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An international team of scientists has successfully found a way to spin tens of millions of carbon nanotubes into a flexible conductive thread that’s a quarter of the thickness of human hair.

“We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don’t exist in any other material,” said lead researcher Matteo Pasquali of Rice University. “It looks like black cotton thread but behaves like both metal wires and strong carbon fibers.”

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“Air travel has a hassle factor. You have to turn off devices for takeoff and landing and there is often no Wi-Fi,” Schwieterman said. “On the other hand, you can get on a bus with your laptop and you’re set for the day.”

Not to mention getting your junk groped by the Post Office TSA.

“You look at the economics of single-occupant driving, and young people see it as almost ridiculous to drive long distances alone,” he said. “Gas itself is far more than the bus fare if you look at the typical price from, say, Chicago to Detroit [roughly $35 round-trip].”

And God alone knows how much it would cost by air, assuming your flight doesn’t get cancelled.

Expanding rail service, meanwhile, has been a difficult proposition in recessionary times because it requires years of planning and regulation.

And costs out the ass, usually at taxpayers’ expense, and they just aren’t willing to put up with such boondoggles any more.

“Taxpayers have been footing the bill for Amtrak’s gravy train for over 40 years, and all they’ve gotten in return for their $40 billion investment is an inefficient, costly, Soviet-style passenger rail system,” he said at a hearing in September. Former presidential nominee Mitt Romney, too, said that, if elected, he would end all U.S. taxpayer support for the railroad, which totaled roughly $1.4 billion for fiscal year 2012.

Your tax dollars at work. Private industry does things much more efficiently — after all, they actually have to make money

And then there’s the bus, which requires much less overhead, uses existing infrastructure and entails no taxpayer support.

To which politicians and the Usual Suspects in the media react like a vampire faced with holy water. What? No lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts to give out to highly-unionized, lobbyist-supporting, Democrat-donating firms? No points to be gained with the enviro-Nazis who want to cancel the 20th century? The horror! The horror!

Sign the petition.

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Apparently, it’s working on a way to make a gift purchase from a clueless friend or relative convert according to rules that you set up to something that you like and will use.

I wish this had been in place when I was a kid the time I got that ugly sweater from my aunt for Christmas.

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This year’s Razzies look set to be a head-to-head between Battleship and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 to see which movie can walk away with the most gongs for serious celluloid undertainment.

I must confess I haven’t seen either one. Apparently my native indolence is the path of wisdom in this case.

The annual celebration of the cinematically dire sees seven nominations for Battleship, including Worst Picture and a well-deserved Worst Supporting Actress nod for Bajan warbler Rihanna.

The latest outing in the teen bloodsucker Twilight franchise, meanwhile, is up for Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Kristen Stewart), Worst Actor (Robert Pattinson), Worst Supporting Actress (Ashley Green), Worst Supporting Actor (Taylor Lautner), Worst Screen Couple (you guessed it, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, or Mackenzie Foy and Taylor Lautner, if you prefer), Worst Director (Bill Condon), Worst Screen Ensemble (“The Entire Cast”), Worst Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel, and Worst Screenplay.

Below the Boat

Pillow With Built-In Speakers

America’s Unhealthiest Fast-Food Items

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The device is the brainchild of Australia’s Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation , which runs a Weeds Research and Productivity Program. Dr Graeme Brodie from Melbourne University, who works on the program, has led a team that created a trailer on which four horn antennas are mounted. Those antennas beam out microwaves into the rows of dirt between crops.

When the beams – each of which emit two kilowatts of power, thanks to the presence of a generator – strike a plant for as little as one second Brodie says the effect is akin to placing an egg in a domestic microwave oven.

“The microwaves superheat the water inside the plant, which explodes the leaves and stem,” he says. “In our experiments that was always fatal, because it damages the mechanism that gets nutrients around the plant and if a plant can’t process food it won’t be very happy.”

Sign me up.

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The Affordable Care Act will flood the resource-strapped national emergency room system with 30 million more insured citizens, increasing already-long wait times to see a doctor. A new hospital-in-a-box, HealthSpot, aims to alleviate congestion with medical stations capable of treating emergency room visits for minor inflictions by beaming in idol doctors via video conference. “Emergency rooms and the urgent cares are being crushed because they’re being used for convenience,” says CIO Dave Sebenoler, who helped launch the product at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

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Astroboffins poring through data from NASA’s Kepler telescope have spotted what they think might be the most Earth-like planet yet discovered.

The object has a radius 1.5 times that of Earth, which lumps it into the class of extrasolar planets known as “super Earths.” That’s not so unusual, in and of itself; scientists estimate that about 25 per cent of known star systems feature similarly sized worlds. What makes this one special, however, are all of the other ways in which it resembles our own planet.

Great. Let’s go. This one sucks.

Som Sabadell flashmob

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

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 The images were found by experts who were scientifically analysing the portraits in a bid to increase understanding of the working practices of Tudor artists.

They used reflectography and x-radiography to examine the layers beneath the paint surface.

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The pieces of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver were declared treasure by coroner Andrew Haigh on Friday and will now be valued by the British Museum.

There are two items in the current collection that do not sparkle as much as the others but which could be the most valuable to archaeologists researching the hoard.

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According to a study from Long Island’s Stony Brook University, the lightbulbs give off extraordinary levels of UV radiation, which can burn skin and even cause skin cancer. “When there is something in your house,” said Miriam Rafailovich, Professor of Materials Science at Stony Brook, “you don’t perceive any danger, you wouldn’t get that close to an x-ray in a doctor’s office.” Marcia Simon, who teaches dermatology, said, “The results were that you could actually initiate cell death.”

Heh.

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

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And that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about France … and Russia … these days.

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Just in case you’re stuck for ideas.

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 In the September 1960 issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, radio theorist Millett G. Morgan, a “leading researcher in the field of ionospheric physics” based at Dartmouth, speculated that he could generate artificial “whistlers”—that is, audial electromagnetic effects that are usually caused by lightning—if only he could find the right island.

“In thinking about how to generate whistlers artificially,” Morgan’s proposal leisurely begins, “it has occurred to me that an island of suitable size and shape, extending through the conducting sea, may constitute a naturally resonant, VLF slot antenna of high quality.”

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It’s not what you think….

Available here.

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Blue Boar inn rises again in model and digital form, recreated from detailed drawings found in Leicester family’s archives

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Every morning five-year-old Tristan starts his school day by reading in bed with his mother. He especially likes Enid Blyton. And even though he often doesn’t bother to get out of his pyjamas in time for his first class of the day, at the age of five he has a reading age of between seven and eight. He is also ahead of his peers in a variety of subjects—all, his mother reckons, thanks to home schooling.

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Termites collect particles of precious metals such as gold when they are burrowing and then stockpile them in their mounds, often indicating a larger deposit underneath.

A study published in PLoS One and Chemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis found that termite mounds in West Australian goldfields contained high concentrations of gold. This means that the insects can be used to help humans find gold and other mineral deposits.

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Shortly after the ink was dry on the state’s new “Right to Work” law, Michigan Governor  Rick Snyder reports that state economic development officials are hearing from manufacturers interested in moving to area.

They’d still be better off in Texas than a losertopia like Michigan.

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The race for the South Carolina House seat vacated by Rep. Tim Scott, who was appointed to the Senate seat left open by Jim DeMint, is going to be mighty interesting.

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who left the governorship in 2009 after revelations of his extramarital affair came to light, says he’s going to make a run—and so is his ex-wife.

Perhaps we’ll see whether character matters in South Carolina.

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 In the “sure wish we had a video” category, aptly-monikered defense contractor Rheinmetall has run a highly successful test of its 50kW high-energy laser weapon. It works by hunting down incoming targets using a so-called Skyguard radar system, then locking in with an optical scanner before firing multiple, superimposed beams for extra energy. During the Swiss trials, the German-made HEL cannon managed to cut through a 15mm steel girder from over 3,200 feet away and knock down several drones diving at over 110 mph. Most impressively, the laser succeeded in dipatching an 82mm steel projectile in flight, showing the viability of beam-based weapons against potential mortar attacks. Rheinmetall has quintupled the power in just the last year, and plans to ramp up the juice to 60kW in 2013 trials, saying “nothing stands in the way” of a future 100kW system. Of course if that doesn’t work out, it could always start up a death metal band.

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A “recipe” to deliver the perfect kilogram as a mass standard that the world can trust is coming closer to completion as the physicists behind the project bake their raw numbers.

International scientists met in late November and pushed forward a 21-page document that’ll eventually instruct boffins responsible for managing weights and measures how to adopt a planned quantum kilogram as an SI standard. This comes after decades of work attempting to redefine the kilo in terms of a fundamental constant of nature. It is the only SI unit still directly defined by an artefact.

I’m sure you were as worried about this as I was.

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Colin Wright is a mathematician who in the 1980s helped develop a notation system for juggling while at Cambridge University.

He was frustrated that there was no way to write down juggling moves.

“There was a juggling move called Mills Mess and when I tried to write it down I couldn’t. When I finally did get a description after a few days of working, it took two and a half sides of A4 and I thought, for a juggling move that lasts one second there must be an easier way,” says Wright.

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It’s that time of year again. As the Christmas lights go up, Wikipedia’s donation drive kicks off. Wikipedia claims that the donations are needed to keep the site online. Guilt-tripped journalists including Heather Brooke and Toby Young have contributed to Wikipedia in the belief that donations help fund operating costs. Students, who are already heavily in debt, are urged to donate in case Wikipedia “disappears”.

But what Wikipedia doesn’t tell us is that it is awash with cash – and raises far more money each year than it needs to keep operating.

Donations are funding a huge expansion in professional administrative staff and “research projects”. Amazingly, this year for the first time Wikipedia – the web encyclopaedia anyone can edit – has even found the cash to fund a lobbyist.

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Researchers for the Institute for Law and Economics have released a new paper that draws a correlation between mobile phone adoption and a dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s, especially instances of rape and assault. In the paper, Mobile Phones and Crime Deterrence: An Underappreciated Link, authors University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Jonathan Klick, Penn criminology professor John MacDonald, and George Mason University professor Thomas Stratmann speculate that the ability of mobile phones to allow victims to more quickly report crimes acts as a deterrent for criminals, who faced more risk in the 1990s as mobile technology became more widespread. “Mobile phones allow for quicker reporting of crimes, and, in some cases, real time communication of details about the crime and the criminal,” Klick and his colleagues write. “The presence of mobile phones increases the likelihood of punishment along a number of different margins.”

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And about damned time, too.

In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models. Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

Wearable Wagging Tail Matches Your Mood  I am not making this up.

Bladeless Ceiling Fan

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Kinda scary, when you think about it.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A new pacemaker has been built inside a heart by converting beating muscle into cells which can organise the organ’s rhythm, US researchers report.

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Gord Young, from Peterborough, in Ontario, says it took him 17 minutes to decypher the message after realising a code book he inherited was the key.

Mr Young says the 1944 note uses a simple World War I code to detail German troop positions in Normandy.

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Of course, that could just be the Obama budget cuts. How would we know?

Butterfly Bottle Opener

Remote Control Water Cannon Helicopter.  Here, kitty, kitty, kitty….

How to Unlock a Car Door Without Keys

Fully Enclosed Self-Balancing Electric Motorcycle

Motorized Monocycle

Auto Insurance by the mile

The Science Behind Gifting (and Regifting)

Cerego Online Learning Tool

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You press a button and wait for your elevator. How long before you get impatient and agitated? Theresa Christy says 20 seconds.

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The 12th day of the 12th month of 2012 is not a day of deliverance but of delivery for devout American fans of Westvleteren 12, brewed by the reclusive Belgian monks at St. Sixtus Abbey.

The celebrated beer — often called the best in the world — is usually only available for sale at the abbey, located in the Belgian countryside. But starting Wednesday, buyers in the U.S. and other countries can purchase the beer at select retailers for $84.99 for six bottles.

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They’ve had the AN/SPN-42 Automatic Carrier Landing System that can land a plane on a carrier using radar and computers without pilot input since the ’70s. So this isn’t really all that big a deal.

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Can Suger Bear be far behind?

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No doubt it will feature prominently in the movie premier this month.

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Cybercrooks are putting up stickers featuring URLs embedded in Quick Response codes (QR codes) as a trick designed to drive traffic to dodgy sites.

One reason why I don’t do QR codes.

And about time.

Miller, who also happens to be a front-end developer, began building Ontract — “the tool that would have kept me in the classroom,” he says. This week, Miller and co-founder Matt Duch officially beta-launched Ontract, a realt-time analytics platform for K-12 schools that aims to do for educational data what Mint.com did for financial data.

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Posted without comment.

Electronic Deer Deterrent

Checkon.me

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The federal government suffered a major defeat today at the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States. In their unanimous decision, the justices rejected the government’s sweeping claim that a series of recurring floods induced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not qualify as a taking of property under the Fifth Amendment because the flooding was only temporary in duration.

At last.

An Informative Chart.