From the CBC: “Christians are recognized by Hollywood as a valuable niche market after Mel Gibson’s version of the crucifixion earned $600 million worldwide.” $600 million is a “niche market?” That’s a nice niche!

Very hard. A pistol won’t do it. Neither will a rifle. You need a shotgun, firing a slug. How do I know? Because somebody conducted an experiment. Let’s hear it for the scientific method! (Via Gizmodo.)

“It’s like something from a horror film,” says a geophysicist, but I think it’s rather beautiful.

…is always good advice.

That’s because it uses light-sensitive bacteria. It also takes four hours to take a picture and works only in red light–but then, it’s more a proof of concept than anything else. It might just help point the way to the first nano-factories.

Don’t look now, but here comes Christmas—and its concurrent cannonade of calories. If visions of sugarplums dancing in your head give you a headache, perhaps the best thing you can do to relieve your stress is…reach for another sugary treat. At least, if you’re a rat. In a recent study led by Yvonne Ulrich-Lai, a …

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Invented by studnets at the National University of Singapore, it uses “negative ions, compressed air and deodorants” to clean clothes without water. Now if only it ran on USB, it would be perfect. (Via Gizmodo.)

The University of California, Santa Barbara, has created a digital collection of more than 5,000 cylinder recordings from the early 20th and late 19th century–and you can listen to them/download them here! (Via By the Way.)

According to Italian researchers, great works of art, such as Michelangelo’s David, can trigger, aggression, nausea and even a desire to destroy the work. Not my reaction when I saw it. I think my first thought was, “Wow, it’s bigger than I realized.” Prosaic, perhaps, but there you go.

The ongoing Gizmodo quest for the world’s most useless USB peripheral turns up a strong contender.

In the immortal words of Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, “Work, work, work, work, work, work, work.”

Harry Taube, born in Neudorf, Sask., educated right here in Regina at Luther College, then in Saskatoon at the University of Saskatchewan, and winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1983, has died. From his acceptance speech: “Science as an intellectual exercise enriches our culture and is in itself ennobling. Each new insight into …

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