Friday Night Links: Twilight, Occupy, Obsolete Sounds, Lab Mice, More

* Obligatory Twilight backlash: But when a saga popular with pre-adolescent girls peaks romantically on a night that leaves the heroine to wake up covered with bruises in the shape of her husband’s hands — and when that heroine then spends the morning explaining to her husband that she’s incredibly happy even though he injured her, and that it’s not his fault because she understands he couldn’t help it in light of the depth of his passion — that’s profoundly irresponsible. A countervailing view.  Counter-countervailing. More.

* Mental Floss’s library of obsolete sounds.

* An interview with the creator of the Occupy Wall Street “bat-signal” projections during Brooklyn Bridge #N17 march.

* North Carolina AFL-CIO: 9 Demands of the 99%.

* Fear and Zugzwang in Zuccotti Park.

* That’s the drawback of the modern lab mouse. It’s cheap, efficient, and highly standardized—all of which qualities have made it the favorite tool of large-scale biomedical research. But as Mattson points out, there’s a danger to taking so much of our knowledge straight from the animal assembly line. The inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today—raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics—may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn.

“This is important for scientists,” says Mattson, “but they don’t think about it at all.” Via MeFi.

* GE Filed 57,000-Page Tax Return, Paid No Taxes on $14 Billion in Profits.

* Weird science watch: Quantum theorem shakes foundations: the wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers. Second experiment confirms faster-than-light particles.

* Hermain Cain asks for Secret Service protection to protect him from… reporters.

* And a big coup for Netflix: it will bring back Arrested Development.