This week has been slightly relaxing. No school this week, and I’m back from vacation, we got reliable internet back at my house, and I was able to catch up on sleep. That being said I still managed to stumble on some gems to read.

Found this website, by ERSI. They are the people who bring us ArcGIS in all it’s wacky glory. I’m kinda liking this, since its an academic style online magazine that is  open to the public. I’m hoping they make a Volume 2. http://www.esri.com/library/journals/archaeology/index.html

I found this while looking for other articles on Vikings, the reason for that search will be obvious soon. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/02/0217_040217_vikings_2.html, its all about reforming the bad rep Vikings got, mainly from exaggerated or  made up tales of raiding churches  along the coast. This might be fodder for another series one day, for now it’s just good reading.

The last thing I really got fired up over was a study on the “Expensive Tissue Hypothesis” which basically says the larger our brains the more it cost us to run them, or Big brains = lots of calories. These guys tested this with guppies, and selectively breed them for larger brains. They noted that the larger brained females out performed the smaller brained ones in cognitive tests and the guts of the larger brained guppies shrank. Also, they appeared to have fewer offspring at a time. This is pretty exciting for a lot of reasons dealing with the evolution of human brains.  http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(12)01438-8

So, that’s what I’ve been up to this week. Feel free to share what you’ve read.