Artificial leaves.

Organ culture

After his aviation career, Lucky Lindy was a medical pioneer in organ culture back in the 1930's? Wow.

And as if 3-D printing of plastics wasn't cool enough already...

Neandertals, too, missed the obvious.

There are many remains of the Neanderthals, since they performed primitive burials that prevented scavenging & destruction of the bodies.

So, we know that a lot of the Neanderthals carried "Rodeo lesion" skeletal injuries [scary adjective], suggesting "frequent close encounters with large ungulates unkindly disposed to the humans involved."

Combined with their burly stature & the fact that Neanderthal hunting tools are jab-style rather than projectile, this tells us that our closest relatives liked to stab pointy sticks into large animals, then hang on for the violent ride. They never figured out how to chuck a spear or arrow, then get out of the way.

This seems so simple & obvious that it boggles my mind to consider what absolutely critical information we humans have access to, yet utterly fail to process.

Researchers:
Thomas D. Berger and Erik Trinkaus
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico

The human hunter's secret weapon.

Nothing is more common than to hear someone hold forth about how we wimpy humans have no claws, teeth, venom or other killing gifts like virtually every other animal does...just our magnificent brains to help us catch food in the survival game.

But apparently we've been overlooking the obvious yet again. As it happens, humans have one really MASSIVE advantage when it comes to hunting: we are physically designed to run down any large animal over long distances!

The trick is our small, sweaty, more-or-less hairless bodies that make us significantly more efficient at blowing off heat than heavy masses of sprinting venison are. We just jog along, forcing large prey to keep running until it overheats & collapses after only about 10-15 km.

As evidence, human bodies come equipped with some interesting features that don't even fire up until we start running: like a thick neck-support ligament, disproportionately large butt muscles & long springy leg & foot tendons, for instance.

Grow new body parts like a lizard.

Oh, man--don't watch this one while eating your lunch!

This guy lost the end of his finger in a model airplane accident. Fortunately, his brother happens to be a researcher in the field of "regenerative medicine".

Long story short, his finger grew back. Watch the video--it's pretty amazing!

Doh! Lactic acid is fuel, not waste product.

In the annals of overturned conventional wisdom, this is a doozy.

Everybody KNOWS that lactic acid is the stuff that builds up in your muscles during exercise, slowing you down, making you burn now & ache later. Seeking faster runs, longer leaps & higher jumps, people have been tweaking their diets & training for decades in a desperate attempt to remove this offending substance.

Turns out that's not a brilliant idea: scientists have discovered that lactic acid is actually the fuel our muscles burn.

Oops.