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

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Actually, the future is already here, with highly advanced milking machines on some dairy farms and a fully automated robot planting tractor set to hit the market this fall.

Cue handwringing from the Left about the poor illegal immigrant underclass losing jobs ‘that Americans won’t do’.

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Portions of a National Ground Intelligence Centerstudy on the lethal effects of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and high-powered microwave (HPM) weapons revealed that the arms are part of China’s so-called “assassin’s mace” arsenal – weapons that allow a technologically inferior China to defeat U.S. military forces.

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The end of needles is nigh: researches have developed a laser-based system “that blasts microscopic jets of drugs into the skin [that] could soon make getting a shot as painless as being hit with a puff of air,” reports phys.org. The laser system works by creating microsecond bubbles of air that penetrate the skin and injects a drug through a narrow space about as wide as a human hair.

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

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The throwing gap has been researched for more than half a century, and the results have been consistent. According to Jerry Thomas, dean of the College of Education at the University of North Texas in Denton, who did the throwing research Hyde cites in her paper, “The overhand throwing gap, beginning at 4 years of age, is three times the difference of any other motor task, and it just gets bigger across age. By 18, there’s hardly any overlap in the distribution: Nearly every boy by age 15 throws better than the best girl.”

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The time lenses that were created for this experiment were split time lenses. Essentially, two halves of a lens were placed so that the points met in the middle. There was one split time lens on one side of the cloaked event and another split time lens on the other side. A laser was then passed through the first time lens. This dispersed the light around the events happening between the lenses. The light then passed through the second split time lens and returned to its original phase. So to an observer, it’s as though the events between the lenses never happened.

And you can believe as much of that as you want to, but it’s an interesting notion.

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Those Republicans! What a bunch of haters!

Mark Siegel resigned Friday from his post in the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, according to the communications director of the state’s Democratic Party, Brannon Jordan.

Oh, wait….

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Crooks have created what’s reckoned to be the first computer virus featuring the Irish language.

Ta se garbh anseo.

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She was given a five-year sentence for each of the ten counts of voter fraud for which she was convicted, but the sentencing judge allowed her to serve the terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times.

Matthew Vadum, author of Subversion, Inc., notes Sowers’s DNA was found on the inner seals of five envelopes that contained the absentee ballots, and liberal groups like the NAACP and ACORN have had a history of such shenanigans.

Of course she voted them as Republican ballots. Democrats would never do something like that.

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Impossible. Everybody knows that voter fraud is a myth.

Kiwis. Style by the mile.

Water-Absorbing Concrete Coasters

Scientific Evidence for Popular Health Supplements

UFO Identification Chart

Mini Microscope For iPhone

12 Supercool Projects You Can Make From Scratch This Weekend

Get Organized With These 5 Handy YouTube Channels

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They say Pope Benedict XVI is preparing to establish a new pontifical academy for the study and promotion of Latin, to be known as the “Pontificia Academia Latinitatis”.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the academy will be staffed by “eminent academics of various nationalities, whose aim it will be to promote the use and knowledge of the Latin language in both ecclesiastical and civil contexts, including schools.”

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Slate magazine has a Blind Pig moment.

Read it. And watch the video.

A blind woman can now see spots of light after being implanted with an early prototype bionic eye, confirming the potential of the world-first technology.

Australian researchers have been working for years to develop the bionic eye, in which electrodes are inserted into the retina of vision-impaired patients.

Gotta love Australians.

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 The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys put on the diet when they were old. The causes of death — cancer, heart disease — were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.

Heh.

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Retired Anglican bishop and South African peace campaigner Desmond Tutu has pulled out of an event because he cannot share a platform with Tony Blair because of the Iraq War.

There’s a win-win: The poseurs get to posture, and Tony Blair doesn’t have to put up with Desmond Tutu.

I suppose it would be too much to expect Tony Blair to pull out of an event with Desmond Tutu because of Robert Mugabe?

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As with all such writings, if it doesn’t happen on the Other Left Coast it’s not important, but the article is interesting all the same.

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Think of it as evolution in action. Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Everybody’s iris – the colored portion of their eye – is unique. Even identical twins.

Of course, no one could possible know that for a fact; like the uniqueness of fingerprints, it is merely supposition.

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 This is a nice theory. But is it true? To find out, my colleagues and I recently measured daily energy expenditure among the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the few remaining populations of traditional hunter-gatherers. Would the Hadza, whose basic way of life is so similar to that of our distant ancestors, expend more energy than we do?

Our findings, published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, indicate that they don’t, suggesting that inactivity is not the source of modern obesity.

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A man who was photographing a grizzly bear in Alaska’s Denali National Park was mauled and killed by the animal in the first fatal attack in the park’s history.

Think of it as evolution in action. Perhaps we could get some animal-rights activists up there to ‘talk the bear down’.

 Investigators have recovered the camera and looked at the photographs, which show the bear grazing and not acting aggressively before the Friday attack, Denali Park Superintendent Paul Anderson said.

A Muslim bear? Not impossible, I guess.

 Rangers in a helicopter spotted a large male grizzly bear sitting on the hiker’s remains, which they called a “food cache” in the underbrush about 100 to 150 yards (meters) from the site of the attack on Friday.

Waste not, want not.

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Consumer interest in farmers markets has similarly exploded across Pennsylvania. According to USDA data, there are more than 250 farmers markets in the state—about two-dozen of which are located in Philadelphia.

In spite of these great numbers, Pennsylvanians should be grateful to have access to any farmers markets at all this year. That’s because the direct-to-consumer bounty farmers provide might have all but disappeared. And though drought concerns persist in some parts of Pennsylvania, the specter of a summer with fewer farmers selling less produce at markets in the state was due not to Mother Nature but—instead—to state legislators and regulators.

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A team of researchers has shown that, in some sense, negative frequencies can be observed through the generation of radiation with a positive frequency. To explore this idea, they looked at very intense light fields moving through certain types of glass and glass fibers. When the light field is very intense—as is the case when a very short, intense burst of light is created—this can lead to some very cool effects. In particular, when the light is passing through a material, the light field pushes the electrons around so hard that the electrons start to push back.

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I have zero interest in sports but the amount of technology that is permeating the professional ranks is just amazing. I’m waiting for the Packers to christen their new playbook ‘Air-Land’.

Check it out.

Print your own gun. What the Internet did for the First Amendment, 3D printers will do for the Second.

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MIT researchers produce complex electronic circuits from molybdenum disulfide, a material that could have many more applications.

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We have the technology.

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A US Open tennis umpire, who officiated at matches involving players including John McEnroe, has been arrested and charged with the murder of her husband after allegedly bludgeoning him to death with a coffee mug.

Memorandum: Never argue with the umpire.

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Powerful new anti-cancer drugs based on green tea could soon be developed after scientists found an extract from the beverage could make almost half of tumours vanish.

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The biology of aphids is bizarre: they can be born pregnant and males sometimes lack mouths, causing them to die not long after mating. In an addition to their list of anomalies, work published this week indicates that they may also capture sunlight and use the energy for metabolic purposes.

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 People’s moods on Mondays are actually no worse than on any other week day barring Friday, a survey of more than 300,000 people found.

The popular fixation on the idea of “Blue Monday” should be given the status of a “cultural myth”, the team behind the new findings wrote in the Journal of Positive Psychology.

“Despite our global beliefs about lousy Mondays, we conclude that this belief should be abandoned,” said lead researcher Prof Arthur Stone, of Stony Brook University in New York state.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

“The perception of Blue Mondays is likely prevalent due to the extreme contrast in mood from Sunday to Monday, even though there is no real difference in mood with Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Don’t worry! Be happy!

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Five Nobel laureates (Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Myron Scholes) signed the statement which, in part, reads, “We enthusiastically endorse Governor Mitt Romney’s economic plan to create jobs and restore economic growth while returning America to its tradition of economic freedom.”

The economists also denounced Obama’s economic ideas, claiming they led to an “an anemic economic recovery and high unemployment.” They further assert, “his future plans are to double down on the failed policies, which will only prolong slow growth and high unemployment.”

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

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Trust people from Harvard to do something brilliant in a totally useless say.

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Australian scientists have come up with a clever way of storing hydrogen that they feel could make it a viable portable fuel source.

The cartoon “Not Invented Here” has ceased to be funny and so has been expunged.

Anyone who has a problem with that, say so in the comments and I’ll bring it back. But know that you will live in ignominy.

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 The driver spotted the moose on a country road near Hanestad, 139 miles north of Oslo, around midnight on Wednesday, and tried to go around the animal, not realising that a bear was also nearby.

“The driver had lost a bit of speed as he tried to avoid the moose before hitting the bear,” said Svein Erik Bjorke of the local wildlife authority, who was out in the forest searching for the wounded animal.

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In the continuing saga of whether or not Christian student groups violate college anti-discrimination policies, the State University of New York at Buffalo has re-recognized InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) as an official student organization, just in time for the start of the 2012-13 school year.

After being de-recognized as a club amid a leadership scandal earlier this year, IVCF regained official status on July 27. SUNY Buffalo’s Student-Wide Judiciary ruled that it is “common sense, not discrimination” for a religious group to want its leaders to agree with its core beliefs.

Duh.

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Bet it tastes as good as fresh….

 By placing the ship – La Belle – in a constant environment of up to 60 degrees below zero, more than 300 years of moisture will be safely removed from hundreds of European oak and pine timbers and planks.

The freeze-dryer, located at the old Bryan Air Force base several miles northwest of College Station, is 40 feet long and 8 feet wide – the biggest such machine on the continent devoted to archaeology.

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Wouldn’t mind having one of these. Of course, you wouldn’t dare drive it on Texas roads. (‘Your truck havin’ suspension problems, Steve? Thought I felt a bump there.’) But for a girly-man state like Massachusetts, it ought to be just the thing.

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Hey, toilets are important. And it’s not as if he’s got a day job or anything.

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Things in South Africa are a lot more interesting now that those boring white people are no longer in charge.

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Low-calorie diets that included high fructose corn syrup yielded the same amount of progress as diets that substituted an equivalent amount of table sugar.

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Scientists used nanotechnology to repair tissues damaged in heart attacks in rats and pigs, suggesting a possible new way to treat people who’ve suffered the same ailment.

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 A section of the centuries-old Great Wall of China has collapsed due to a combination of heavy rainfall and construction works.

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Underneath the pubs, shops, houses, and office buildings of Nottingham lie more than five hundred man-made caves, carved into the city’s soft sandstone bedrock over a thousand years, and now largely abandoned and forgotten.

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Under the direction of Katharina von Kriegstein, the researchers conducted two experiments in which several volunteers had to perform various speech comprehension tasks. When affected individuals performed tasks that required the recognition of speech sounds, as compared to recognize the voices that pronounced the same speech, magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) recordings showed abnormal responses in the area around the medial geniculate body. In contrast, no differences were apparent between controls and dyslexic participants if the tasks involved only listening to the speech sounds without having to perform a specific task. “The problem, therefore, has nothing to do with sensory processing itself, but with the processing involved in speech recognition,” says Díaz. No differences could be ascertained between the two test groups in other areas of the auditory signalling path.

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Mostly stuff you knew already or could figure out, but it’s amusing dragging it all into one steaming pile.