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The Navy’s robotic fighter just got one step closer to earning its wings. The X-47B, an unmanned stealth attack jet, has completed the first major phase of flight testing on its way to become the first aircraft to be able to land and take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier –completely autonomously.

The Navy has had the SPN-42 ACLS (automatic carrier landing system) that can land a plane on a carrier flight deck without the intervention of a pilot since the early 70s — I was part of the crew on the USS John F Kennedy who maintained that gear. So this won’t be a big stretch. The autonomous refueling is the impressive part.

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It’s been an interesting day for a developing market which seems so utterly niche as to be untrue. There really are startups out there linking recipes to supermarket so you can just buy the food you need to make the dishes. Niche, but potentially quite powerful. Two start-ups announced funding today in the UK. Whisk, a startup produced by a minor UK TV celebrity, has raised £170,000 for a product that has yet to launch, while Foodity has secured over £300,000 seed funding for a platform that’s already being traded on and has customers after bootstrapping for two years.

Foodity produces an e-commerce toolkit for recipe publishers on all platforms that lets consumers buy recipe ingredients at major online grocers in the UK, Europe and the US; plus a data platform and an advertising/analytics module. The startup already has Premier Foods, (the UK’s biggest food manufacturer) as a customer and a number of big grocery retailers, as yet unannounced.

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

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Since launching last year, HealthTap has built a network of 12,000 U.S.-licensed physicians — no easy task — to allow its users to get answers to medical questions for free without relying on algorithms — and has raised $14 million from Mayfield Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Esther Dyson, and more. With its new mobile apps, HealthTap is essentially trying to bring the house call back to life, giving users the option to text doctors from their mobile devices for free.

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Dr. Paolo Macchiarini is no stranger to world firsts, and less than a year after performing a synthetic windpipe transplant, the Karolinska Institute Professor has coordinated no less than two successful transplants of synthetic sections of larynx. Amazingly, both patients were able to breathe and talk normally straight after surgery, the basic functions we take for granted that they either struggled with or were simply unable to do before.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Archaeologists in Greece’s second-largest city have uncovered a 70-meter (230-foot) section of an ancient road built by the Romans that was city’s main travel artery nearly 2,000 years ago.

The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki’s new subway system, which is due to be completed in four years. The road in the northern port city will be raised to be put on permanent display when the metro opens in 2016.

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Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time – and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.

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

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Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.

…

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

…

As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”

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A Chinese student forced to intern at Foxconn has complained that his two months on the gadget assembly line was like “military training” and unrelated to his degree, according to a local Chinese news site.

A group of students at Xi’an Technological University have complained about having to do work with with the iPhone manufacturers in order to pass their degrees, reports the Huashang News webite, via MicGadget. It’s particularly resented by arts and social sciences students, according to the Chinese news site, which reported that many felt the “work experience” was irrelevant to their studies.

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Two adult lionesses, two young adults and two cubs were killed by a mob after they invaded a settlement in Kitengela on the outskirts of the park, Kenya Wildlife Service said.

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‘With this device I could — dare I say it? — rule the world….’

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A stem-cell biologist has had an eye-opening success in his latest effort to mimic mammalian organ development in vitro. Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CBD) in Kobe, Japan, has grown the precursor of a human eye in the lab.

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Hey, we’re flogging a book, here. These things don’t sell themselves, you know.

Never trust anybody who shaves his head.

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It was written in 1853 by his great-great grandmother who was called Daniels and was a local herbalist in Llanelli, South Wales.

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Well, his story made as much sense as anything we’ve heard out of Obama.

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New tests show that crude Spanish cave paintings of a red sphere and handprints are the oldest in the world, so ancient they may not have been by modern man.

Some scientists say they might have even been made by the much-maligned Neanderthals, but others disagree.

I always knew that Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso weren’t really human.

Hear, hear!

Fife council has pushed ahead with its mobile working plans by issuing building services staff with Motorola-built handheld devices to receive job instructions.

A number of frontline staff have been using mobile phones to receive information for carrying out scheduled repairs and maintenance in council homes and non-domestic properties over the past two and a half years. The council said that although this has led to an increase in productivity, with more jobs per person completed daily, using mobile phones still required significant manual input.

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Neal Stephenson, the celebrated sci-fi and speculative fiction writer, is sick of the superficial way that sword fighting is treated in video games, and the self-described “swordsmanship geek” wants to fix the injustice. He’s heading up the development of an arena combat game called Clang (video below) that aims to bring the “obsessive attention to real-world detail” found in today’s immensely-customizable shooters to the more nuanced world of sword-to-sword warfare. In order to make Clang a reality, he’s turning to Kickstarter to raise the $500,000 his team needs.

And about time, too.

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A wave of local and state Democrats throughout the U.S. are leaving the party due to controversy over its leaders’ support for “gay marriage,” as well as concerns about religious freedom and the defense of the unborn.

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Texas is #2. No mention of Michigan.

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Scientists are puzzled today by the discovery that millions of years ago levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were lower – and yet, temperatures were higher than today’s.

The Nature paper, indeed, states that in the boffins’ opinion oceanic temperature and atmospheric carbon levels – generally considered to be firmly connected in today’s climate science – were “decoupled”.

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A Japanese airline has instructed its passengers that flight attendants will not help them with their luggage, do not have to be polite and complaints will not be tolerated.

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And I, for one, am glad it did.

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Zeolites (literally “boil stones”) aren’t exactly new: The term was coined in 1756 by Axel Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist who noted that some minerals, upon being heated, release large amounts of steam from water that had been previously adsorbed. For the last 250 years, scientists have tried to shoehorn this process in a heat storage system — and now, the Fraunhofer Institute, working with industrial partners, has worked out how to do it.

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I was wondering where all that missing weight from the dinosaurs went.

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The US town of Boring has voted in favour of becoming a “sister community” to the small Scottish village of Dull.

Gotta admire places with a sense of humor.

On the other hand, I’d prefer living in either to any major metropolitan area.

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And since Madison is a famous hotbed of Republicanism, we know who’s doing the cheating … oh, wait….

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Everyone has heard about the Bakken shale, the huge expanse of oil-bearing rock underneath North Dakota and Montana that billionaire Harold Hamm thinks could yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come. The Bakken is a huge boon, both to the economic health of the northern Plains states, but also to the petroleum balance of the United States. From just 60,000 barrels per day five years ago, the Bakken is now giving up 500,000 bpd, with 210,000 bpd of that coming on in just the past year. Given the availability of enough rigs to drill it and crews to frack it, there’s no reason why the Bakken couldn’t be producing more than 1 million bpd by the end of the decade, a level that could be maintained for halfway through the century.

But as great as the Bakken is, I learned last week about another oil shale play that dwarfs it. It’s called The Bazhenov. It’s in Western Siberia, in Russia. And while the Bakken is big, the Bazhenov — according to a report last week by Sanford Bernstein’s lead international oil analyst Oswald Clint — “covers 2.3 million square kilometers or 570 million acres, which is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined.” This is 80 times bigger than the Bakken.

But we’re going to run out of oil any day now, depend on it.

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Injured during the attack, the man, who was not identified, suffered lacerations to the back of his head and was taken to Whistler Health Care Center for treatment.

Police responded to the incident, locating the bear about 100 meters away as it headed for a wooded area.

“The bear was destroyed,” the police statement said. According to local media, police shot and killed the bear.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The roach coach is on the pier. I’ll fly if you buy.

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Well — where else would he go? Think about it.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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We have the technology.

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A study of pollution in 34 Chinese cities has found that the electricity generated by power stations to drive electric vehicles leads to more fine particle emissions than petrol-powered transport.

No surprise to some of us.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Norwegian mass killer’s life “fell apart” after a failed relationship with a Belarusian internet date left him struggling with his sexuality, his friends told the court.

“That was perhaps his last attempt at dating a girl like the other boys did,” his best friend’s ex-girlfriend told the court.

Breivik’s friends suspected the 33-year-old extremist might be homosexual because he was feminine and fastidious about his appearance, another friend, a lawyer in Norway’s Ministry of Defence, said.

“He used make-up powder, those kinds of things, and he explained that as being ‘metrosexual’. He made reference to David Beckham being that at the time.”

Heh.

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Scientists and doctors are using the creeping metallic tools to perform surgery on hearts, prostate cancer, and other diseased organs. The snakebots carry tiny cameras, scissors and forceps, and even more advanced sensors are in the works. For now, they’re powered by tethers that humans control.

We have the technology.

But experts say the day is coming when some robots will roam the body on their own.

Rather like herpes.

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Paedomorphosis is the evolutionary process in which a descendant retains the juvenile state of an ancestor, retaining certain juvenile features of the ancestor into adulthood and reproductive age.  Paedomorphosis is one example of heterochrony: the process (discussed by Steve Gould in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny) whereby evolution operates by changing the timing of development.

Bet you didn’t know that.

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I think Congressmen ought to be tested for this new organ. They certainly have the ‘special, accordion-like blubber layer that goes from the snout to the navel’ that ‘expands  to allow the whales to engulf large quantities’.

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Forward into the past!

The university, along with Sustainable Rail International, are to restore a 1930s locomotive – 3463, a 4-6-4 Hudson-type loco built by Baldwin that’s spent its retirement at the Kansas Expocenter in Topeka – as a test bed for bio-coal. The locomotive has already been stabilized prior to the trip to Minnesota for restoration.

If all goes well, the university says, it expects to create the “cleanest, most powerful passenger locomotive”, costing less to maintain and fuel than current diesel-electric locos.

And, since there’s no point in ambitions if you don’t make them big, the consortium also hopes to take the restored loco up to 130 miles per hour (nearly 210 km/h).

Good luck finding tracks that will handle that speed in modern America.

Its biocoal – cellular material processed into a solid fuel – exhibits the same energy density and material handling properties as coal, the university says, but without coal’s heavy metals. The biomass is also carbon-neutral, and produces less ash, less smoke (sorry to those for whom the ‘magic of steam’ includes the smell of burning coal), and fewer volatile off-gases.

Note there’s no discussion of how much it costs. Which means that it’s far more expensive than real coal.

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If the nuclear apocalypse comes, do you want to be hanging out with the mutants we got to know oh-so-well in Fallout? Of course not, but you’ll have to pay for the privilege to ride out the end of the world in the lap of luxury — to the tune of at least $2 million if you’re looking to get into Larry Hall’s 200 foot-deep, missile silo-housed apartment complex in Kansas.

In-depth (no pun intended) overview here.

Ben Yagoda continues his fight for truth, justice, and correct use of the comma.

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Yeah, if the government allows them to do anything about it. If an energy source doesn’t require a taxpayer subsidy, this administration doesn’t want anything to do with it.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. Touch not the cat bot a glove.

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Watch never-before-seen videos of an amazing new condiment lubricant that makes the inside of bottles so slippery, nothing is left inside. This means no more pounding on the bottom of your ketchup containers–and a lot less wasted food.

We have the technology.

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Martha Payne had some sad-ass lunches at her school in Scotland — unsatisfying food that sometimes had more hair than vegetables. So the 9-year-old decided to start a blog with photos and vital statistics about her meals. Almost immediately, the blog got international attention, including from prominent school lunch busybody Jamie Oliver. Result? Martha’s dad just met with the local council, and it announced that kids could have unlimited salad, fruit, and bread.

We have the technology.

Ben Yagoda is a champeen grammar nazi.

The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas.

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If, of course, that’s the sort of thing you go in for.

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Hey – just trying to help….