Week in Geek: Potpourri Edition*

*UPDATED to repair the broken links. Click away! 

This video is called “Isaac Newton v Rube Goldberg”, but you’ll have to watch it to find out why.

Here’s your grab bag of geek for the week:

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Latest

U.S. Olympic Committee bans trans women in line with Trump attacks

Ja’han Jones

• I’ve been day dreaming all week about traveling to these STUNNING places on Earth that look fake but are actually real.
• Ways nature could kill us. Highlights include volcanoes, fungi, radiation, and landslides.
• Scientists have created fake feces, a “super-probiotic” named RePOOPulate, for people with a hard-to-treat bacterial infection in their intestines. Also, RePOOPulate is really fun to say.
• Bored with Pandora and Spotify? Listen to whales instead on this live station from Hawaii. I was hooked immediately.
• Czech scientists find brown-eyed faces are deemed more trustworthy than blue-eyed ones based not on eye color alone, but on facial morphology qualities that appear linked to brown eyes.
• New species of flying frog discovered near Ho Chi Min City. I wonder if it can fly across the DMZ…?
• Researchers suggest Dinosaur Stampede National Monument in Queensland, Australia should be renamed Swimming Dinosaur National Monument based on a new theory that fossilized tracks may be a record of dinos crossing a river instead of fleeing a predator.
• A recent study of lizards shows that they aren’t such great jumpers when they leap off a diving-board-esque flexible surface. In fact, they fall on their face. Bonus: the published paper is entitled “Total Recoil”. [VIDEO]
• Fascinating article on how Intel helps Stephen Hawking communicate. The renown physicist can only compose his thoughts at one word per minute by twitching a muscle in his cheek, but Intel is working on a full facial software program that would allow him to also use his mouth and eyebrow muscles.

Geek you later. @Summer_Ash