…and accompanying image for a blog post on the new study from the University of Michigan’s Addiction Research Center that says smoking can lessen your IQ and harm your ability to think: “ No Wonder Existentialism Never Made Sense.”

No one won either of the $50,000 prizes in a NASA competition designed to lay the groundwork for space elevators–but a team from our very own University of Saskatchewan built a robot that managed to climb the highest, 12 metres, up a 61-metre cable using photoelectric cells to convert radiation from an industrial searchlight into …

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This is interesting: researchers at Oxford University and Imperial College London have identified the exact area of the brain that controls blood pressure–and discoverd that they can increase or decrease patients’ blood pressure by stimulating specific regions with electrodes. Right now that requires brain surgery, but once we perfect methods for stimulating specific parts of …

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It’s buckypaper: “10 times lighter than steel — but 250 times stronger.” Practically able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Fascinating stuff.

Browse this gallery of the top photos in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, organised by London’s Natural History Museum.

…courtesy of the Japanese. But would you really want to wear a skirt while flying such a thing?

That’s Visco for short, and I can’t believe I haven’t run across this amazing site before. If you love pulpy SF art–who doesn’t?–you’ll love this site. (It also includes the much better recent cover art of existing magazines.)

…well, no, I’m not, but what else can you title a post about a congressional report in the U.S. endorsing the idea of buying heavy-lift airships–like the Walrus, a proposed hybrid airship capable of carrying 500 tons over 6,000 miles within a week, without refueling–to get troops and equipment where needed?

Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy Web site liked it more than I did–but reading his review just reminded me of how much I disliked it.

Are you a cat suffering from asthma? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you may be allergic to humans, or at least affected by some of their nasty habits. I know they’re cute when they’re young, but really, maybe it’s time you got rid of those apes-with-delusions-of-grandeur. Dump them outside to …

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Flour may seem, at first glance, like a boring white powder. But it’s much more than that. To begin with, it’s likely to have been made from wheat grown right here in Saskatchewan (which grows about 50 percent of Canada’s wheat). But more than that, it’s scientifically interesting (something I’ve found to be true of …

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Scientists at The University of Manchester have discovered a new method of linking qubit rings, pieces of quantum information–which could hold the key to creating the first practical quantum computers.