Using stem cells and other techniques, scientists have been able to "turn off" the extra chromosome that causes Down’s Syndrome.
via Boing Boing
Watson Dollar is 22 and autistic. He is non-verbal but, for someone who hasn’t spoken for 20 years, he has a lot to say. The story of how he found his voice is heartwarming.
via The Loop
This review of a gallon of milk done in the style of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven is one of the best reviews I’ve read ever.
Brian Phillips writing for Grantland on how changes to the major tennis courts have altered the pace and style of the game:
What used to be four radically different surfaces, requiring four radically different styles of play, have become increasingly homogenous. This is a major factor — arguably the major factor — in the current state of the game, particularly in men’s tennis, where it has helped shape both the Nadal-Federer-Djokovic-Murray golden age and the slow-paced, relentless, defensive tennis that more and more seems to define it. There’s a serious argument to be made that Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and even Roger Federer could never have won so many majors if they’d played in an era before the biggest competitions started rewarding similar skill sets.
He argues that through subtle changes to grass mixture, paint, and different surface materials have slowed down the game to attract the mass audiences – not the rabid tennis fans. Where there was once a difference to force players to change their style of play, it’s more or less the same and players just have to out-last the other instead of relying on more skill or tactics.
via MG
Grub Street wanted to know why NYC restaurants are so loud. The answer:
Most restaurant scholars will tell you that the Great Noise Boom began in the late nineties, when Mario Batali had the genius idea of taking the kind of music that he and his kitchen-slave compatriots listened to while rolling their pastas and stirring their offal-rich ragùs (Zeppelin, the Who, the Pixies, etc.) and blasting it over the heads of the startled patrons in the staid dining room at Babbo. Over the next several years, as David Chang and his legions of imitators followed Batali’s lead, the front-of-the-house culture was slowly buried in a wall of sound. Sound-muffling carpets (and tablecloths) were taken up in favor of exposed-wood tables and brittle floors. Rooms became smaller and more acoustically challenged, and with the arrival of the recession, the small bars in the front of the house got bigger in order to sell more profitable drinks. Sound systems were cranked up, and suddenly noise became the hallmark of a successful New York restaurant.