In the cards

How did a deck of cards lead to solving a cold case?

Q: How did a $2 deck of cards and boredom help solve some cold-case homicides?

A: Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement and others distributed decks of cards with pictures of murder victims on them, including a short summary of the case, says Dan Lewis on his Now I Know website. The decks are often the only playing cards available to the inmates in the prison commissary. And here’s where boredom and loose lips enter in: As one Connecticut corrections official told Slate: “Inmates brag to one another about their past exploits, and when the people they brag to come across cards that match the stories they’ve heard, they realize they have information that could be worth money or could help them get time off their prison terms.” Before featuring victims on the cards, their families are contacted and most are “eager to have a card assigned to their case.” Why? According to the New York Post, over the last 10 years, information obtained from such programs has helped solve about 40 homicides, including “two in one week in the fall of 2017.”

Q: If you dream about something you are trying to memorize, is that likely to improve your recollection?

A: Only dreams that occur during the REM (rapid eye movement) phase of sleep are typically remembered. But a person awakened during non-REM sleep will often report they were dreaming. Using the forced awakening technique on 22 volunteers each tasked with memorizing 100 word-picture pairs (for example, “tree” paired with a picture of a seated child), Sarah Schoch et al., found that non-REM dreaming about the memorization task correlated with improved recollection the following day. REM dreams about the task, on the other hand, indicated no such correlation. The counterintuitive conclusion? Dreaming about a memorization task does improve recollection, but only if you don’t remember the dream.

Q: As the Earth’s population continues to climb, a team of scientists and robots is raising about a million “sixlegged livestock” a day hoping to supply much needed protein and other nutrients. What are these six-leggers?

A: They’re crickets, and they “pack more protein than beef, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach and as many fatty acids as salmon,” says Carl Engelking in Discover magazine. Once fully grown, they’re roasted and seasoned, then mixed into granola or ground into flour.

To maximize yield, researchers need massive amounts of data, and crickets with their short (a few months) life span provide ample opportunity to amass this data from billions of cricket forebears. Feeder robots are employed to patrol bin aisles doling out specially designed formula. Currently, though, the 300,000 pounds of crickets produced at one next-gen facility are just a small fraction of the current human consumption of 8.8 billion pounds of whey powder a year. Another research impetus is the stark contrast between beef and cricket production: Cows require 25 pounds of food for every pound of beef, while crickets need just two pounds of food for every edible pound they become. Further, the livestock industry contributes to greenhouse gas levels and drives deforestation. Says Engelking, “Insects are about as clean as it gets.”

Already, some two billion people regularly eat insects. It’s called entomophagy and will become, it is hoped, “an integral part of the world hunger solution.”