Ammunition for parents

I know, I’m old, and even when I was young, I wasn’t cool, but I’ve never understood lip-piercing, nose-piercing, tongue-piercing, other-bodily-part-piercing–even ear-piercing is suspect, as far as I’m concerned. Why would you want to do that to yourself? Now comes a scientific reason to object, should my daughter one day (God forbid) seek to pierce …

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The old ways are the best ways

This just in! The best way to rid the hands of disease viruses is…soap and water.

Man bites dog, cat shoots owner

As the famous quote has it, when a dog bites a man, that’s not news. When a man bites a dog, that’s news. No doubt when a cat bites a man, that’s not news, either–but when a cat shoots its owner–well, that is undoubtedly news. The weapon in question was a 9mm handgun, and the …

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Giant man-eating croc captured, saved from mob in Uganda

With a headline like that, the story itself is kind of anti-climactic.

News from the Battle of the Bug

Humans and insects have been fighting over whose turn it is to eat the plants (and, in the case of mosquitoes, over whose blood is it, anyway?) for a very long time–but recent research may be about to give us two-legs a leg up over the six-legs. More than 3,000 years ago, the Chinese used …

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Teenage girl beats arm-wrestling robots!

In the first ever human-versus-machine arm-wrestling competition, a 17-year-old girl beat three robotic wrestling arms in a matter of seconds. Artificial muscles still can’t measure up to the real thing, it appears.

The New York genome project

Craig Benter is siphoning off some New York City air every day and amplifying the DNA of the fungi, bacteria and viruses it contains, in an effort to find out just what is in the air of a major city–a project that could aid efforts against bioterrorism, and will almost certainly turn up some fascinating …

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Safe drinking water for $6 a year

A former U.S. Navy Captain, Joseph A. D’Emidio, has invented a unique pour-through water filter called Disket that can treat microbial contaminated surface water for a family of five for around $6 U.S. per year–something that has the potential to save millions of lives.

World’s tallest building

Here’s an interesting article from Architecture Week about the world’s tallest building (for the moment), the new Taipei 101 Tower. It’s built just a couple of hundred metres from a fault line, so the engineering challenge was, well, immense.

News on Doctor Who!

I was just thinking I hadn’t heard anything about the new installment of Doctor Who recently, when lo and behold, here’s a story. Most exciting news? CBC will carry the new series, beginning in April!

Snakebots and scorpions

And while we’re on the subject of weird-looking robots, check out what NASA’s been up to.

Robot dinosaurs to roam World Expo

Robit scale models of Dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus rex and Parasaurolophys will stroll the grounds of the upcoming World Expo in Japan.