Although the creativity of the human mind is theoretically limitless, people often have incredible difficulty in finding a novel name when it comes to labelling a new Internet domain or an email account. This individual challenge is multiplied on an exponential scale when it comes to naming a new company.  In this article by Brian Hayes in American Scientist, the daunting shortage of new names – and new numbers – in many areas of business is discussed.

The Brewers Association, the Boulder, Colorado-based trade association that hosts the Great American Beer Festival, has updated its advertising and marketing code, placing restrictions on the marketing of beer with brand names and labels seen as sexually explicit, lewd, or demeaning.

An independent, three-member panel that brings expertise from academia, marketing and law will take up a case when another brewery lodges a complaint. If a brand name wins an award but has been deemed inappropriate, it is not allowed to use names and logos from the Great American Beer Festival, which will be Oct. 5-7 in Denver, or World Beer Cup to promote their winning beer.

Science fiction and fantasy have inspired the naming of many plants and animals. Some two decades ago, the intrepid zoological collector Harry Conley became the very first researcher to capture a maddeningly elusive species of crab, now named Harryplax severus.  In honour of this spectacular discovery, the crab was given Conley’s first name.  And, in honour of the crab’s impressive ability to keep its identity such a well-guarded secret, the illusive crustacean was given a second name inspired by Harry Potter’s teacher, Severus Snape. Writing in Zoekeys, Jose Mendoza and Peter Ng said they had named the new species severus as an allusion to the notorious and misunderstood potions master “for his ability to keep one of the most important secrets in the story”.

In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: that every culture in history, when they developed their languages, invented words for colors in the exact same order. They claimed to know this based off of a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red , and so on. The theory was revolutionary — and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge. To learn more, watch this short video from Vox.com, or click through to YouTube.

One of the many skills that helped enslaved Africans survive in the Americas was their in-depth knowledge of plant life. Modern linguists and ethnobotanists working together have revealed the importance of African names in revealing the breadth and depth of this collective naturalist knowledge. Ethnobotanist Tinde van Andel describes how such work has spawned new collaborations between botanists and linguists. (And you can read the original paper, published in PNAS, here.)

Albert, Lucy, Ollie, Penny, Pearl, Riley, and Yoshi – friends? Video game characters? Names from Beatles’ songs? They’re actually the names of startups, part of a trend of using familiar, friendly personal names for new businesses. At TechCrunch, Joanna Glasner looks at how startups name themselves and which trends are on the rise – and on the way out.