August 05, 2016 at 12:24AM

Today I Learned: 1) Back at the beginning of the year, a joint team of various New York state university scientists created a mouse whose feeding behavior could be controlled by radio waves... and not in the way you'd expect. The team genetically engineered a mouse with a fusion between a calcium channel (TRPV1) and a radio-sensitive, iron-binding protein called ferritin. The fusion protein was engineered to be expressed in glucose-sensitive neurons. When triggered by radio frequency photons, the proteins could either switch the channel on or switch it off, activating or inactivating the glucose-sensing neurons and altering feeding behavior in the mice. 2) Ever heard of a hornworm? Go do a quick google search. Those things are about the size of a human finger. You can buy them, one to a box, at Petsmart. 3) Monopoly is based on an earlier board game called The Landlord's Game, which was designed to demonstrate the benefits of single tax systems. It was meant to be played in two phases. The first phase was pretty familiar to anyone who's played Monopoly. In the second phase, the rules switched to show off the single tax system, and to make the game more egalitarian and less zero-sum. Turns out that the zero-sum version of the game was more fun, so someone else tweaked those rules and released their own version of the game, which they called Monopoly. Thanks to Andrew Montequin for teaching me about this!