June 14, 2016 at 12:59AM

Today I Learned: 1) I think I found the most sublime spinning tops on the planet. No joke. Check out foreverspin.com -- this is way more dedication to tops than I ever imagined possible. (For some reason, I got an add for these on a sidebar while accessing a journal article. Go figure) 2) Apparently a good deal of German pop music is sung in English. I knew this was a thing in France, but singing in English is apparently more widespread than I thought. Thanks Mengsha Gong! 3) Shining UV in one's eye is, generally speaking, an awful idea. Today I learned of one case where it is a good idea -- corneal collagen cross-linking surgery. It's a technique used to stop thinning of the cornea by zapping the cornea with UV light, forming cross-links between the collagen molecules in the cornea and essentially fixing it in place. This is though to be what happens naturally, albeit too slowly -- corneal thinning is one of the rare diseases that is worst during youth and progressively flattens out with age, because the kinds of crosslinks induced by UV are the same as ones that form naturally with age.