- Atlatls to Bows: A Serendipitous Lion Hunt. Continuing his series of posts on the transition of the ancient North Americans from atlatls to bows, teofilo of Gambler’s House talks about a fortuitous discovery of a cache of bows that lead to increased understanding of ancient bow technology.
- Perception of volcanic hazards in Iceland. The world’s attention was recently focused on Iceland due to the eruption there that paralyzed air travel for days throughout Europe, but Iceland has always been a geothermally active region. How well-prepared are Icelanders in general to deal with volcanic emergencies? Jessica at Magma Cum Laude looks at the evidence.
- Relativity on a human scale. This one will be hard for the relativity denialists to explain! Chad at Uncertain Principles describes research with atomic clocks that has demonstrated Einstein’s special and general relativity in a tabletop experiment!
- The assessment of emotional expression in dogs. Everybody seems to agree that dogs are very emotive animals, but do we all see the same emotions in a particular animal? At her eponymous blog, The Dog Zombie looks at an attempt to apply statistics to understanding how much we agree on a dog’s emotional state.
Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” suggestions!
Skulls in the Stars 
The first article about bows is very nice. Among others, the quick reference to the importance of arrowheads in theories about ancient weaponry is interesting: sharpened points versus stone heads. I guess all sorts of factors come into play when choosing the type of arrow: what prey (small or large animals), flight time?, shooting accuracy?, durability?, etc. It would be interesting to learn more about these things.
It’s sort of fascinating to realize how many things that would seem very trivial to us — such as the type of arrowhead or even its shape — would have been almost life-or-death choices for primitive people. It’s an interesting reminder of how far we’ve come as a species — and how much we’ve forgotten.