Category: Blog

…the headline “Armoured Grizzlies in Sudan within days: Ottawa” makes you think of Philip Pullman.

There’s an obvious cheap joke here, considering how people tend to think of opera singers as being, um, large individuals…but I think I’ll just point you to the story without further comment.

I didn’t know they existed, but they do: and thanks to space-age know-how, they may be reaching the point where ordinary water heaters will become obsolete, saving energy and expense and ensuring the hot water never runs out.

From The New Scientist: “A new microscope sensitive enough to track the real-time motion of a single protein, right down to the scale of its individual atoms, has revealed how genes are copied from DNA – a process essential to life.” From me: “Cool!”

Well, what do you know! Maybe getting your feet cold doescontribute to getting a cold.

Picture this: you’re in a classroom. Your teacher is at the blackboard. She has long, red nails. She reaches out—and scrapes her nails slowly down the blackboard from top to bottom. Got the shivers? You’re not alone. Many people cringe at the mere thought of fingernails on a blackboard, even without hearing that horrible screeching …

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Artist Elizabeth Hickock builds San Francisco landscapes out of Jello. No, I’m not joking. And they’re beautiful! (Via Dynamist Blog.)

You thought your tinfoil hat was protecting you from the government’s invasive mind-control beams? Bwah-ha-ha. Read this definitive study (from MIT, no less) and weep, oh pawn of the powers that be. (Via Media Blog.)

Well, no, not exactly; just good old-fashioned gravity, of the kind exerted by a spacecraft with a goodly supply of mass. But on an incoming asteroid, the effect would be the same…given enough time.

It’s in the works, and could one day lead to superfast robots–or superstrong artificial limbs.

A team at Stanford has figured out a way to focus blurry digital photographs—after they’ve been taken.

It has to be if this amazing new energy source* works as advertised. But that’s a big “if.” But then again, “What if…?” We’ll know soon enough. *…a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste…