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Well, they’re not really panicking — Democrats are about as easy to panic as a cow — but they ought to be.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

The Wolfram Locker.

Scented Necklaces.

Inconspicuous Handcuff Key. For those times when, you know, you just gotta go.

Post It Labeling Tape.

Scooba.

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I’ll bet she is, I’ll bet she is…. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.

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Don’t be underneath it when it does.

Read it. And watch the video.

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Scientists in China say they have developed a way to manipulate liquid metal substances into self-assembling shapes and forms.

The researchers, working out of Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reckon that by applying an electric charge to liquid metal alloys, they could control the behavior of substances and build simple shapes.

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a tiny device they hope will lower that statistic — it’s a 1.4-millimeter silicon chip that takes real-time, 3D images from inside the heart, coronary arteries, and surrounding blood vessels. Using volumetric imaging, it could better guide doctors through heart surgery and allow them to unclog some patients’ arteries without major surgery.

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He certainly deserves it more than Obama.

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Time zones were introduced because of railroads. You remember railroads?

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The Pine Island Glacier has been much studied over the last two decades, as the rate of ice melting into the sea there has accelerated during those years. Many scientists have theorised that this might be due to global warming caused by human burning of fossil fuels. It’s been suggested that the PIG on its own might cause sea levels to rise by several centimetres this century (for background the seas rose about 17cm in the last century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects this to increase massively this century, though there’s plenty of research to suggest otherwise.)

However it now appears that the recent rapid flow of the PIG into the sea may just be one of those things that happens from time to time, as it did 8,000 years ago. This is borne out by research from 2010, in which BAS boffins sent a robot submarine under the glacier’s projecting ice shelf and found that its acceleration in recent times probably resulted from the fact that it has just finished grinding away a troublesome underwater reef which was slowing it down and causing ice to back up.

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A team of material scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have just discovered a new way to create powerful artificial muscles—synthetic sinew that forcefully expands and contracts on command—from low-cost, everyday fibers such as fishing line and high-tension sewing thread. In a study published today in the journal Science¸ the researchers described how they’re doing it: by twisting the materials into springy and energy-dense coils.

Well, ‘fishing line’ and ‘sewing thread’ aren’t materials, they’re products made of materials. The actual materials involved are, in the case of fishing line, probably nylon or dacron, and in the case of sewing thread, cotton or polyester. I should think that a sharply focused mag like Popular Mechanics would have more respect for the intelligence of their readers.

Toilet Auger.

Nightstand Dog House.

Sword Fly Swatter. Gives ‘flèche’ an entirely new meaning.

Tiny electric hatchback for wheelchair users.

Painless treatment to repair teeth.

How Not to Die: 20 Survival Tips You Must Know.

HotLogic Mini Personal Oven.

Gerber Money Clip. (Who uses money clips any more?)

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At the moment, Organovo is synonymous with bioprinting in the 3D printing world. The San Diego–based company will begin selling its printed, living liver tissue later this year to the pharmaceutical industry, which can use it to test new drugs.

But other institutions are hot on Organovo’s trail. Scientists at the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering announced Wednesday that they have successfully printed multiple types of cells and blood vessels, a combination that is necessary to create more complex tissue. They published their work in Advanced Materials (subscription required). A visual walkthrough of their method is available here.

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Sounds like a plan.

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The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians who have obsessed about Platonic solids, a class of geometric forms that are highly regular and are commonly found in nature.

Since Plato’s work, two other classes of equilateral convex polyhedra, as the collective of these shapes are called, have been found: Archimedean solids (including truncated icosahedron) and Kepler solids (including rhombic polyhedra). Nearly 400 years after the last class was described, researchers claim that they may have now invented a new, fourth class, which they call Goldberg polyhedra. Also, they believe that their rules show that an infinite number of such classes could exist.

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We have the technology.

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Well, yeah….

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Watch the government screw it up as they did with fission power.

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Everything bad is good for you.

This is on NPR so it HAS to be true, right?

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Yet another thing that requires better identification than voting in America.

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The robot, which is less than a millimeter long, is just a simple rectangle that contains metal particles. Magnets surrounding the building area pull it in any directions with enough power that the robot can push different blocks of material into place.

The researchers were able to use the robot to assemble 1mm square pieces of gel cut into different shapes, including squares, circles and triangles. But it is also capable of moving more complex shapes like spheres and rods. By sliding up a tiny ramp, the robot can stack objects to build taller structures.

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I hope they didn’t use the guys that made the Obamacare web sites.

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Thanks to recent breakthroughs, the insides of our refrigerators could work very differently in the coming years. Scientists at GE are perfecting a method of transferring heat that uses magnets to achieve temperatures cold enough to freeze water.

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‘Here. Have a Coke and a smile, on me.’

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When offered the choice of playing with either a doll or a toy truck, girls will typically pick the doll and boys will opt for the truck. This isn’t just because society encourages girls to be nurturing and boys to be active, as people once thought. In experiments, male adolescent monkeys also prefer to play with wheeled vehicles while the females prefer dolls — and their societies say nothing on the matter.

The monkey research, conducted with two different species in 2002 and 2008, strongly suggested a biological explanation for children’s toy preferences. In recent years, the question has become: How and why does biology make males (be they monkey or human) prefer trucks, and females, dolls?

Who’ll be the first ‘progressive’ tool to get his/her panties in a wad about this?

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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One of the biggest possible economic impacts of 3D printing  to the U.S. economy is the fact that it may eventually allow corporations to bring jobs back onshore from China. The United States outsources a large number of jobs over to Asia as a way to cut labor costs. 3D printing and robotics promises to change some of this, as companies can utilize industrial scale 3D printers and automation to manufacture parts for their products, cheaper than even the labor force in China can produce them. That’s if, of course China lags behind in their adoption of these technologies.

It appears, however that China is investing heavily in 3D printing, just like those in the U.S. and Europe. Their corporate and government leaders clearly can identify an emerging technology and its possible economic impact on the future of China. In fact, back in June, China announced a gigantic 3D printer, which they claimed was the world’s largest at the time, with a 1.8 m build diameter. Basically the thing could print out a nice sized bathroom vanity if you wanted it to.

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I am not making this up.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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And I can’t think of a more appropriate place.

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Having been to Wellesley in my youth, I suspect it’s because that’s about as close to a nearly naked man that most of them can aspire to for quite a while.

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Not that anyone would notice.

The Hanger Squeegee

Unbreakable Walking Stick Defense Umbrella

Canine Raincoat. Nothing smells worse than a damp pooch.

Personal Steam Inhaler.

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Experiments showed that a traumatic event could affect the DNA in sperm and alter the brains and behaviour of subsequent generations.

A Nature Neuroscience study shows mice trained to avoid a smell passed their aversion on to their “grandchildren”.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, call your office.

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Researchers at IPCMS in Strasbourg, working with a team from the Institut Parisien de Chimie Moléculaire (CNRS/UPMC), have produced an LED that consists of a single molecule.

While it’s unlikely ever to serve as a display, the molecular LED is an important step forward in miniaturising components to provide optical communications in molecular-scale computing, the researchers say.

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Can they cope with a nail through your sidewall?

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The key to bones’ strength is that they are made of a repeating pattern. Light materials like foam have a random structure, which is why they collapse if any pressure is applied. The researchers tried a variety of patterns, including cubes, pyramids and honeycombs. They were able to use a lithography machine to create at least 10 different options made of a polymer covered in an aluminum compound. They found that some buckled under pressure while others fractured.

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So he’s not sleeping under a mountain somewhere with his paladins waiting to ride to our rescue in time of need?

Pity.

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The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP, has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland.

But in 2009 their borehole at Krafla, northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below, at searing temperatures of 900-1000°C.

Now your talking….

Journal of Personal Science: Baby Shampoo Cured My Sinusitis

HeatTrak Snow and Ice Heated Stair Mat

Pivoting Microdermabrasion Brush  I look a this and think, ‘Hmmm. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques….’

Shredder Scissors

The Backpack Cannon

Seed spoons

Igloo-making tool

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A US team at the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 men, women, boys and girls and found striking differences.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Male brains appeared to be wired front to back, with few connections bridging the two hemispheres.

In females, the pathways criss-crossed between left and right.

These differences might explain why men, in general, tend to be better at learning and performing a single task, like cycling or navigating, whereas women are more equipped for multitasking, say the researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Whoda thunkit.

But experts have questioned whether it can be that simple, arguing it is a huge leap to extrapolate from anatomical differences to try to explain behavioural variation between the sexes. Also, brain connections are not set and can change throughout life.

Not a quote, but a bald unsupported statement by the writer of the article — after all, a Voice of the Crust cannot let this contradiction of the Narrative go unchallenged.

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Luca Iaconi-Stewart is building a paper airplane unlike anything you’ve ever seen before — and it’s taking him years to get it just right. He’s building a 1:60 scale model of a Boeing 777, one so detailed even the tiny chairs and bathrooms look real. There are even miniature meal carts. He starts by printing out object designs and then slicing them down with an X-Acto knife, before gluing it all together. Iaconi-Stewart’s building material of choice is the manila file folder, something he first started using in a high school architecture class. “Even back then I found it a really versatile material; it’s flexible enough to shape and mold, but it can be incredibly strong if you engineer it properly,” he tells The Verge. “I never really tried anything else.”

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Campaigners wanting to protect the site of a 15th Century Wars of the Roses battlefield have been given more time to buy it.

The land where the Battle of Tewkesbury was fought was due to be sold in an auction, with a deadline of 3 February.

Tewkesbury Borough Council has listed the site as an asset of community value, meaning it cannot be sold for six months.

The land has been put up for sale by Tewkesbury School’s trust fund.

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Google Glass is still a technology very much in its infancy, looking for the specific utilities and features that’ll make it useful to a broader market than the developers and enthusiasts who are currently experimenting with the device. One of those developers is Patrick Jackson of Rocky Mount, North Carolina — the Glassware apps he’s building aren’t going to be the ones to make Glass a widely-accepted consumer device, but despite that, he’s building out a specific, potentially life-saving use case for Google’s wearable.

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Kwelia heat maps have been a great way to visualize rental prices with a detailed, city-wide view of median prices per square foot, and today the maps are getting additional features. Now, in addition to the median price per square foot overlay, you can explore every rental market by median income as well as by median rent as a percentage of median income. Simply toggle the “switch layers” button on the bottom left portion of the map and select your desired data layer to look around.

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The dirty secret of almost anything made out of plastic — from your soda bottle to a trash bag  — is that there’s a good chance it was made with ingredients that come from crude oil. A startup named Siluria is looking to swap out that crude oil with natural gas, which could make plastics and chemicals just a little less terrible for the planet.

If you’ve heard of startup Siluria before it’s probably because of the people involved with the company. Former Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy is on the board, the core tech came out of the labs of well-known MIT scientist Angela Belcher, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s fund also backed the firm. But the six-year-old company could be on the cusp of finally breaking out, thanks to a new partnership with the U.S. arm of massive Brazilian petrochemical company Braskem.

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Every newly developed pharmaceutical drug takes a long, winding path before it is ever administered to a human in a clinical trial. It’s first tested in a petri dish and on animals, which, it turns out, are fairly poor ways to predict how successful a drug will be for a human.

Soon, it will be possible to cut out dishes and animals and instead test drugs directly on living human tissue. San Diego-based Organovo, which develops methods to 3D print living tissue, announced today that it will partner with two National Institutes of Health groups to print tissue for medical purposes.

“Researchers who develop new therapies for patients are too often hampered by animal models and traditional cell culture models that are poor predictors of drug efficacy and toxicity in human beings,” Organovo CEO Keith Murphy said in a release. “Our 3D printer creates living human tissues that more closely reproduce in vivo human tissues.”

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“Almost all prior studies administered caffeine before the study session, so if there is an enhancement, it’s not clear if it’s due to caffeine’s effects on attention, vigilance, focus, or other factors,” Yassa said. “By administering caffeine after the experiment, we rule out all of these effects and make sure that if there is an enhancement, it’s due to memory and nothing else.”

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Plans have been unveiled for the Hypermach SonicStar, a business jet which will be capable of a top speed of 2,664mph – twice as fast as Concorde. It will fly at 62,000ft, allowing passengers to see the curvature of the earth.