(PHOTO: OkCupid)

It’s probably not exactly a secret to Inkling’s enlightened readers, but this meticulously laid out post on the blog of the dating site OkCupid argues that more men ought to consider dating older women, because:

1) They’re better in bed.
2) They’re happier and more confident.
3) They’re “better looking than you realize.”

(As a qualified “older woman"—at 31! Sheesh—I say check, check, ouch.)

At any rate, the post, though long, is well organized and a fun read. Calculus is involved.

Thanks to Inkling author Anya Weber for the tip.

(PHOTO: NPR)

NPR just filed a charming story about how crows can recognize individual human faces—and built an interactive game in which to answer, once and for all, the burning question: Can I recognize individual crows?

(I tried. I kind of can, but not as easy as it looks at first glance.)

Check out the full story for an explanation of why crows are better at inter-species face recognition than we are.

(PHOTO: Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH))

South Korea’s “EveR-3” (Eve Robot 3), pictured here dressed in a costume created for the Seoul production “Robot Princess and the Seven Dwarfs,” apparently has a long list of other roles with which she’s set to hit the stage in 2010. 

Science news service Physorg quotes Korean scientist Lee Ho-Gil as saying that robot actresses, unlike human ones, never forget their lines—but have been known to bump into things slightly more than their living, breathing counterparts. Aw.

We received a note from Johannes Wiebus, a senior producer at Jynx Productions, this morning. He’s working on a documentary about Arc Attack, an Austin, Texas band whose members regularly perform with electrified Tesla coils, using them to make strange, resonant music. Johannes writes of the video above, “A guy in a chain mail Faraday suit is getting hit with 500,000 volts, generated by a home made Tesla Coil.  Lightning is shooting out of his hands, right over our camera’s lens. We had mounted the camera in its own Faraday cage to protect it—and to attract the sparks.”

More on Arc Attack here.

Are you fans of the Science Creative Quarterly? They’re a sort of small Canadian McSweeneys, only they’re all about science. One thing they’re doing this year, to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity, is something they call their Phylomon Project. They’re soliciting designs for what they envision as being a Pokemon-type card set, as well as ideas for what sorts of games one might play with such a set.

If you’re interested, you can submit illustrations to their Flickr group.

A Japanese astronaut is tweeting photos from space. That up there is a view of Pico De Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico.

THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL. More photos on his Twitpic page here.

A Bristol University poll shows cat owners are more likely to have a university degree than dog owners. Ha. 

Johns Hopkins researchers confirm what we’ve all always suspected—it is your mom’s fault that you’re always getting lost!

“We found that people with a rare genetic disorder cannot use one of the very basic systems of navigation that is present in humans as early as 18 months and shared across a wide range of species,” Landau said. “To our knowledge, this is the first evidence from human studies of a link between the missing genes and the system that we use to reorient ourselves in space.”

More detail here. Thank goodness for smart phones, eh?

...or not.

(PHOTO: DeaPeaJay)

From Proto magazine comes a nice round-up of the latest advances in restoring vision, including artificial retinas (like hearing aids for your eyes), gene therapy, and stem-cell treatments that may be able to regrow damaged retina cells.

The piece has a great opening line: “How many electrodes can fit on the back of an eye?” (Answer: In about five years, hopefully 1,000.)

(PHOTO: Jeff the Trojan)

A Spanish experimental psychologist has just concluded that left-handed people like things on the left better than things on the right, unlike right-handed people, who like things on the right better than things on the left.

In one of his experiments, Casasanto presented participants a diagram that depicts a character who was planning a trip to the zoo, and who loves zebras and thinks they are good, but dislikes pandas and thinks they are bad. The participant had to draw a zebra in the box that best represented good things and a panda in the box that best represented bad things.

You can read the press release here. I kind of love it.