The World Cup keeps (almost) everyone glued to their televisions so if you've managed to get away for a bit, navigate to here to read about how the particular aerodynamics of South African stadiums could be affecting teams' performances in the World Cup at LiveScience.com
Of all the assumptions underlying quantum mechanics and the theory that describes how particles interact at the most elementary level, perhaps the most basic is that particles are either bosons or fermions. Bosons, such as the particles of light called photons, play by one set of rules; fermions, including electrons, play by another. Seven years ago, physicists at the University of California at Berkeley asked a fundamental and potentially game-changing question: Do bosons sometimes play by fermion rules? Read more here.
A great website find is BioNumbers: a large database of biological numbers. You can find here numbers on life spans, volumes of cells, how long it takes to transcribe a particular protein, standard rates of all sorts of biological processes, such as metabolism and digestion for instance. This link is sure to come in handy in writing research papers for the acquisition of hard numbers faster than can be obtained by rifling through huge textbooks. Check out the BioNumbers of the Month here, where it answers questions such as: what are the timescales of diffusion in cells, which is faster: transcription or translation etc.
THING FOUR:
NYU Neuroscience professor Joseph LeDoux works on memory and is also a rock musician. His band called Amygdaloids make songs about the mind and mental disorders. Read more about LeDoux and his fascinating way of making the two domains interact here on BigThink.com. Sample some of their research-inspired music on their website here.