Not that I’m one to be giving fashion advice (as my wife would be the first to tell you), but the idea of a scarf that automatically changes colour to match your clothes strikes me as, well…cool.

Get your colour–yes, colour–photographs of Imperial, pre-Revolution Russia here. Gorgeous, and fascinating.

No, honestly, that’s what this story says: a “brain” made of 25,000 neurons grown from a single rat embryo has learned to fly a figher jet simulator. I’m evenly divided between “Cool!” and “Ewwww!” Could go either way. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Methane-producing microbes buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland provide credance to the notion that high methane concentration in areas of the Martian atmosphere could be the result of life. Little green bugs, as it were. (Via The Speculist.)

He suffered from lead poisoning, analysis of bone fragments at the Argonne National Laboratory has confirmed. Deafness is a rare but not unknown complication of “plumbosis,” so that well-known disability of Beethoven’s may also have been caused by lead. Via MedGadget.

It’s not as famous as the one in California, or the one in the Yukon, but Saskatchewan had its own gold rush in the 1930s. Oddly enough, the topic is uranium, not gold. (Perhaps I should explain I’m working on a book for the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan, not currently writing …

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Some people think e-books won’t really take off until e-paper is perfected. That day is coming closer, as this e-paper display in a Tokyo subway station makes clear.

Check out this slide show of some of the most popular and best-selling toys of the past century. (Via Dynamist Blog.) How many did you have?

“Three hundred seventy million years ago or so, Saskatchewan was a very different place, which isn’t surprising, since most of it was underwater.” The topic? Potash.

Icicle lights. LEDs. It seems like every few years there’s another “big thing” in Christmas lighting. But how do they all work? General Electric’s first sets of pre-wired lights intended for home Christmas trees came out in 1904-1905. (Edward Johnson, a business associate of Thomas Edison, was the first to use electric lights on a …

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“I wonder if diagrams such as these would capture the public imagination today?” asks the author of this website of “Unusual Technical Images of Equipment Used in World War II.” And the answer…yes! (At least, this public’s imagination…) (Via digg.)

I’m a writer, write? (Er, right?) And so I present a new daily feature here at Hassenpfeffer: The First (Non-Blogging) Sentence I Wrote Today. Today that would be: It seems like every few years there’s another “big thing” in Christmas lighting. Hey, I didn’t say it was an exciting feature…