Dopamine fasting, Florence Nightingale, experimental USSR tanks, Italian erotic comics and the most venomous snake in the world, all that and much more, in a wonderfully palindromic edition of the Recommended Links of the Week.
Florence Nightingale, statistics and nursing: "During the Crimean War, she worked as a nurse in a military hospital. She realized that a large part of the soldiers who died in the hospital did so not because of their combat wounds themselves, but because of infections once they were in the hospital. Did I say a large part? For anyone fond of numbers and statistics, expressions like "a large part", "many" or "some" are a devil. They were also for Nightingale."
The universal law of physics discovered thanks to a drop of olive oil: "Rodríguez leads the team at the Dutch scientific institute AMOLF, which in mid-April published a study that revealed a new universal law of physics by experimenting with light particles, that is, photons. The explanation of this law, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, covers photons interacting with other photons from the present and the past at the same time."
How dopamine fasting works (or doesn't): "This is how it works in theory: dopamine is popularly known as the "pleasure neurotransmitter". Every time we experience something pleasurable (a piece of chocolate, a Facebook like, an orgasm, a line of coke) dopamine flows to flood the brain's reward centers, reinforcing the behavior and, over time, making it addictive."
The Soviet version of Sherlock Holmes: "The script follows the original stories quite faithfully, although it sometimes mixes some. For example, in Bloody Inscription, which is A Study in Scarlet, it begins with a scene from The Sign of the Four and the two episodes from 1986 mix four of the Holmesian adventures. Far from making us throw our hands up, we must appreciate the effort to remain faithful to the original, something not everyone achieves."
The experimental tanks the USSR created during World War II: "Shortly after the troops of Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, Leningrad tank builders began to create the armored vehicles of the future. The work was directed by Zhorés Kotin, recalls Rossíiskaya Gazeta. The Russian newspaper cites the book Arma de la Victoria (Editorial: Mashinostroyénie, 1987): "In the ChTZ Design Office under the direction of chief designer Zh. Kotin, in the winter of 1941-1942, possible modifications of the heavy tank were developed: KV-7, KV-8 and KV-9." And KV-13 was also created."
Fast and precise hunters versus persistence hunters: "The first study was conducted by researchers from Indiana University and the University of Wyoming, in the United States, and published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. The work, titled "Human readiness to throw: the size–weight illusion is not an illusion when picking the best objects to throw", is signed by Geoffrey Bingham, who concludes, from the analysis of certain brain regions, that the ability to throw objects at a distance provided an adaptive advantage for our species compared to Neanderthals."
'Captain Voyeur': the origins of 'Halloween' from John Carpenter's first short film released to the public: "After being given up for lost for years, in 2011 a short film by one John Carpenter was found in the archive of the USC School of Cinematic Arts by Dino Everett. Captain Voyeur is the first short film made by the seminal horror author, which he made for the Introduction to Cinema class at that university. After being recovered, the short has been shown at some festivals over the years, and in 2016 it was included as an extra on the British Blu-ray of Assault on Precinct 13."
[NSFW] Very dangerous women, the divas of Italian erotic comics: "It's possible that many of you already know them. What's more: it's quite likely that somewhere in your homes rest copies of their adventures, from the collections of older siblings, uncles, cousins or (gasp!) even parents. Because, in Spain in the late seventies and early eighties, when pornography (de facto legalized in 1983) had not quite arrived and the echoes of the 'destape' and 'clasificado S' had not yet died out, erotic comics from Italy caused a real furor."
The most venomous snake in the world and the evolution of venom: "Coral snakes belonging to the family Elapidae are a group of highly venomous snakes characterized by their bright colors. The blue Malaysian coral snake (Calliophis bivirgatus), which falls within this family, is one of the most venomous and beautiful in the world. In a study published in Toxins conducted by associate professor Bryan Fry of the School of Biological Science at Queen's University (in Australia), it was found that its venom is unlike that of any other snake."
The day the Philadelphia police bombed their own neighbors: "The orders were very clear: explosives had to be dropped on a house, regardless of the fact that it was in a residential neighborhood inhabited by civilians. It was not a city at war and the attack did not come from foreign forces. We're talking about Philadelphia, where the police decided to bomb a building in which members of a group of African American activists called MOVE were sheltering. Eleven people died, including five minors, and more than 60 homes were destroyed."
Computing in the '80s - A Commodore 64 that saved Bolivia and went down in history: "Inflation was reaching 30,000 percent annually and the plan had to be drawn up in secret. Twenty days later the government had its economic recipe, planned in record time thanks to Cariaga's son's Commodore 64. With that computer plus a datasette (audio cassette storage unit) and a common color television, Cariaga spent three weeks developing the emergency economic program that saved that country from collapse and abruptly reduced inflation to only 60 points every 12 months."
Pandemic. When old borders returned and new ones appeared: "The pandemic caused by Covid-19 brought back the internal borders of the European Community, something that had not happened on this scale since the mid-90s. A quarter of a century of border relaxation had fostered a series of border facilities that disappeared overnight, leaving a trail of fines, angry citizens and curious stories. Let's review some."
VIDEOS: PS5 graphics, cats and cups, video games in quarantine, sea lion hunting salmon, first 1080° on a vertical ramp, the dance of the drawer from easy to difficult, restoring the oldest film, bobcat jump, cooking a piece of meat in 30 seconds, ship anti-piracy protection, throwing a frisbee with a pneumatic cannon, how to make muppets (by Jim Henson), exploring the abandoned Tekoi Test Range, space-time break, a grenade inside a safe, incredible the ingenuity of ants, coyote vs roadrunner IRL, 16 years of free energy with a washing machine, how a virus spreads in a restaurant, squirrel working from home, base jump from a plane, a sea in a billboard, the amazing Atlas and Handle from Boston Dynamics, bioluminescent algae and a short about the blocks of the universe.
GALLERIES: The best worst photo of wild animals, low-budget striking portraits, art with optical illusions, trikinis to go to the beach in a post-pandemic world, Bowie's resemblance to a banchia, a handmade aquarium, Big Picture Competition 2020, guide to overcome the Japanese flu of 1918, the impressive illustrations of Tim White, more photos of Cheryl Tiegs' beauty, beautiful birds of the world, the Vertedero Animado and the Tiradero Visual de la Semana.
