Otitis externa, better known as a dog's ear infections, are one of the most common health issues that plague our canine compadres today. They are also particularly troublesome because, after one infection, your dog typically contracts more and more. Much of what will decide on the severity of the condition would be the dog ear infection treatment provided...

(No actual April Fools jokes among these, sorry.) Superhydrophobic fountain uses surface coatings to control the flow of water (G+) Interview with Robert Lang about what it feels like to fold origami (G+) How the constraint of having a unique solution can be used to help solve puzzles (G+) Desargues' concertina — Greg Egan animates unit-distance drawings...

The regular icosahedron hides many regular pentagons, surrounding each of its vertices. Cut it through the planes of two parallel pentagons, and you decompose it into two pyramids and a pentagonal antiprism. But what if you add a second antiprism, and glue the result back together? The result is a 17-vertex triangulated planar graph called the Errera...

Using foldable nanostructure to make materials that can transform from soft to stiff, dense to sparse, etc (G+) Voronoi analysis of soccer plays (G+) Bricard's flexible octahedra (G+) What happens to soap bubbles when gravity becomes too big to ignore (G+) Randomized routing and a lack of super-connected nodes help the darknet stay robust (G+) No more...

Denis Kurz, a student of Petra Mutzel at Dortmund, visited Irvine last year. Since Kurz had already done some work on k shortest simple paths with Mutzel, that's what we worked on during his visit. Our paper is now online as a preprint: "K -Best Solutions of MSO Problems on Tree-Decomposable Graphs", arXiv:1703.02784. If you just want the k shortest...

Emmanuelle Moureaux's walk-through forest of colored digits reminds me of some earlier digital art (G+) Sariel peels huge grids, with the result appearing to approximate the affine curve-shortening flow (G+) Berenice Abbott's vintage scientific photography (G+) The growth of perverse incentives in academia or Campbell's law in action (G+) Moon Duchin...