating with a fever instead.

…church.

General ill dark feelings on Thursday evening.

By Friday evening, feeling like crap and went to bed with a headache, cough and runny nose.

Saturday started to feel better, but by the afternoon was getting feverish with coughing fits, vomiting and general crappiness. (yay)

Sunday, raised tempertaure and still slightly delirious. Persistant motherfucking cough.

Monday, a little flem.

Today, alive and well.

Nice try Death.

Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
It’s not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.

That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: “What keeps you awake at night?” [full article]

Innovation: You Facebook, you tweet – now lifelog
It has been said before that an era of lifelogging, in which people will record and broadcast their daily lives, is on the way. But this time it might happen – people are already capturing many things about their lives and sharing them via social networking sites. The launch of the new camera and new research from Microsoft suggest people are ready to take the final steps. [full article]

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? [full article]

What a week and weekend. Most of all the Armageddon Expo decimated my bank account and I’ve got a lot of things bookmarked that I’ve neglected to post…

Dave McKean is making an animated adaptation of his own comic Cages. This is gonna be sweet and it’s one of my all time favourite comics for multiple reasons. [full article]

Some Hot Fuzz slash fiction from the actual creators of Hot Fuzz. [website]

Mild America is a Wellington band that Michelle Savill, director of Betty Banned Sweets is a part of. There’s some tracks available at their website here and definitely worth listening to.

Some of the images are pretty rough but make for essential viewing into the fallout of the international drug trade following a UN report after 100 years of drug control. Recommended checking out here.