Americans for Tax Reform has a handy reminder list for you.

My favorite:

2. Elliot Spitzer is running for office again

Seriously. Client Number 9, New York’s former Governor will be seeking the position of NYC comptroller. It’s so real he Tweeted it. As if that wasn’t enough Kristin Davis, the woman who provided him with call girls, is running for the spot as well. This probably doesn’t help Anthony Weiner’s bid for mayor. Something’s clearly is in the drinking water.

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Got tired of reading stories about Muslims murdering people. So here are some stair-ish phenomena.

Melomics

Flashing Roadside Emergency Disk

Food Huggers

A Massive Chart of Every Superhero’s Powers Ever

America’s top chain burgers

Microsoft Home Use Program

SolSource grill

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Tell the truth: Who hasn’t wanted to do that?

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 First introduced in May, the Square Stand is a cash register replacement that features both a secure iPad stand and an integrated card reader. It is also able to support additional peripherals like a receipt printer, kitchen printer, cash drawer, and barcode scanners.

Still time to buy Apple stock now that it’s cheap due to the hedge funds dumping it.

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To the rescue come the researchers and their paper, “Tin Anode for Sodium-Ion Batteries Using Natural Wood Fiber as a Mechanical Buffer and Electrolyte Reservoir”. Their brainstorm was to take cellulose fibers from a yellow pine tree, coat them first in carbon nanotubes to improve conductivity and then a tin film – tin being the anode material of choice for both lithium and sodium ion batteries.

Not only did the yellow-pine cellulose fiber absorb much of the shock caused by the heavy sodium ions slamming into the tin, it also served as a fine receptacle for the necessary electrolytes.

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At a test site in Norway, Thor Energy has successfully created a thorium nuclear reactor — but not in the sense that most people think of when they hear the word thorium. The Norwegians haven’t solved the energy crisis and global warming in one fell swoop — they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium reactor. What they have done, though, which is still very cool, is use thorium instead of uranium in a conventional nuclear reactor. In one fell swoop, thorium fuel, which is safer, less messy to clean up, and not prone to nuclear weapons proliferation, could quench the complaints of nuclear power critics everywhere.

Yeah, well, maybe. It’s still progress.

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People are waking up to the bogus nature of the ‘intellectual property’ scam.

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Very dangerous — you go first.

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An engaging look at one of Britain’s more obscure installations.

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With good reason.

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Or they may just be messin’ with us, you never really know.

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To anyone that’s ever broken a bone, the negatives of traditional plaster casts are familiar: they’re cumbersome, heavy, and can get rather smelly. Victoria University of Wellington graduate Jake Evill is looking to change all that with his Cortex cast. A mere concept for now, Evill says the cast — which is specifically fitted to each wearer based on X-rays of the fractured bone and a 3D scan of its surrounding limb — introduces many benefits. First and foremost, you’d be able to wear a longsleeve shirt over the lightweight, ventilated nylon cast. The open design is also shower-friendly, unlike bulky plaster casts.

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A 15-year-old high school junior from Victoria, British Columbia, Ann Makosinski, created a hollow flashlight powered by the holder’s body heat for the Google Science Fair. The invention made her one of 15 finalists, who will travel to Mountain View, California for a prize ceremony held this coming September. Google will choose one winner each out of three age groups, then from that will decide on the final winner, who will receive a grand prize of $50,000 and a trip to the Galapagos Islands.

Baltimore Pit Beef.

Fracture: Glass Photos

Whisk: Home Cooking Made Easy

Squatty Potty. I am not making this up.

NeverWet

RiffUp

SmartHeadlight

9 surprising foods that fight pain

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Yellowish tubes that feed on microorganisms, tunicates are the only animal known to produce cellulose. Cellulose breaks down into sugars that can produce bioethanol. Tunicate are also 60 percent protein when dried and a rich source of omega 3 fatty acids, making them a sought-after addition to salmon feed. They can produce 100 times more protein per 10 square feet than any land-based protein source.

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In the future, patients and doctors will monitor health with data collected constantly inside the body and beamed directly to their mobile device or computer.

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Unlike larger robots, microrobots for applications in the body are too small to carry batteries and motors. To address this challenge, we power and control robots made of magnetic materials using external magnetic fields. Developed at ETH Zurich’s  Multi-Scale Robotics Lab (MSRL), the OctoMag is a magnetic manipulation system that uses electromagnetic coils to wirelessly guide microrobots for ophthalmic surgery. The OctoMag is capable of generating magnetic forces and torques in three dimensions, and is physically restricted to a single hemisphere to allow easy access for patients and physicians. Using an early OctoMag prototype, ex-vivo experiments were performed in pig eyes to study the navigation tasks required for retinal surgery. Following these experiments, a next-generation system was built to accomodate a small animal head, allowing for in-vivo trials. With this system, mobility experiments were conducted in which a microrobot with a diameter of 285 µm (about four times the width of a hair) was navigated reliably through the eye of a rabbit, demonstrating the feasibility of using this technology in surgical applications.

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

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I’m not sure I believe it, but hey, it makes a great story.

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Bones are made of collagen and a mineral — soft and brittle materials, respectively. But combine the two into a bone and they become much stronger. The mineral provides structure while collagen distributes energy over a larger area.

The two interlock in complicated ways, so first the researchers modeled a bone on a computer. Software translated this into a design readable by a Stratasys 3D printer capable of printing with two materials. Within hours, the researchers had their synthetic bone. The 3D printer produced a sheet of polymer about half the size of a piece of paper and one-eighth inch thick. Hard polymer formed the hard bricks of mineral while soft polymer worked as flexible collagen mortar. The material was as tough as bone and more than 20 times stronger than printed polymers that resembled just collagen or mineral, the paper said.

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Leprosy, the disease that causes skin lesions and eventually permanent disfigurement, was a constant threat in Medieval Europe, with as many as one in 30 people infected in some areas. But something remarkable happened around the mid 1500s — disease rates dropped sharply, according to historical records, although scientists were not quite sure why. Now an international team of researchers has uncovered DNA evidence that suggests humans rapidly evolved to fight off the disease.

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After some to’ing and fro’ing Soylent were kind enough to ship Vulture West a week-long supply of the stuff, so with a mild amount of trepidation we began our Soylent adventure on a muggy Thursday night in Oakland, California.

Marinade Infusing Meat Tenderizer. Or interrogation implement. We report, you decide.

Wide Coverage LED Pain Reliever. No indication of whether it’s useful for revealing secret writing in ancient esoteric texts, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Seat of Power. Me want.

Crib Dribbler. Hey, it works for your hamster.

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Officials in three Illinois counties have announced that they will no longer enforce the state’s ban on concealed carry.

They justify their decision by pointing to the Chicago-based 7th Court of Appeals Decision that found the ban unconstitutional in December 2012.

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And about fargin time.

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I never believed half of this stuff, anyway.

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As if the silly hoops that Google and Facebook and Microsoft put you through weren’t enough already….

Read it. And watch the video. I dare you.

Dress up like Elvis and climb aboard.

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Britain’s efforts to change the law of succession across the 16 Commonwealth countries where the Queen is head of state could now be thrown into disarray.

If the challenge succeeds, it means a firstborn girl could lose the right to succession to a younger brother.

The changes to the law brought about by the Coalition had been agreed by all 16 of the Queen’s realms, led by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But professors Genevieve Motard and Patrick Taillon, constitutional experts at Laval University in Quebec City, lodged a case in Quebec Superior Court on Friday.

They allege that the ­Canadian government acted unconstitutionally by failing to seek the approval of each of the ­country’s 10 provinces before agreeing to the changes.

They also say the new succession laws would still prevent a Catholic or other ­non-Anglican from becoming the monarch, in breach of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It’s always something.

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Iain Banks was a big noise among speculative fiction writerdom not only because he was a good writer (which he was) but also because he envisioned a universe in which socialism has triumphed through technology and therefore actually works, a setup that he called The Culture, the sort of world that Lenin et al. thought they would get by force-industrializing the Soviet Union (with results as you see them).

A significant number of ‘writers’ are drones who would really prefer that someone else support them while they Devote Their Time To Art, and so are by inclination socialist (except when they hit it big, in which case what’s theirs is theirs and keep your hands off. Stephen King comes immediately to mind.)

Because speculative fiction attracts a large number of bright but impractical people, it has a larger percentage of socialists than most genres — as one can tell by listening to many of them blather about political issues (which, in the modern world, can include where the coffee in your cup came from). Think English majors who really wanted to be engineers but discovered that it required a lot of math. (‘Math is hard!’)

And that’s not when they’re avowed Marxists, like Steven Brust. But most of them are conventional ‘progressives’, like Isaac Asimov.

Of course, there are a significant minority who actually apply their intelligence to understanding the real world and hence are on the conservative-to-libertarian side of the aisle. Publishers tend to attract people of a compatible bent: lefties gravitate to Tor, and righties to Baen. If you want to know what a writer’s politics are, see by whom s/he is published.

But don’t take my word for it; here’s Charlie Stross, another excellent writer and socialist:

However, I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on my personal sense of loss. Iain’s more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. And in his science fiction he achieved something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do: he was intensely political, and infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that same human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed).

‘Palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity’ is usually the spoor of the ‘progressives’, ‘if only it existed’ is their epitaph.

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The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine; what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know—from 50 feet away—what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew know what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life.

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But it was an expedition he undertook in 2000 that really put him on the map, so to speak: He managed to locate Thonis-Heracleion, an ancient port city (built circa 800 B.C.!) that’s now completely submerged off the coast of Egypt. The hyphenated name hints at its cosmopolitan nature: The Egyptians called it Thonis, the Greeks, Heracleion after a massive temple to Heracles that once stood at the site.

Doghouse Air Conditioner

HealthTap

WheelHarp

The Chillsner

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Robot fish can lead real aquatic life to safety, and apparently robotic weavers can guide silkworms, too. One year after the MIT Media Lab’s artificial spider wove an artificial web, the group has used another such robot to create a biological printer and print a giant cocoon. After using a CNC machine to lay down the foundations, a swarm of 6,500 live silkworms finished the job, depositing their natural silk to create a partially natural, partially artificial structure.

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Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect.

Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Voux’s linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words.

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Researchers have uncovered what is now the oldest known primate fossil, pushing our understanding of human evolution seven million years farther into history than we could see before. Discovery of the 55-million-year-old fossil allowed an international team of researchers to identify a previously unknown species, as well as an unknown genus of animals that surrounds it. The fossil sits at a juncture in evolution that helps to explain how humans, apes, and monkeys all diverged from a small primate known as a tarsier.

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Amazon is planning to kick off a major expansion of its AmazonFresh grocery delivery business as early as this week, sources close to the company claim.

The online retailer has been quietly offering the fresh-food delivery service to customers in the Seattle area for years, but Reuters reports that it now plans to launch it in as many as 20 markets by 2014, including some outside the US.

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For 75 years, Finland’s expectant mothers have been given a box by the state. It’s like a starter kit of clothes, sheets and toys that can even be used as a bed. And some say it helped Finland achieve one of the world’s lowest infant mortality rates.

Hey, at least it isn’t a flatpack.

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The Blue Waters petascale computer at the University of Illinois’ National Centre for Supercomputing Applications is being credited with cracking part of the code of HIV – and possibly helping point the way to new treatments.

Simulations carried out on Blue Waters allowed researchers to determine the precise structure of the HIV capsid – the protein shell protecting the virus, which is an important part of its ability to attack the human immune system.

We have the technology.

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Children who learned multiple languages from birth seemed to partition up their brains, using different parts for different languages, while people who added languages later spread their languages throughout their brains.

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 Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week.

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

“Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in Waterloo’s Faculty of Science. “In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming.”

Remember when they banned CFCs? I do. So I guess we can all relax now.

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Options for elderly patients who can no longer remain independent are limited. Most choices involve assisted living facilities, 24-hour caregivers, or nursing homes. State and federal assistance for payment for individual care is limited, and seniors usually pay for most costs out of pocket. For those patients who have the means to afford assisted living centers or nursing homes, “cruise ship care” is proposed. Traveling alongside traditional tourists, groups of seniors would live on cruise ships for extended periods of time. Cruise ships are similar to assisted living centers in the amenities provided, costs per month, and many other areas. This article begins with an examination of the needs of seniors in assisted living facilities and then explores the feasibility of cruise ship care in answering those needs. Similarities between cruise ship travel and assisted living care, as well as the monetary costs of both options, are defined. A decision tree with selections for non-independent care for seniors was created including cruise ship care as an alternative. Using a Markov model over 20 years, a representative cost-effectiveness analysis was performed that showed that cruises were priced similarly to assisted living centers and were more efficacious. Proposed ways that cruise ship companies could further accommodate the needs of seniors interested in this option are also suggested. Implementation for cruise ship care on the individual basis is also presented. Ultimately, it is wished to introduce a feasible and possibly more desirable option to seniors who can no longer remain independent.

And when the geezers get tiresome, over the side they go. Win-win.

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Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have grown microscopic fields of flower-like structures made of crystals. Project lead Wim L. Noorduin and his colleagues were able to modify the growth of the crystals through tiny chemical alterations of a fluid containing water, liquid glass, and the salt barium chloride. Carbon dioxide from the air dissolved into the solution, forming solid barium carbonate crystals. “This precipitation happens spontaneously,” says Noorduin, but by controlling the amount of carbon dioxide that dissolves into the solution, the team was able to change the way the crystals formed. A high amount of carbon dioxide led to “broad, radiating leaves,” while low carbon dioxide levels could create “a thin stem, or a rosette of petals.”

We have the technology. Kinda scary, really….

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The idea is to harness technology to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean, including marriage, medicine and mysticism. For decades, scholars relied mainly on memory to match up pieces of the Cairo genizah, a treasure trove of papers that include works by the rabbinical scholar Maimonides, parts of Torah scrolls and prayer books, reams of poetry and personal letters, contracts, and court documents, even recipes (there is a particularly vile one for honey-wine).

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If they can beat Costco’s price, I’m in.

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British scientists say they have developed a new type of wheat which could increase productivity by 30%.

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‘Oh, there’s nothing that a wompom cannot do….’