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Well, that’s a relief.

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The United States is running out of helium.

Yes, helium. Thanks, in part, to a 1996 law that has forced the government to sell off its helium reserves at bargain-bin prices, the country’s stockpile of the relatively rare and nonrenewable gas could soon dwindle.

Sky falling. Film at 11.

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And about damned time, too.

Steve Sailer examines the ongoing ‘progressive’ attempt to cancel the 20th century.

It’s worth keeping an eye out for what the cultural trends are among the more privileged of younger people because they can signal the beginning of sea changes.

The word “locavore” was invented in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005 to describe people who make an effort (a fetish?) to eat only food grown locally. In Brooklyn, where the climate is less propitious and land is either built-upon or toxic, this urge has mutated into people trying to eat what is manufactured locally.

The main engine is, of course, a new wrinkle in status-seeking. That localism emerged first in the San Francisco Bay Area has much to do with the fact the Bay Area is, as ex-sailor Richard Henry Dana explained to Americans in his 1840 bestseller Two Years before the Mast, just about the most favored locale for human habitation on Earth. It’s not surprising that Northern Californians are building barricades of local solidarity against the rest of the world.

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The question of whether donkeys are stubborn or simply “misunderstood” has been discussed at a conference held by a leading British university.

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

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And don’t get me started about cats.

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

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On September 27th, 2010 the solar-powered MS Tûranor (also known as PlanetSolar) departed from Monaco with the goal of travelling around the entire globe using only the power of the sun — and now the ship has finally arrived back where it started. In doing so PlanetSolar becomes the first solar-powered ship to circumnavigate the globe, and over its lengthy journey it crossed the Atlantic ocean, the Panama Canal, the Pacific ocean, the Indian ocean, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean as it kept as close to the equator as possible to ensure plenty of sunshine.

The Patron Saint of Dyspepsia brings us up to speed.

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‘Most prisoners confessed within five minutes of the first application’

Warning: These are trained professionals. Do not try this at home.

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No pun intended, of course.

Solar power researchers at Princeton University have discovered that by mimicking the surface of leaves, they can create solar cells that are better at capturing sunlight for a 47 percent efficiency boost.

In the kind of discovery that’s obvious after the fact, the researchers have “roughed up” the surface of their cells, in imitation of the way that leaves use microscopic irregularities in their surfaces to maximize their harvesting of the sun.

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A plan by a Native American tribe to kill two bald eagles for use in a religious rite has drawn the ire of a fellow tribe, which says it doesn’t want any eagles sacrificed on the Wyoming reservation they share.

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It is a medieval solution to a very modern problem. The ancient role of the lengthsman, who would “walk the length of the parish” to ensure ditches and drains were clear, is being revived across the country.

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In related news, Prince Charles wins twentieth consecutive Upper Class Twit of the Year award, gains permanent possession of the trophy.

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LiveLine faced a new challenge while developing the technology — constant motion. The process used for field sports requires geostationary reference points, while yachting is typically filmed from inside a helicopter. LiveLine combines military grade GPS receivers, high-powered radios, and gyroscopically stabilized cameras to triangulate the distance between competitors. Once this data is transmitted to the ground, operators can add metrics like wind speed, nautical speed, placement in the race, waypoints, and even what country the boat represents, all in real time.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

‘There were giants in the earth in those days….’ Genesis 6:4.

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Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

In other breaking news, war has been discovered to be bad for some people, better for others.

Stay tuned.

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It takes a lot to kick a star out of a galaxy, but a group of Vanderbilt University astronomers say they’ve found a group of more than 675 stars that look like they’re headed for the exit door.

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Nina Rhodes-Hughes, a 78-year-old former television actress, volunteer for Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and witness to his 1968 murder, “wants the world to know that, despite what history says, [Sirhan] Sirhan was not the only gunman firing shots when Senator Kennedy was murdered a few feet away from her at a Los Angeles hotel,” CNN reports. According to Rhodes-Hughes, there were two gunmen, Sirhan and another unidentified person.

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I’m not really sure in what way ‘optical computing’ is any advantage over the ordinary way, but here’s hoping it produces something useful.

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‘It’s free! It’s free! Just put your helm a-lee!’

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The masts look like those on Tom Perkins’ yacht The Maltese Falcon.

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And Dan Brown will by God be there with a notebook and a camera.

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Environmental luminary Dr James Lovelock says he now regrets being “alarmist” about climate predictions.

Speaking to MSNBC, Lovelock admitted spicing up his books with headline-catching doomsday predictions.

In 2006 Dr Lovelock predicted the Earth “would catch a morbid fever” that would destroy six billion people – “the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,” he predicted. In 2009, he was telling the Guardian that “we may face planet-wide devastation worse even than unrestricted nuclear war between superpowers”.

“I made a mistake,” the 92-year-old scientist now says.

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Fusion occurs when plasmas become hot and dense enough for the atomic nuclei contained within the hot gas to combine and release energy. But when the plasmas in experimental reactors called tokamaks reach the mysterious density limit, they can spiral apart into a flash of light. “The big mystery is why adding more heating power to the plasma doesn’t get you to higher density,” said David A. Gates, a principal research physicist at PPPL and co-author of the proposed solution with Luis Delgado-Aparicio, a post-doctoral fellow at PPPL and a visiting scientist at MIT’s Plasma Science Fusion Center. “This is critical because density is the key parameter in reaching fusion and people have been puzzling about this for 30 or 40 years.”

The scientists hit upon their theory in what Gates called “a 10-minute ‘Aha!’ moment.” Working out equations on a whiteboard in Gates’ office, the physicists focused on the islands and the impurities that drive away energy. The impurities stem from particles that the plasma kicks up from the tokamak wall. “When you hit this magical density limit, the islands grow and coalesce and the plasma ends up in a disruption,” says Delgado-Aparacio.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Kazakhstan’s foreign minister says the fictional Borat character has been good for tourism, increasing the number of visas to the ex-Soviet state by ten times.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

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That’s the problem with open borders, pretty soon you get a lot of riff-raff moving in.

Michigan has the same problem.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.

Hey, which one of you guys is Rock Hudson?

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Italian authorities faced severe criticism on Thursday after it emerged that they gagged two North African immigrants with duct tape while deporting them.

Police defended their actions, saying the Algerians had been chewing the inside of their cheeks and trying to spit blood in order to avoid being forced back on the aircraft.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

‘You have the right to remain silent, so shut the fuck up.’ — Chris Rock

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I’d venture to say that they smoke more, too. NTTAWWT.

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An international research team has observed an electron being split into two “quasi particles”, one carrying the original particle’s spin, the other carrying its orbital movement.

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Poor neighborhoods, Dr. Lee found, had nearly twice as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier ones, and they had more than three times as many corner stores per square mile. But they also had nearly twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocers per square mile.

So stuff it, Michelle.

Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.

More New Age leftist claptrap debunked.

Jacob Sullum has some thoughts on the subject.

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The first cargo resupply mission to the space station to be carried out by a commercial operator is likely to be on 30 April, the US space agency says.

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Is the President’s resume accurate when it comes to his career and qualifications? I can corroborate that Obama’s “teaching career” at Chicago was, to put it kindly, a sham.

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

The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Gotta love that Global Warming.

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With arranged marriages back up to 40 per cent, business has been brisk for photo studios, who prepare the portfolios which are shown to potential suitors.

Women pose in a kimono and also in informal attire; men wear a suit and tie as well as dressing down for the other picture.

Anxious parents then circulate the portfolio, which also sets out the youngsters’ interests and prospects, to work colleagues, friends and neighbours.

Once a meeting is arranged the couple are normally accompanied by their mothers who act as chaperones.

Polite small talk is the order of the day. Afterwards it is a case of comparing notes to see if there are grounds for pursuing matters further.

We call it Facebook.

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We have the technology.

Impossible to tell whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing….

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Does anybody care?

Didn’t think so.

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This website offers true random numbers to anyone on the internet. The random numbers are generated in real-time in our lab by measuring the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum.

If, of course, it’s random numbers you’re looking for.

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An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. “If all goes well,” the magazine explains, in a few year’s time the pit will “rage with humanity’s first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life.”

We have the technology … I hope.

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In any neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), every baby is connected to dozens of monitors. And each monitor is streaming hundreds of readings per second into various data systems. They can generate alerts if anything goes severely out of spec, but in normal operation, they just generate a summary report for the doctor every half hour or so.

IBM discovered that by applying machine learning to the full data stream, they were able to diagnose some dangerous infections a full day before any symptoms were noticeable to a human. That’s amazing in itself, but what’s more important is what they were looking for. I expected them to be looking for telltale spikes or irregularities in the readings: perhaps not serious enough to generate an alarm on their own, but still, the sort of things you’d intuitively expect of a person about to become ill. But according to Anjul Bhambhri, IBM’s Vice President of Big Data, the telltale signal wasn’t spikes or irregularities, but the opposite. There’s a certain normal variation in heart rate, etc., throughout the day, and babies who were about to become sick didn’t exhibit the variation. Their heart rate was too normal; it didn’t change throughout the day as much as it should.

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There are more, but let’s face it, if the title were Top 246 reasons, who would look?

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The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.

Heh.

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The plasma gun or “flashlight” requires just a 5V battery to produce enough cold plasma to kill even heat-resistant and antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Enterococcus faecalis (a nasty gastrointestinal bug). Because the plasma’s heat ranges from 20 to 23°C (68 to 73°F), it doesn’t damage the skin. The bacteria-busting raygun – the work of scientists from China and Australia – costs just $100 to manufacture.

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I don’t care what you call it, I want one.

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The Telegraph has a new and greatly improved method of doing photo slideshows.

When I went aloft through the lubber’s hole
The mate, he cried, ‘Why, damn your soul!’…

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In common with its venomless modern cousin, Titanoboa crushed its prey before swallowing the squashed victim, and could doubtless have ingested Jennifer Lopez in one mighty gulp.