Hogblog leads us to the dark matter flowchart, laying out explicitly and definitively for all time the intricate nexus linking elementary particle physics with cosmology. It was designed, around 1986, by a group of Princeton graduate students who have now gone on to (arguably) greater glory elsewhere
A label that changes colour as fruit ripens is allowing shoppers to see whether pears are ready to eat without have to squeeze them. The system, developed at the Horticulture and Food Research Institute of New Zealand, uses a punnet that traps the volatile compounds fruit emit. As the fruit ripen, the colour of the label changes in response to changing concentrations of these compounds
Hibernating bears have a unique ability to stop their bones from degenerating during long periods of inactivity, a finding that is stimulating the search for new treatments for osteoporosis
Just half a litre of blood and a few hours could be all it takes to create a personalised body repair kit, if controversial claims prove true. TriStem, the small London-based company, says it can revert white blood cells into a stem-cell like state. This would make them capable of regenerating many body tissues and treating illnesses from heart disease to Parkinson’s. The company has now published some evidence, but many experts remain very sceptical
Darren Barefoot points out a consumer-sized wind turbine from Windsave. A very nice device that allows you to generate wind power at very low wind speeds
Melani McAlister, an associate professor of American studies at George Washington University, takes us on an interesting journey through the evangelical mind and its obsession with fulfilling its end times prophecy at any cost — as well as making a tidy profit on the side
A new device called a dog on a chip may combine the benefits of technology and nature by not only detecting dangerous or illicit substances but by providing the electronic equivalent of a dog barking
For decades scientists and farming bodies have been trying to find alternatives to shearing for removing the wool from the sheep’s back. All sorts of weird inventions have come and gone but one, it seems could now be here to stay. Bioclip involves the use of an injection to break the wool. The product is now used commercially on tens of thousands of young sheep and within weeks Bioclip will announce that an international company will distribute the product throughout Australia
Don’t try this at home boys and girls… PowerLabs is where a serious electricity geek keeps track of his many rail guns, disk shooters, Tesla coils and related projects, documenting them with video, stills, blueprints and tutorials
A new species of baleen whale has been discovered. The stunning find, made after researchers studied the body shape and genetics of a few leviathan skeletons gathering dust for the last 25 years in a Japanese museum, brings the total number of known species in the main genus of baleen whale to eight
A must for the Monty Python fan: leave your mark in the sand with the weirdness of Spam thongs.
Everything Linux has an entire section devoted to silly USB devices, but the dumbest one has got to be the USB xmas tree light that will flash through six festive colours. It’s nauseating enough to cause co-workers to snap and insert the device into one of your bodily orifices.
T-Shirt Hell is guaranteed to have a shirt to offend everyone.
I’m fascinated by magnets and the Green Man has been teasing me with a shiny new one… behold the cow magnet. They’re not for attracting cows. Cows eat everything from grass and dirt to nails, staples and bits of bailing wire. Cow magnets attract these chunks of stray metal that would otherwise lodge in the honeycombed walls of the recticulum, threatening the surrounding vital organs and causing irritation and inflammation, known as Hardware Disease.
Research done by Jennifer Richeson, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, shows that political correctness in American society takes it’s toll on cognitive ability. It appears that white Americans, when placed in a situation where they are interacting with blacks, spend so much of their cognitive capacity ensuring that they show no racial bias that it impedes their ability to do other cognitive tasks
In the Robert Redford Building, toilets flush themselves with rainwater — except for the urinals, which use no water at all — the floors are made of bamboo and the carpets from hemp
Daniel Schacter and Scott Slotnick, at Harvard University, have revealed characteristic activity in the brain that predicts whether a memory is accurate or false. The difference occurs at the time of recall, suggesting that a test for false memory might one day be possible
Before you complain about your job, take a look at some of the most noxious jobs in science. Some of the career gems include; fart-sniffer, barnyard masturbator, and prison-rape researcher. Then there’s the outright terrifying; the pre-med student who ate, drank, and breathed the blood, urine and vomit of yellow-fever victims
Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated for the first time that they can easily apply a film of tiny, high-performance silicon nanowires to glass and plastic, a development that could pave the way for the next generation of cheaper, lighter and more powerful consumer electronics. The development could lead to such futuristic products as disposable computers and optical displays that can be worn in your clothes or contact lenses
Law enforcement officers currently search for prints by dusting a crime scene with fluorescent powder. This sticks to the oily residue left by the fingertip, showing up the whorls and ridges. But sometimes the prints are not clear enough to finger a suspect. A new dust being developed at the University of Sunderland is made of sticky nanoparticles could help. The nanoparticles are tiny glass spheres between 200 and 600nm in diameter. As well as being speckled with a fluorescent dye, they are coated with hydrophobic molecules, which are repelled by water and attracted to oil. So they fix tightly to the fingerprint
People with urinary incontinence could one day use a remote control to keep their bodily functions in check. Scientists from the University of Melbourne say they are close to making replacement sphincters operable by remote control — via Die Puny Humans
Modern-day medicinal use of leeches is limited to the treatment of blood clotting problems after surgery. Dr Gustav Dobos, from Kliniken Essen-Mitte, and colleagues maintain that leech saliva contains anti-inflammatory substances and other chemicals, which could relieve symptoms of arthritis
Warren Ellis offers a tidy summation on a lengthy Scientific American physics article, Information in the Holographic Universe:
The universe is actually a two-dimensional plane packed with information, and the three-dimensions universe we perceive is nothing but an expression of that information. Matter and energy and life are, in fact, holograms. It leaves something very very interesting open for the future. If the universe is a vast two-dimensional plane of information — then it can be hacked.
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