July 17, 2016 at 04:04AM

Today I Learned: 1) There's a variant of chess called Crazyhouse, in which you can place pieces captured from your opponents anywhere on the board except the last rank in lieu of moving a piece on your turn. That rule is also standard in the Japanese version of chess, shogi. Checking out Crazyhouse led me to the awesome wikipedia article on "List of chess variants". A couple of fun variants from there include absoption chess, in which pieces gain the movement abilities of pieces they capture; genesis chess, in which the board starts empty and you place your pieces as a move; synchronous chess, in which the players record their moves and execute them simultaneously, a la Diplomacy; and Beirut chess, in which each play secretly straps a "bomb" onto one piece, which can be detonated to take out all pieces in the surrounding squares (and can be used to kill kings). Turns out Erik Jue knows a lot of chess variants. 2) Protein translation can, rarely, initiate from codons other than the canonical AUG and its variants. Translation from other codons tops out around 2% of AUG translation initiation rate. 3) E-cigarettes smell kind of like cotton candy, at least at range.