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Researchers now have a hypothesis for the reason your 4-year-old niece insists on telling you the same story over and over every time she sees you. Alas, there are no new findings on how not to look bored.

The quick development of nerve cells in the hippocampus — the part of the brain that tucks our new memories away into the long-term file — may be what causes what researchers refer to as “infantile amnesia,” the reason you probably can’t remember anything from age 3 or younger.

Paul Frankland, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and co-author of the study, theorizes that the memories are actually in there somewhere, but not stored in the proper order, thanks to the overload of brain development and activity during those first three years.

He tested out his theory on baby mice, teaching them how to navigate a maze and then slowing down the hippocampus growth in half of them, which ended up being the group to more successfully navigate the maze again. Franklin plans on surveying some of the children he treats, whose chemotherapy and radiation treatments also slow down hippocampus nerve growth, to test his theory.

(via Why Don’t Toddlers Remember a Damn Thing? Asks Science)

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“That feels better right? Look, your uncle died. I’m sorry. I get it. I’m sorry.”

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Artist Rey Taira updates Georges Seurat’s masterpiece of pointillism “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by adding DC’s superheroes. Behold, “Saturday Morning in Front of La Salle De Justice.”

Taira also created the above piece’s dark reflection, “”Sunday Evening by the Legion of Doom”:

(via DC heroes and villains invade Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon”)

Chinese design firm Studio Liu Lubin is exploring the concept of the “micro house,” a structure that offers the minimum necessary indoor living space, with rooms that can be stacked on top of and alongside one another in an architectural game of Tetris.

Studio Liu Lubin has just installed its prototype three-room micro house in a park in Beijing. This particular house contains an office, a bedroom, and a washroom, showing just how much can fit in such tight quarters and how much natural sunlight travels into the rooms.

If you’re looking for a kitchen or a second bedroom, other cross-shaped room modules could, in theory, be added, each with its own entry window:

And the concept image of a high-density community offers a better sense of how the modules might fit together, with some rooms connecting directly to others and the modules providing stairway passages to the higher levels.

It’s an intriguing concept, although it appears that, unless two rooms are connected by a window, you would need to go outside to travel from room to room. Perhaps individual residences within a larger community would all exist on the same level, with apartments consisting of long corridors of connected rooms.

You can see more images of the prototype and the design phase of the micro house on Designboom.

Micro House by Studio Liu Lubin Installed in Beijing Park and Micro House by Studio Liu Lubin [Designboom via Treehugger]

(via Tetris-piece micro house is designed to be stacked)

Here’s a device to add to your steampunk fiction: the chatelaine, a popular accessory from the 19th century. Part practicality, part fashion accessory, the chatelaine was the perfect way for women on the go to carry all of their tools.

Collectors Weekly has a fascinating interview with Genevieve Cummins, who co-authored a book about this forgotten bit of Victorian Era fashion. The term “chatelaine” first appeared in 1828, and while the cartoon up top is certainly an exaggeration (it’s from Punch magazine, after all), the item was worn about the waist and held chains with all sorts of items a woman might need at the ready: eyeglasses cases, scissors, keys, seals, tiny notebooks, perfume bottles. A nurse’s chatelaine might hold a thermometer while a seamstress’ might include a thimble and a tape measure. Women might have different chatelaines for running errands and for doing work around the house. Cummins even mentions a chatelaine holding a tiny paintbox and another for play golf, complete with scorecards and a pencil.

All the famous jewelers of the day, including Tiffany and Fabergé, manufactured chatelaines at one point or another, and some were more ornate than practical. (Cummins says that she has seen enormous steel chatelaines with up to a dozen attachments, however.) Eventually the chatelaine fell out of fashion in favor of pocket watches and larger purses. Cummins says that no museum has a collection that shows off the range of chatelaine styles that existed, but she has taken up collecting them on her own. You can see photos of several of the chatelaines she has found at Collectors Weekly.

(via Before the Swiss Army Knife, Victorian women wore ornate multitools)

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