The trouble with King Kong (Wired)
by Rhett Allain
King Kong is just a really big gorilla. But that doesn’t mean he could act like one. Physics reveals that movies about the city-destroying super-ape are actually not very realistic after all.

The dialects of the naked mole rat (Mongabay)
by Romina Castagnino
Like people, and unlike most other animals, naked mole rats learn to “speak” by imitation. They even have dialects, created by their queens, that help them discriminate against foreigners.

What the “mark of the beast” meant to early Christians (The Conversation)
Eric M. Vanden Eykel
The COVID-19 vaccine is just one of many things that some people have suggested might be linked to the “mark of the beast” mentioned in Revelation. Actually, the most likely meaning of the phrase is much more straightforward, but equally political.

Lust in the convent (Nursing Clio)
by Anna Weerasinghe
Records of women’s sexual desire have often been stripped from historical documents. What can we learn from a not-very-reliable story of a Catholic nun in early modern India watching a neighboring monk through a spyglass?

What’s a “nature cure” for? (Psyche)
by Jeremy Mynott
Scientific studies, and lots of anecdotal evidence, suggest that time in nature is good for us. But what do we really mean by nature? Or by “good for us”?

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