Galaxy Notes.

Google spreads its wings, moving into drone deliveries - CNET

Google is working on a delivery system called Project Wing that will use what it's calling "self-flying" drones to bring goods to people.

The search giant has been working on the service for two years, and it is the latest project announced by Google X, the division of the company that works on Google's most ambitious projects. Other X initiatives include self-driving cars and the connected headset Google Glass.

Google has been testing the vehicles in Queensland, Australia, and has already made deliveries to locals -- including shipments of candy bars, dog treats, cattle vaccines, water and radios. Similar to the company's self-driving car project, the drones will be able to fly a pre-programmed route at the push of a button. The company said that it will be a few more years before the system is ready for commercial use.

Can America Learn to Love Misshapen Veggies? - The Atlantic

America’s growing income inequality has dominated the national conversation in recent months, accompanied by an avalanche of data: economists tell us the richest 1 percent of American households earn 20 percent of all income and own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. But how do these figures translate into everyday life? For a glimpse into what has gone wrong, consider America’s food paradox: Grocery stores catering to wealthy shoppers discard billions of pounds of wholesome food because of minor cosmetic flaws while, in low-income neighborhoods across the country, 48 million Americans lack reliable access to affordable, nutritious food.

'Columbusing': The Art of Discovering Something That Is Not New - NPR

'Columbusing' is when you "discover" something that's existed forever. Just that it's existed outside your own culture, nationality, race or even, say, your neighborhood. Bonus points if you tell all your friends about it.

Why not? In our immigrant-rich cities, the whole world is at our doorsteps.

Modern Tools for Mom and Pops - NYTimes

For example, Cups, a coffee subscription app that came to New York in April, helps independent coffee shops compete with giant chains like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. It is working with 50 small shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. ShopKeep, a New York company, helps small businesses ring up sales, accept credit cards, email receipts or print remotely with an iPad-based checkout system.

Lab Rats, One And All: That Unsettling Facebook Experiment - NPR

'How Professor Godzilla Learned to Roar' - NPR

Tsutsui went on to become an economist and wrote books about business and banking in Japan. Most recently, he was a dean at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"For a long time, I thought I had serious work, but I realize all the books that I wrote about Japanese history, most of the people who read them were my relatives," he says. "Whereas I wrote about a giant rubber monster rampaging through toy cities in Japan, and tens of thousands of people read it. So I'm actually real proud to be known as the guy that studies Godzilla."

His first book on the giant lizard, called Godzilla On My Mind, earned him his nickname, recalls Tsutsui's wife, Marjorie Swann.

"Often his students had trouble pronouncing his last name ... so they'd call him Professor Godzilla," Swann says.

Harley Hopes An Electric Hog Will Appeal To Young, Urban Riders - NPR

Ben Lund, a leader of the project, says he hopes the prototype bike shows off Harley's technology skills and begins to reach out to a younger, more urban potential customer base.

"People in an urban environment have different needs and different requirements. You know, they're not riding a thousand miles across the country," Lund says. "They're maybe running around to the grocery store or they have a short commute."

Electric motorcycles are better suited to shorter trips than long ones because their batteries have to be recharged.

Kandinsky On A Plate: Art-Inspired Salad Just Tastes Better - NPR

Recently, some experimental psychologists at the University of Oxford decided to see what impact a plate of salad arranged like an abstract painting would have on 60 diners' perception of the food.

One group of diners was offered a salad arranged like Wassily Kandinsky's Painting No. 201. Another group was given a salad featuring broccoli sprouts, Portobello mushroom slices and snow peas lined up in neat rows. The last group was offered a typical pile of salad arranged in the middle of a plate. Each salad had identical ingredients, dressing and condiments.

A Bear on the Loose in Washington - NPR

There's a bear roaming the streets of Washington, D.C.

It's more metaphorical than ursine. That's how President Obama describes his recent efforts to break free of the cage that is the White House bubble. He's been venturing out on strolls — like real bears, often in search of food, but also searching for something more.

The bear was spotted Monday near the National Zoo, wearing sunglasses and walking on Calvert Street with four people who had been attending the White House Summit on Working Families.

How the area code rose to power - The Verge

I Won't Eat, You Can't Make Me! (And They Couldn't) - NPR

But nah, he won't eat. According to Rocket News, "Over time, the animal learned how to seem to appease its human keepers by moving its mouth and front legs around the food pretending to eat. In the end, it never actually took a bite. ... No. 1 would simply play with its food."

No.1 didn't eat for all of 2013. That's five years without a meal. No animal in captivity has refused food for that long, the Japanese press said. This was some kind of record. Why wouldn't the animal eat? Nobody knew.

Then, this month, on Valentine's Day, when Moritaki arrived with a new mackerel and lowered it into the tank, No. 1 stayed totally motionless. Moritaki leaned in, picked up the isopod, and it wasn't alive. A dissection was performed to see if there was some obvious reason, some blockage — some something — that would explain No. 1's stubborn behavior and, according to Rocket News, none was found. "The creature," Rocket News reported, "will be frozen for preservation. Research is underway on the remains of No. 1 to find out why it refused to eat."

Maybe it was sick. Maybe it was angry. Maybe it was stubborn. But whatever it was, it managed to say, "No, thank you," for 1,868 consecutive days. Then it keeled over. An isopod that determined deserves the name "giant."

Trader Joe's Caught in Sticky Lawsuit Over Peanut Butter Pretzels - NPR

Among the many snacks you can find in the aisles of Trader Joe's is an icon of sweet and salty goodness: the peanut butter pretzel. It's a combination so tasty, famed food writer Ruth Reichl once raved, "You haven't lived until you've tried the two together."

But the beloved treats aren't just treasures for the palate — they're a pretty lucrative business worth millions of dollars. And now, Trader Joe's is being sued for allegedly cornering the market on the snack.

The plaintiff is Maxim Marketing, a Southern California company that claims to have invented the peanut butter pretzel in the early 1980s. And for more than 25 years, Maxim claims, it supplied the grocery chain with the snack, which is sold under the private Trader Joe's label. But Maxim says the retailer switched suppliers to packaged food giant ConAgra Foods, unfairly cutting it out of the business it pioneered. So Maxim is suing both companies, explains journalist Alfred Lee, who wrote about the lawsuit for the Los Angeles Business Journal.

An App to Search Street Art - New York Times

The destruction of the graffiti mecca 5Pointz, in Long Island City, last fallwas a devastating blow to the community of street art in New York City and around the world.

Lois Stavsky, an aficionado of local street art, said 5Pointz “was wonderful to me, and its loss is tremendous.”

“Artists all over the world,” she added, “were contacting me asking for a place to paint, and I’d always direct them to 5Pointz and meet them there.”

Ms. Stavsky, who taught at Taft High School in the Bronx from 1970 to 1980, the crucial decade in the birth of the city’s graffiti scene, is also the content creator for the New York version of an app called Geo Street Art.(There is a sister app in London, run by the software’s developer, Richard Howard-Griffin.)

Danish Zoo Criticized For Killing Giraffe - CNN

Learning About Love From Prarie Vole Bonding - NPR

Most mammals have "love 'em and leave 'em" relationships, but not the prairie vole. They mate for life, sharing nest-building duties and an equal role in raising their young.

It looks a lot like a relationship many of us would like to have. Prairie voles have long been of interest to scientists looking at the neurobiology of bonding and monogamy.

Larry Young from the primate research center at Emory University in Atlanta tells NPR's Rachel Martin there's a ritual that happens when a male prairie vole spots an eligible female.

"The first thing he has to do is to get her interested in him, and he does that by courting her, and the smell of the pheromones gets her brain activated," he says. "And after about 24 hours, she's ready to mate."

In the wild, prairie voles don't have a long life expectancy — they're kind of at the bottom of the food chain. But in the lab, that bond is strong enough to keep them together for a long time.

Dr. Wikipedia: The 'Double-Edged Sword' Of Crowd-Sourced Medicine - NPR

Wikipedia has become a go-to source for definitions, celebrity facts, and now, medical information. A study by the IMS Health Institute published in January names Wikipedia as the "single leading source" of health care information for both patients and health care professionals.

Unfortunately, some of that information is wrong.

"I think that's the double-edged sword of Wikipedia," Dr. Amin Azzam tells NPR's Arun Rath. "Because anyone can edit, we don't necessarily know the expertise of the people doing the editing. One the other hand, the reason it's so popular is because everyone can contribute."

Azzam is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He teaches a course that encourages fourth-year medical students to use their knowledge to improve Wikipedia, one article at a time. The syllabus is, of course, posted on Wikipedia.