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Where she was beheaded, no doubt, because she wasn’t Muslim. Hey … it happens.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Angelina Jolie. I hope.

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‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.

Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.

Cue hordes of Global Warming lemming running around and screaming about how we’re all gonna die when the sea levels rise.

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Today, Foursquare is expanding Specials to the rest of the world through partnerships with Visa and MasterCard for both credit and debit cards. This means that Visa and MasterCard can approach Foursquare to reward cardholders for checking in to places like Burger King. Merchants, on the other hand, get enhanced analytics from Foursquare about the kinds of people spending money at their location. “Every person in the US has an American Express, Visa, or MasterCard credit or debit card, and the offers now work for all of them,” Product Manager Noah Weiss says.

I wish someone would tell this to the stupid women who stand in the grocery checkout lane taking half an hour to write a check. Sheesh.

Once you’ve initially added a credit card to your Foursquare account, discounts activate automatically any time you check in to an eligible location, like a restaurant or bar.

My bank has a similar program that gives me rebates (miniscule, but better than nothing) when I shop with local merchants and use their debit card. Once I ‘load’ the discount on the card (which takes about a second), I get the rebate whenever I use the card at that merchant. Since I use the card to pay for damned near everything, it’s totally painless for me. At the end of the month, they total up the rebate and credit my account. Granted, the rebates are miniscule, but they’re nevertheless greater than any interest I could earn on my checking or savings account in the Ben Bernanke Era, so I am content.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

In fact, the physicists found that just one spider web could do the job — if it were the web of Darwin’s bark spider from Madagascar. The silk has been found to be tougher than any other known material and more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

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In addition to making our lives more comfortable, advancing technology allows us to waste time in ever new and different ways.

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

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Flowers’ methods of communicating are at least as sophisticated as any devised by an advertising agency, according to a new study, published today in Science Express by researchers from the University of Bristol.  However, for any advert to be successful, it has to reach, and be perceived by, its target audience.  The research shows for the first time that pollinators such as bumblebees are able to find and distinguish electric signals given out by flowers.

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Thanks to decades of breeding, the modern agricultural tomato has a lot of properties that are great for farmers: the plants are incredibly productive, and the resulting tomatoes hold up well to shipping. Just one small problem: they are nearly tasteless. Heirloom tomato strains have become available precisely because people aren’t especially interested in the mass-produced, modern tomato.

In the words of a panel at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of science, we “broke” the tomato by allowing the plant breeders to respond to the needs of farmers, instead of the tomato’s end-users: consumers.

Gee, Congress does the same thing. Unfortunately, voters don’t have any panel of scientists to stick up for them.

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You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there’s a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a “language protein” in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven’t been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

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Our cells remain chimeras, a hybrid fusion of unrelated creatures.

The genes date from an event 1.5 billion years ago, when two kinds of simple cells, neither having a nucleus or cellular membrane, shacked up and created an entirely new form of life: eukaryotes.

While the two distinct communities of genes work together to keep cell machinery ticking, they otherwise stay out of each other’s hair, report biologists from the National University of Ireland.

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In a spectacle that might have beguiled poets, lovers and songwriters if only they had been around to see it, Earth once had two moons, astronomers now think. But the smaller one smashed into the other in what is being called the “big splat.”

The result: Our planet was left with a single bulked-up and ever-so-slightly lopsided moon.

The astronomers came up with the scenario to explain why the moon’s far side is so much more hilly than the one that is always facing Earth.

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In the quest to find new materials with exotic properties such as superconductivity, physicists are always on the lookout for new ways electrons can push each other around. For example, last week scientists announced they’d created a new kind of solar cell by discovering new electronic properties using a large-scale computer simulation. To discover properties that occur under more extreme conditions, theoretical physicists like Coleman write the equations that are sent over to experimental physicists who run tests using devices like the Large Hadron Collider to see if they hold up. “Along the way, we sometimes stumble across something amazing like high temperature superconductivity, which works well for levitating trains,” Coleman said.

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 Automakers have long resorted to incentives like zero-percent financing, rewards points and rebates to inspire customer loyalty. Now Honda is offering a different deal: inexpensive home solar power systems for customers.

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For a universe so old and so illustrious, the end may be boring and lightning quick: According to one Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician, if what we know about the Higgs boson subatomic particle is true, the universe may come to an end when another universe slurps us up at light speed.

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” Joseph Lykken said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Monday. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself.”

Well — something to look forward to, then.

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Philipp Ronnenberg, a masters student in design interactions at the Royal College of Art in London, recently showed off the first prototype sensors for his alternate “Open Positioning System,” which are designed to pick up regular seismic waves given off by large machinery in nearby power plants and factories. Once a sensor detects at least three different nearby seismic wave sources, Ronnenberg theorizes it should be able to determine its location.

I have my doubts. But it’s an interesting idea.

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All Around Pizza and Deli in Virginia Beach, VA, is offering a 15% discount to customers who carry a gun in with them or show a concealed carry handgun permit.

Virginia Beach is the off-base residential suburb of Norfolk preferred by those working at the Norfolk Naval Base and a number of other Navy installations, including the East Coast SEAL teams.

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I am not making this up.

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I am fully prepared to believe it.

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Usually, public college administrators who blatantly violate the Constitution and due process rights get off scot-free even when they lose, as their employers (read: the taxpayers) get stuck with the bill for their transgressions. The thin reed of reason on which this “qualified immunity” rests is that administrators supposedly didn’t know that their actions were unconstitutional when they took them. (Yes, that’s pretty farfetched in most of the case FIRE sees, but courts tend to buy it.)

Zaccari appealed this finding, and it went all the way to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, where Zaccari lost. When the appeals were finished and the case came before a jury, the jig was up: Zaccari personally owes Barnes $50,000—and the court has not even assessed attorneys’ fees yet.

A step in the right direction, but I predict it won’t go beyond that single step. The Crust will take care of their own, and if a judge wanders in who refuses to get with the program, he (or she) will soon be replaced.

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I’m impressed.

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A very elegant design.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Pity they aren’t yellow….

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Well, I’m glad that’s settled. I’d hate to go through life not knowing for sure what killed off the dinosaurs.

At least it wasn’t Global Warming.

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The British Library, famed for holding every book published in the UK over the past hundred years, has added digital copies of some of its older manuscripts. The works were digitized as part of an ongoing project to make fragile historical documents available to the public, and include a Leonardo Da Vinci notebook, the Harley Golden Gospels, and the oldest-known copy of Beowulf. All of the manuscripts are available through the British Library’s Digitised Manuscript page, along with hundreds of other documents.

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Only in Japan….

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

I especially like the Hamblin glasses.

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Two economics professors at the University of California, Davis have published a paper arguing that mixed-gender high schools are at least partially to blame for the persistent gender gap in the salaries of men and women.

In a working paper published by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Massimo Anelli and Giovanni Peri demonstrate that students who attended all-boys or all-girls high schools are considerably more likely to embrace college majors associated with high-paying jobs, such as medicine or engineering.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Most insects have no trouble moving around when the moon is bright, but darker nights can make nighttime navigation a bit more difficult. African dung beetles, however, have apparently found a workaround — the Milky Way. A recent study from researchers in Sweden and South Africa found that on moonless nights, dung beetles use the stars to help orient themselves, a rather surprising tactic for a creature that spends so much time with its nose to the ground. In fact, scientists say these findings are the first evidence of any insect having celestial navigation capabilities.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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Tudor and Stuart histories insist that the remains contained in an urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren are those of Edward V and Richard Duke of York who were “stifled with pillows … by the order of their perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper”, as the 17th-century inscription puts it. A concerted attempt to get the urn opened was made by the Richard III Society, the group behind this week’s confirmation of Richard III’s remains, together with the BBC in 1993 and again by Channel 4 in 1995. A Home Office file shows the then dean of Westminster, the Very Rev Michael Mayne, strongly resisted both requests despite being “pressed very hard to agree” to allow the bones to be submitted to carbon dating, to match their deaths to Richard III’s reign, and DNA testing to prove their identities.

Buckingham Palace and then home secretary, Michael Howard, were consulted and both the Queen and the minister were in “full agreement” with the church authorities that matter should not be reopened. The dean took advice from the historian Lord Blake and an Oxford archaeology professor, Edward Hall, who said carbon dating of a sample from the late 15th century would only establish the accuracy of the bones within plus or minus 50 years. Richard III occupied the throne for two years between 1483 and 1485 before his death in the battle of Bosworth Field. “It could not therefore differentiate between Richard III or Henry VII – or another – being the guilty party. Nor would the C/14 technique give any clue as to the age at death of the children,” the dean said.

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[I]f your car is ever stolen, your first calls should be to every cab company in the city. You offer a $50 reward to the driver who finds it AND a $50 reward to the dispatcher on duty when the car is found. The latter is to encourage dispatchers on shift to continually remind drivers of your stolen car. Of course you should call the police too but first things first. There are a lot more cabs than cops so cabbies will find it first -and they’re more frequently going in places cops typically don’t go, like apartment and motel complex parking lots, back alleys etc. Lastly, once the car is found, a swarm of cabs will descend and surround it because cabbies, like anyone else, love excitement and want to catch bad guys.

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If you know a quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard III, chances are it is the king’s last, desperate plea to escape his fate.

But the writer’s imagination aside, the discovery of his skeleton beneath a Leicester car park – combined with historical research and weapons analysis – means we now are closer to the grisly truth.

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At-home dads aren’t trying to be perfect moms, says a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Instead, they take pride in letting their children take more risks on the playground, compared with their spouses. They tend to jettison daily routines in favor of spontaneous adventures with the kids. And many use technology or DIY skills to squeeze household budgets, or find shortcuts through projects and chores, says the study, based on interviews, observation of father-child outings and an analysis of thousands of pages of at-home dads’ blogs and online commentary.

And about time, too.

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In today’s exciting episode, we learn  yet again that attempts to cancel the 20th century do not represent progress, however ‘progressive’ they may be labelled.

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Another paper, then, called “Detecting and mapping buried buildings with Ground-Penetrating Radar at an ancient village in northwestern Argentina,” published in 2010 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, describes an archaeological survey in which ground-penetrating radar was used “in order to detect new buildings,” including a system of “complex wall distribution and a number of unknown enclosures.”

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The picture’s conceit is that Hansel and Gretel, having survived their childhood encounter with the kiddie-baking cottage witch, have grown up to become a semi-sullen Jeremy Renner and foxy Gemma Arterton. They’re now freelance witch-hunters, outfitted in stylish black leathers and armed with formidable steampunk weaponry. (Gretel’s complicated crossbow can fire in two lateral directions at once; Hansel’s huge scattergun could blow a hole in the moon.) For reasons they don’t understand (a key plot point), they’re immune to witchy spells and curses. This makes their job a little easier, and it’s not brain surgery to begin with. “If you’re gonna kill a witch,” Hansel says, “set her ass on fire.”

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In recent decades it has become the tradition for the monarch to abdicate.

Queen Beatrix’s mother Juliana resigned the throne in 1980 on her 71st birthday, and her grandmother Wilhelmina abdicated in 1948 at the age of 68.

I guess she just got tired of all the bullshit.

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A collection of vampires is called a ‘scourge’. Just thought you’d like to know.

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Here’s a brief rundown of some of things graphene represents:

• The best electrical conductor, at room temperature
• The best thermal conductor, even more so than carbon nanotubes
• The strongest material, despite being the thinnest
• The stiffest material, despite being the most ductile

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Scientists analysing ancient ice samples say that the Greenland ice sheet withstood temperatures much higher than today’s for many thousands of years during a period of global warming more than 120,000 years ago, losing just a quarter of its mass. It had been widely suggested – by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for instance – that any such warming would melt the entire sheet, leading to massive sea-level rises.

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

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 WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court threw out a federal rule on renewable fuels on Friday, saying that a quota set by the Environmental Protection Agency for incorporating liquids made from woody crops and wastes into car and truck fuels was based on wishful thinking rather than realistic estimates of what could be achieved.

At last, some good news.

Magnetic Light Switch Covers

How to Tie a Eldredge Necktie Knot

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A new polymer developed at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Hong Kong Polytechnic University could be used to enable cheap cotton to provide water in deserts and other arid regions. Researchers write that at low temperatures, cotton treated with the polymer becomes super-absorbent, and can hold up to 340 percent of its own weight in water (compared to just 18 percent without the polymer). As the treated cotton gets hotter, it automatically releases “totally pure water,” and completely releases all absorbed water as it reaches 34 degrees Celsius.

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We’ve already seen folks at MIT’s Research Labs working on ways to 3D print the frame of a home in a day, as opposed to the month it would take a construction crew to do the same. But it isn’t just geeks taking an interest; a Dutch architect is interested in 3D printing a home, with the hopes that it’ll be ready by 2014.

Reda it.

Wangfujing is the latest area of Beijing to have its Chinglish tidied up, after Dongcheng district chengguan (urban management officers) helped foreign affairs officers to inform store owners of their errors in translation Tuesday.

Forty stores in the famed shopping street were found to have problematic English in their signs and labels, according to Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages (BSFL), a program launched by the municipal government to promote the use of English.

“The way they translated the signs was so literal, so word by word, they can hardly be understood by foreign travelers,” BSFL wrote on its website.

Well, we can’t have that.

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In my column this week, I asked why police officers should be allowed to have so-called high-capacity magazines if they have no defensive value. Since “no one needs” to fire more than X number of rounds before reloading (and assuming that “need” should define what people are allowed to possess), why not apply the same limit to everyone? It looks like the New York legislature, which this week reduced the state’s magazine limit from 10 rounds to seven, did take an evenhanded approach—but only by accident. According to DNAinfo.com and WABC, the ABC station in New York, legislators were in such a rush to impose new gun restrictions that they forgot to exempt active-duty and retired law enforcement officers from the new magazine rule. Whoops.

Legislators apparently lost sight of the basic Crustian principle that some animals are more equal than others. Uh-oh.

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If you’ve never heard about the world of high-speed boating, there are some technological and human feats in Fisher’s piece that go far beyond what comes to mind when most of us think of boating — when Larsen and his team broke the outright world speed sailing record in November, the Vesta SailRocket Mark 2 was regularly going in excess of 60 knots.

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A dramatic decline in cases of pubic lice has been linked to growing enthusiasm for the Brazilian bikini wax, and trimmed shrubbery in general.

Phthirus pubis is estimated to infest between 2 and 10 per cent of people worldwide, according to this report, but the species could be heading for “disaster” if humans persist in mowing their nether regions.

A 2011 study by Kenyon College in Ohio revealed that “more than 80 per cent of college students in the US remove all or some of their pubic hair, as well as a majority of university-aged men and women in Australia”.*

Hair today, gone tomorrow. Say not that the struggle nought availeth.

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Nevertheless, he is pleased, because he was able to bring notes, bits of debris and bones back to Heidelberg. Yule has concluded that Zafar was the center of an Arab tribal confederation, a realm that was two million square kilometers (about 772,000 square miles) large and exerted its influence all the way to Mecca.