Weekly Webcrawl: May 9, 2014

Wired blew up my FB feed a little this week with posts about nifty tools to make the world a little better. For instance, a book and water filter in one, and a solar paneled road in Idaho. But really, why is everyone so excited about scrambling eggs without having to crack them? I’m confused.

Do you want to be the ruler of your own immune system? Take a cue from Wim Hof. He and some researchers at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands taught people how to do this using nothing but the power of their minds.

In honor of my impending parenthood, which was just confirmed this morning with a look at the babe via ultrasonic imagery (really though–ultrasound technology is freaking amazing), here are two posts about babies:

  1. Despite plenty of other studies saying exactly the opposite, new research from researchers at Arizona State University and  Santa Clara University suggests that children may actually make people happier.
  2. We may forget our early days as babes (despite what my grant aunt will tell you about remembering her own birth) because of newly growing brain cells in the hippocampus. It was previously thought that this brain area was only important for memory formation, but this suggests otherwise.

And finally, here’s a website that lets you watch the routes that whales swim around the Hawaiian Islands.