Time to take a break from my break from blogging.
Today I found this video pretty interesting, a neuroscientist discovers his brain scan matches those of psychopaths.

[Update: link “http://wsf.tv/videos/embedded/1361” has died, sorry.]

Okay, so the Periodic Table of the Elements is one of the iconic symbols of Chemistry. Even if you flunked your high school Chem, you’ll recognize it instantly. Unfortunately, if you flunked high school Chem, you won’t actually know what it means.

Not recognizing that it’s a systematic arrangement of all the chemical elements, elucidating their properties in terms of their electron structure, you’re tempted to fill it in instead with items from whatever interest you do have. Make a Periodic Table of Fruit, or a Periodic Table of Government, or a Periodic Table of Rhetoric, then feel like you’ve somehow contributed something useful to Fruit classification. But what does this non-Elemental table mean? Do the properties of fruit recur periodically as something corresponding to atomic number increases? What even corresponds to atomic number? Why should fruit group as if it had electron shells? Does your table actually explain anything? Or are you just capitalizing on the fact that atoms do have electron shells and so elemental properties do arrange into a periodic table which is tremendously useful for chemistry, and applying it to something completely inappropriate?

The folks at Harvard have put together an amazing CGI video showing some of the biochemical dynamics involved in our cells: The Inner Life of the Cell

There’s other good informative bio videos there, but nothing else with as tasty eye-candy.

So, the results from the meta-meta-analysis (seriously) are in: Despite what well-selling relationship books may tell you, men and women are way more alike than different. Ha! I figured this was all over-exaggerated and over-weighted.

Popular science version

Real science version