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Mice get all of the good stuff.

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We have the technology.

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We have the technology.

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Yeah, I’ve played with people like that. But it’s the way he would’ve wanted to go.

Cardiac arrest brought on by low temperatures and a lack of physical movement is likely to be the cause of death.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

An Informative Chart.

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Well, what else would you use a crab robot for? Seriously?

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With only about 50m left to drill, time is running out for the Russian scientists hoping to drill into Vostok – the world’s most enigmatic lake.

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“Our results suggest a potential association between daily diet soft drink consumption and vascular outcomes,” says Hannah Gardener of the Miami Uni medical school.

The peril associated with daily downing of mock-pop was revealed in a study encompassing some 2,564 subjects selected from a “multi-ethnic urban population” in Manhattan.

Hah! I knew it all along.

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Almost 1000 costumed ”guizers”, wearing winged helmets, sheepskins and carrying axes and shields, march through the streets of the town to recreate its ancient past.

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We have the technology.

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In a tour de force of office supply physics, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that it is possible to produce X-rays by simply unrolling Scotch tape.

Next step: nuclear fusion.

“We’re going to do that,” said Seth J. Putterman, a professor of physics at U.C.L.A. “I think it will work.”

Bear in mind that this is from the New York Times so you’ll want to check it with another source.

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Explorers believe they have found a submerged treasure trove of artefacts once owned by Lord Nelson – including his sword – in the wreck of a ship sunk almost 90 years after his death.

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Researchers from the home of graphene, the University of Manchester in England, have discovered — seemingly by chance — one of the most important properties of graphene yet: It’s impermeable to everything but water. It is the perfect water filter.

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It is brown fat, actually brown in color, and its great appeal is that it burns calories like a furnace. A new study finds that one form of it, which is turned on when people get cold, sucks fat out of the rest of the body to fuel itself. Another new study finds that a second form of brown fat can be created from ordinary white fat by exercise.

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So if you speak French and want to learn English, you’ll be paired up with a native English speaker who wants to learn French. You start in one language and halfway through the video session, a timer tells you when to switch to the other. Speakers are also matched by their language levels, and to aid in the conversation, Verbling will suggest topics according to the ability of the participants, such as “What chores are you responsible for in your home” or “what kind of music do you listen to?”

And Berlitz and Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone all feel the cold wind of disintermediation on the backs of their necks….

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According to the report published in Science, the engineered bacteria can metabolize alginate, which is seaweed’s primary sugar constituent. Not only that, but it works without requiring heat or chemicals to pre-treat the seaweed, reducing the number of processing steps needed to create a biofuel.

DNA from E. coli – a workhorse in the lower intestine, but with a few strains that cause illness, giving it a poor reputation in the popular mind – was mixed with DNA from various marine microorganisms. These included Pseudoalteromonas, which provided genes to produce an enzyme to break up alginate; and Vibrio splendidus to digest the alginate.

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The free program, available for iPhones and Android smartphones, is both a primer to help motorists prepare for winter driving and a beacon when things go badly.

It can pinpoint a motorist’s location, call 911, notify friends and family, and monitor how long the car’s gas will hold out. The app also gives potentially life-saving alerts when users tap a big red button on its simple home screen that reads, “I’m Stranded!” Among the advice: stay with your vehicle and keep the tailpipe clear of snow, because a backup can cause carbon monoxide poisoning.

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The bracelet identifies you to the building and allows it to follow you from room to room. Is the meeting room too cold? Press a button and it starts to warm up. It will also prepare rooms for your arrival, reading your patterns of movement over time. If it sounds creepy, it is.

We have the technology.

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Radio astronomer Dr. Venn described how he made the historic discovery after analysing a number of signals originating from the same point in space. “I realised the signal was in the VHF Band and slap bang in the middle of 41-68 MHz. It was obviously old terrestrial television broadcasts, but they seemed to be originating from deep space.” After boosting and digital enhancement the resulting video signals are remarkably clear.

Soon we will have a full set of Historical Documents.

A BBC team have been working closely with Dr Venn’s team to help recover the signals. BBC Television historian Peter Wells, explained “We now know these are original broadcasts. So far we have recovered about 7 weeks of old television signals from space. Every day in our lab is like traveling back in time. And speaking of which we have just started the digital recovery of signals that contain lost Doctor Who episodes.

And that, after all, is the important part….

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The Kennedys still won’t allow it off Cape Cod.

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Professional do-gooder Kerry Kennedy — Gov. Cuomo’s ex-wife and the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy — has called the oil-drilled rain forests of Ecuador “the biggest corporate environmental disaster on the face of the Earth, in the history of the world.”

The human-rights activist penned opinion pieces and lobbied officials to voice her outrage at the damage oil companies have caused to the town of Lago Agrio, where 1,700 square miles of rain forest have been destroyed and people sickened.

What Kennedy has never mentioned during her campaign is that she is being paid handsomely for her seemingly selfless advocacy.

Kennedy, 52, was secretly hired as a “public-relations consultant” by the lawyer representing the Ecuadoreans in an $18 billion lawsuit against Chevron, according to court documents.

Cashing in on her respected family name and legacy, Kennedy raked in tens of thousands of dollars and was given a 0.25 percent stake — worth as much as $40 million — if the $18 billion judgment handed down by an Ecuadorean judge is ultimately upheld. (Chevron has not yet paid pending its countersuit in Manhattan federal court.)

Doing well by doing good. Actually, it’s refreshing to learn that there’s a Kennedy who isn’t a gratuitously buttinsky do-gooder asshole, but is actually working for money like the rest of us.

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Reactions by the cleaning agents, known as Criegee intermediates, are also emitting a by-product that forms solar radiation-reflecting clouds that could help cool Earth and reduce the effects of global warming.

The Criegee biradicals were first hypothesised in the 1950s by German chemist Rudolf Criegee, but only now have they been recreated in a lab and directly measured for the first time. Specifically, the scientists took formaldehyde oxide – a species of Creigee intermediate – and observed it reacting with sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.

These dioxides are said to initiate climate change in our atmosphere, yet it’s now understood they are removed from the troposphere by helpful Criegee biradicals – described as pivotal atmospheric reactants. The reaction also spews sulphate and nitrate into the atmosphere, creating aerosol droplets that seed planet-cooling clouds.

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Researchers in the United States and Great Britain have made a significant breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language in which a series of eight objects have been sonically identified by dolphins. Team leader, Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, ‘spoke’ to dolphins with the dolphin’s own sound picture words. Dolphins in two separate research centers understood the words, presenting convincing evidence that dolphins employ a universal “sono-pictorial” language of communication.

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Or not.

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Gotta love Australians.

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Preserved in Antarctica since 1907, the Scotch that Ernest Shackleton drank is now available in stores

Volokh Conspiracy has assembled a number of useful links to knowledgeable legal discussion of the issue.

Assuming, of course, that you care about that sort of thing.

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Concern that the Arctic Ocean is becoming massively less salty due to its ice cap melting – which could have knock-on consequences for the planet’s climate – is unfounded, NASA scientists have said.

For years, researchers have seen falling salinity readings in the Canadian half of the Arctic Ocean. This has led them to theorise that large amounts of fresh water were being added due to permanent disappearance of ice. In itself this might not mean a lot – sea levels would be unaffected, as the Arctic ice floats atop the sea – but it had been feared that addition of so much fresh water could impact the oceanic “conveyor belt” which moves heat around the planet, with major consequences for the climate.

The enviro-nazis, of course, went ballistic. But it was another case of ‘sky-is-falling’ premature ejaculation.

According to Kwok and his colleagues, analysing readings from the satellites overhead, new freshwater in the Beaufort Sea comes not from melted ice but from rivers in Russia. Formerly this freshwater would have stayed largely in the Russian side of the Arctic, but a shift in circulation has occurred.

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That is, the ones not keeping an eye out for birds.

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Ms Hayek is currently promoting Puss in Boots, a film in which she provides the voice for a character called Kitty Softpaws.

President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that she will become a Chevalier – or Knight – of the Legion of Honour for her services to the French Republic.

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Utilizing a ceramic compound, the group’s optimized ProMetal 3D printer builds dissolvable scaffolds coated with a plastic binding agent that serve as a blueprint for tissue growth. The team’s already logged four long years fine tuning the process, having already achieved positive results testing on rats and rabbits, but it appears there’s still a ways to go — about 10 -12 years, according to the project’s co-author Susmita Bose — before orthopedic and dental surgeons can begin offering “printed” bone replacements.

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I was wondering when some country would start doing this. Given Britain’s money troubles, it makes sense.

Unfortunately, this sort of ‘training’ don’t produce the reflexes and muscle memory that live training does.

But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

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We don’t have many Democrats, for one thing.

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Over time, the neurons in your brain are going to change. And that’s only natural. When you experience a new event, your brain encodes the memory by altering the connections between neurons, which is caused by turning on several genes within these neurons. Recenty, a team of neuroscientists at MIT published their findings in the Dec. 23rd issue of Science in which the group was able to pinpoint some of the exact locations of memory formation within the brain.

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Once a break occurred, microcapsules with liquid metal filled the crack and restored 99 percent of conductivity in mere microseconds.

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Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere.

The discovery shows that such planets exist and that they can be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. They’re the smallest planets found so far that orbit a star resembling our sun.

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The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth’s deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change. New experiments and supercomputer computations have revealed that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth’s lower mantle, ferropericlase.

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The state’s unemployment rate fell 0.6 percent in November to 8.7 percent, according to new state reports, partly because the state’s employers opened up jobs to Americans after shedding illegal immigrants.

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

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Scientists have discovered a new type of chemical bond thanks to the Abe and Ember supercomputers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This may be insanely nerdy for our web-loving readers, but for anyone investing in the future of technology, this is big. Not only because new chemical bonds mean new materials or products that could change the world, but because it shows exactly how supercomputers and big data are becoming the microscope of the future.

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And that seems appropriate somehow, even though it sounds like a newspaper headline from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The French always focus on the important things in life, after all.

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We deal with the important stuff so you don’t have to.

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It isn’t a rarity for the folks at the University of Cambridge to introduce us to some of their digital findings, and on this occasion they are delivering 4,000 of Newton’s manuscripts right to your virtual door.

NIST Time & Frequency Services

I love this kind of stuff.

Useful Stuff from XKCD.

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The hoard was placed in a lead box and buried underground at a time when the Anglo-Saxons were attempting to wrest control of the north of the country from the Vikings.

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Did you know Malaysia had a king? Neither did I.

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You are 25 times as likely to be injured cheerleading as hunting.

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Let’s start with Congress and work our way up.

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An interesting idea. I’m still surprised that they haven’t developed tires filled with some sort of closed-cell foam in place of air.