Challenge: Recent Research

For the last two years, I've been taking part in the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. The first link will take you to the list of topics; the second one goes to the homepage, where you can find a post with everyone's responses each week. Feel free to join in! 

Today's prompt is "recent topics I've Googled," and boy is that a dangerous prompt. I mean, it's a well-documented fact that the search histories of writers are indistinguishable from those of serial killers; if I'm not on a half-dozen FBI watch-lists already, the federal government is not doing its job. 

But, all right. Recent topics I've looked up online: 

• Tumbleweeds. This one was Firstborn's fault; he mentioned that tumbleweeds were an invasive species, which fact I'd either never known or else completely forgotten. He's right, though. And in certain parts of the United States, tumbleweeds are an unholy terror: they can tangle with each other and form huge clumps -- like fifteen to twenty feet deep -- burying cars and trucks, trapping people in houses, and blocking streets and highways.
   
  
• Morning sickness. This was for a bit of writing; I was mainly checking to see how early it showed up, but verisimilitude is all about getting the details right...
   
  
• Bagua Dao. This one's a bit misleading, if you don't have the context. The bagua (or pakua) are the Eight Trigrams of Taoist philosophy. However, there is a Chinese martial art built around (and named for) these principles: Bagua. A dao is basically just a saber; single-handed sabers feature in pretty much any of the classical Chinese martial arts. A bagua dao, however, is a style of saber more-or-less unique to the practice of Bagua: generally two-handed, with a curved blade that widens towards the tip.
  
  So why was I looking for this? Well, first of all, to see if there were any decent ones currently on the market. I don't really collect swords anymore, but... I haven't quite shaken the temptation, either. But secondly, it's because I hate the word "falchion", and that is directly the fault of Dungeons and Dragons. Historical falchions were one-handed slashing weapons, similar in cross-section to a machete but lighter and sharper. If you're just looking at an illustration, they look like a big, heavy, cleaving weapon, which I suspect is how they ended up in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with a surprisingly high damage rating. Regardless, by the time D&D got to its third edition it was using "falchion" as a term for something like a two-handed scimitar. (Currently, D&D is in 5th Edition, and the two-handed saber or scimitar doesn't seem to exist there at all; I guess you'd just use the stats for a greatsword.)
  
  One of the campaigns I play in still uses Third Edition (actually 3.5) rules, and two of the characters I play in that campaign use "falchions". So basically, I was looking this up as part of the process of visualizing the difference between what my half-dragon paladin (who's about seven feet tall and ridiculously strong) uses, and what my elf barbarian (who's about five-foot-six and, well, actually fairly strong himself but lighter and faster) uses. The paladin uses something like the bagua dao; the barbarian uses more of a two-handed scimitar. (I'd also considered having him use something like the blades that are currently marketed as dadao, but I'm saving that for another character.)

So, off the top of my head, those are some of the things that I've Googled recently, plus a modest digression on the naming conventions of two-handed sabers.  

What have you been looking up?