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…

The weekend before last my wife and I attended the International Wine and Food Festival at the Banff Springs Hotel. (A dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.) At the event, top wine makers from around the world led 250 attendees through tastings of some of their offerings. Among the guests on hand was …

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Sounds science-fictional (which is why I noticed it, of course)–but they’re coming.

French diving archeologists have discovered the foundation of the ancient lighthouse of Pharos in Alexandria, the seventh wonder of the world. (Via Archaeoblog.)

…are better than men, a University of Bradford study suggests. “Women seem to realise that they are being asked to do something new much more quickly than men. Men tend to blindly carry on with the original task.” Which presumably translates into women being less likely than men to plough into things.