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Enlarge / Eating our way to world domination. (credit: Vince Smith - Flickr)

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams noted that “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars, and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

This is an interesting point, and one that’s tackled in great detail in Kevin Laland’s new book, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony. Other species are indisputably smart; they can learn by example, they can communicate, they can innovate to solve problems, they can use tools, they may even have distinct cultures. But humans are clearly different. Other species don’t listen to Baroque concerti or read classical philosophy hundreds of years after the scores were composed or the treatises written. They just don’t.

A culture of teaching

This difference really bugged Laland. He is loath to say that humans are special because that implies some vast, unbridgeable gulf between us and our closest kin. Laland is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn’t go for those sorts of claims. He knows that humans evolved from a common ancestor with other primates through natural selection and other such well-defined mechanisms.

(credit: Elias Bizannes)

The Recording Industry Association of America and other rights holders are urging US copyright regulators to update the "antiquated" DMCA takedown process. They want Internet Service Providers to filter out pirated content.

What the RIAA and 14 other groups are telling the US Copyright Office is simple: The 19-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act isn't working. They say the process of granting legal immunity—or "safe harbor"—to ISPs who "expeditiously" remove copyrighted content upon notice of the rights holder needs to be supplanted with fresh piracy controls. That's because, they say, the process creates a so-called "endless game of whack-a-mole" in which an ISP will remove pirated content only to see it instantaneously reappear at the push of a button by a copyright scofflaw. This requires the rights holder to send a new takedown notice—often again and again.

The groups say (PDF):

(video link)

PUEBLO, Colorado—On the dry, windswept plains of southwestern Colorado, a military checkpoint protects a vast field of igloos built with corrugated steel, covered with a thick layer of Earth, and fitted with thick, blast-resistant doors. The walls of the igloos keep the interior a consistent 51 degrees Fahrenheit whether it's in the heat of summer or the depths of winter, and the high-altitude air has little enough water in it that corrosion-causing moisture is an afterthought.

These mounds are carefully spaced to prevent an explosion in one igloo from triggering explosions in neighboring igloos. That's because inside, the US military stores a stockpile of 780,000 unused WWII-era munitions, filled with dangerous and deadly viscous sulfur mustard agent. This stockpile of chemical weapons was shipped to these igloos in the 1950s. They have been carefully guarded since then.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

We're all used to heart rate monitoring chest straps and wristbands, but Moov has just introduced a fitness tracker that goes inside a headband. The new $99 Moov HR monitor is a small module that captures your pulse via the blood that rushes through your head. While most companies favor the wrist or the chest for pulse-tracking sensors, the temple is a good pressure point that is under-utilized in the fitness tracker world.

Paired with the Moov mobile app and its motion sensor, the Moov Now, the company's new heart rate monitor completes the trifecta of fitness coaching that it has been developing for the past few years. However, the challenge for Moov HR is that it needs to be good enough and easy enough to use that people will get over the weirdness of working out with a sensor resting on their foreheads.