1. A geneticist and blogger sequenced his son's genome in utero. 

"An infant delivered last week in California appears to be the first healthy person ever born in the U.S. with his entire genetic makeup deciphered in advance. His father, Razib Khan, is a graduate student and professional blogger on genetics who says he worked out a rough draft of his son’s genome early this year in a do-it-yourself fashion after managing to obtain a tissue sample from the placenta of the unborn baby during the second trimester."

2. Kitty litter investigated (finally, hilariously).

"Two weeks ago I read an article about how kitty litter is used to store nuclear waste and realized that, despite lugging about a ton of litter around New York City over the last 20 years in the service of various cats, I didn’t know much about the stuff. I set out to find where it comes from and if it’s killing us, and in the process realized that kitty litter was directly responsible for the shape of Internet culture."

3. Mat Honan imagines a "nightmare on connected home street."

"Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal."

4. Wow, Lewis and Clark sunk into obscurity before being rediscovered and hailed as heroes.

"The country's attention had shifted to the War of 1812. In that war, they found a new hero: Andrew Jackson. Lewis and Clark sank further into obscurity, eventually replaced by John Charles Fremont, who explored much of the West (including what is now California and Oregon) throughout the 1840s and '50s, and ran for president in 1856. Materials that spoke to Lewis and Clark's accomplishments simply didn't exist, and the most useful resource of all—the expedition's original journals—were tucked away at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. It's possible that, at that time, nobody even knew the journals existed. In American history books written for the country's centennial in 1876, Lewis and Clark have all but disappeared from the narrative."

5. The ocean's hot dog.

"The fish stick arose during the 1950s not because consumers cried out for it, and certainly not because schoolchildren demanded it, but because of the need to process and sell tons of fish that were harvested from the ocean, filleted, and frozen in huge, solid blocks. Consumers were not attracted by the form of these frozen fillets, however, and demand for fish products remained low. Manufacturers believed that the fish stick—a breaded, precooked food—would solve the problem."

Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip

bran(d)-new. The spelling with -d is the right (fresh as from the furnace); but the d is seldom heard, & often not written.

From back before we all knew too much about what brand means.

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Kitty Litter Is Used to Store Nuclear Waste