1. Ancel Benjamin Keys' very bad idea: the shoddy science that got fat booted from the American diet.

"Despite continuing doubts, it became, and still is, the global orthodoxy that saturated fat was an important cause of cardiovascular disease and that people should eat low fat diets. The biggest test of the saturated fat hypothesis came with the Women’s Health Initiative, which enrolled 49 000 premenopausal women in a randomised trial of the low fat diet and cost $725m (£460m; €580m). The women were followed for 10 years, and those in the low fat arm successfully reduced their total fat consumption from 37% to 29% of energy intake and their saturated fat from 12.4% to 9.5%. But there was no reduction in heart disease or stroke, and nor did the women lose more weight than the controls. A 2008 review by the Food and Agriculture Organization concluded that “there is no probable or convincing evidence” that a high level of fat in the diet causes heart disease."  [Pocket]

2. Big Boring System is a text-only BBS, created by 5IT favorite Edna Pirahna.

"Welcome to the Big Boring System Inc. This is a text-only online community. Feel free to browse recent posts."

3. Bananas art project where cyborg cockroaches help make experimental films.

"In the most recent stage of Corrupted C#n#m# - the so-called Entomograph – Madagascar hissing cockroaches were transformed into ‘cyberinsects’ capable of disrupting video data. The project is a collaboration with silversmith Walter Bresseleers. For more visual documentation you can check out this photo album. An experimental film using this system is currently in pre-production and is created in collaboration with filmmaker Jashari Shelbatra."

+ Bonus: One of the artists is the crew commander of the HI-SEAS mission to simulate a trip to Mars.

4. More plausible than Star Trek.

"In celebration of what would be John von Neumann’s 111th birthday, we thought we would take a look at one of his most fascinating contributions to science: the Von Neumann probe. Simply put, a Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating device that could one day be used to explore every facet of the Milky Way in a relatively small window of time. The general idea is to build a device out of materials that are readily available and easily accessible out in space, like on rocky planets or small moons. Once it finds a suitable destination, it lands and mines the material it needs to build even more devices, which, in turn, land on other planets and moons and build even more. The system is very effective, and by some estimates, it would take around half a million years to dispatch millions of probes across our galaxy, assuming each one travels at approximately 1/10th the speed of light, or 18,640 miles (30,000 km) per second (though the real number could be closer to ten million years, which is still no time at all in the grand scheme of things)"

5. Fascinating paper on the role of computers and databases in South Africa during apartheid.

"Thus, the technologies of computerised population registration and identity documentation were basic to the apartheid system of racial identities. As we have argued elsewhere, technopolitical projects do not need to fully achieve their technical goals in order to ‘work’ politically. Indeed, one form of technopolitical action is to defer a problem into the future by characterising it as technical and therefore temporary, a matter for further research and development. The registries ‘worked’ to establish racialised personal identities as elements of governance, and to recast raw minority domination as a technical project, nominally depoliticised by its extension in the 1970s to all South Africans. The technical project in turn ‘worked’ to create an image of the apartheid state as a modern bureaucracy on the European model, and to legitimate the Bantustans as national governments."

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

cunning means artful(ness), quaintly attractive (as a child), craft(y), dexterity (-ous), &c. Used for pretty, it is colloq. US.

+ The pretty usage is just waiting to be rediscovered/reinvented by theyouthtwitter: "She cunning"

The Credits:  1. bmj.com / @bradplumer 2. bigboringsystem.com 3. angelovermeulen.net / @nicolasnova 4. fromquarkstoquasars.com / @ktoerpe 5. pne.people.si.umich.edu / @jennaburrell

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In Order to ‘Work’ Politically