Anne M Stark for Phys.Org:

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) today officially approved new names for elements 114 and 116, the latest heavy elements to be added to the periodic table.

Scientists of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-Dubna collaboration proposed the names as Flerovium for element 114, with the symbol Fl, and Livermorium for element 116, with the symbol Lv, late last year.

Elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 are still nameless.

Colin: So can we call them all Eastwoodium for the time being?

If you spin a hard-boiled egg in a pool of milk, the milk will wick up the sides of the egg and spray off at the egg’s equator. Engineer Tadd Truscott, of Brigham Young University, along with Ken Langley and others, launched an investigation to figure out why this happens — complete with a custom-built spinning apparatus, billiard balls and high speed video cameras.

SCIENCE

Nicola Twilley, writing for Good:

According to a 2004 New York Times article on the subject, this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA since 1992, using a “classified array of hydrophones employed by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines.” It sings at 52 Hertz, which is roughly the same frequency as the lowest note on a tuba, and much higher than its fellow whales, whose calls fall in the 15 to 25 Hertz range.

The upshot of that is that the other whales don’t respond to it, so it’s just chillin’ out there all by itself. Poor lil’ dude.

Karen Kaplan for the Los Angeles Times’s Booster Shots blog:

Though the indigenous people of the Solomon Islands all have dark skin, about 5% to 10% also have naturally blond hair – and a new study finds that the genetic quirk responsible for this is different from the one that produces blond hair in people of European ancestry.

…

Many Westerners had assumed that encounters with European explorers and traders over the years had introduced a blond gene into the Melanesian gene pool.

Evolution is weird.

Ian Sample wrote a piece for The Guardian on how a book about fish nearly bankrupted the Royal Society, nearly resulting in Isaac Newton’s hugely important Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which stated Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, never being published.

Though Ray and Willughby’s masterpiece delayed the publication of Newton’s Principia, it was saved from obscurity by Edmund Halley, then Clerk at the Royal Society, who raised the funds to publish the work, providing much of the money from his own pocket. The Principia was eventually published in 1687.

After publishing the work, the Royal Society told Halley it could no longer afford his salary and offered to pay him in unsold copies of the Historia Piscium instead.

NASA:

Thanks to the presence of a natural “zoom lens” in space, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope got a uniquely close-up look at the brightest “magnified” galaxy yet discovered.

Not only is that cool as hell, the pictures are amazing.

Jason Palmer, BBC News:

[T]he team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.

With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.

They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant.

Imagine a computer controlled with technology like this.

Carl Franzen, writing for TPM’s IdeaLab:

The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a “janitor satellite” that will begin to clean up Earth’s orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth’s atmosphere on a suicide mission, causing both the janitor satellite and the piece of junk to burn up.

Franzen also describes just how real the problem of space junk is. (Spoiler: very serious.)

Alexandra Witze, writing in ScienceNews:

In two new papers, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek lays out the mathematics of how an object moving in its lowest energy state could experience a sort of structure in time. Such a “time crystal” would be the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space.

MOTHERFUCKING TIME CRYSTALS WHAT. Even Witze admits the name sounds “like the title of a bad fantasy movie”.

ScienceDaily:

Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.

In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona demonstrate a plausible mechanism for encoding synaptic memory in microtubules, major components of the structural cytoskeleton within neurons.

I had the opportunity to see Dr. Hameroff speak at Google in 2007 — you can view a video of that talk here. He’s an interesting fellow with a lot of very interesting ideas — some of which are (as far as I can tell as a layman) somewhat outside the mainstream.

What I’m saying is: check this out, but take it with a grain of salt.