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Slow news day. And my sinuses are acting up.

Besides, you can never know too much about puffer fish.

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Everyone realizes that healthcare’s hyperinflation is unsustainable and D.C. has proven itself incapable addressing the healthcare cost crisis. One of the last major crises in the U.S. was the response to Hurricane Katrina. Walmart was at the forefront of hurricane relief while the government struggled to respond. This is a different kind of crisis, but Walmart might just demonstrate that they can be more effective than the federal government once again.

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And why not? He’d have done the same to her, or worse.

Well done, Sergeant Taylor.

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Tell the truth, we’ve all wanted to do that.

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And, once again, rats get all the good stuff first.

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Gotta love Australians.

The real surprise is that it involved a female sailor — these days, that’s unusual.

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The process still requires the craftsmanship and care of a skilled luthier in assembling the instrument, but Dr. Sirr sees the process as an opportunity for ordinary musicians to have access to the world’s most treasured instruments at a fraction of the price.

We have the technology.

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TO satisfy our ever-growing need for computing power, many technology companies have moved their work to data centers with tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat. The additional power needed for cooling them — up to half of the power used to run them — is the steep environmental price we have paid to move data to the so-called cloud.

Well, of you left-wing assholes would allow us to build nuclear power plants, it wouldn’t be a problem. Nuclear power plants have no environmental price except in the fever dreams of Jane Fonda and her crowd.

Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

I am not making this up.

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The actual meat of the discovery is that graphene has been successfully chipped off a block of graphite using a chemical solvent. These flakes are then filtered to remove any larger, print head-clogging chunks, and then turned into a polymer ink. Despite its amazing properties, graphene hasn’t yet found a way into our computers is because it’s currently very hard and expensive to produce, isolate, and use in silicon circuits. Cambridge’s discovery probably won’t help IBM bring 100GHz graphene circuits to market, though — but it could enable, quite literally, wearable computers.

We have the technology.

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The researchers, led by Andrea Ferrari of the university’s Department of Engineering, created an ink able to deposit graphene on a flexible silicon substrate, using this year’s favourite magic material to improve the efficiency and performance of an organic semiconductor material.

We have the technology.

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And the Brits don’t even do Thanksgiving. Talk about cultural dominance….

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The archaeologists found the 42,000-year-old bones of tuna and sharks in a cave on East Timor near Australia, providing strong evidence that people were deep-sea fishing back then, according to their findings, published in Science.

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The deposits rival the world’s leading current source of mined jade, in Myanmar, formerly Burma, the experts say. The implications for history, archaeology and anthropology are just starting to emerge.

For one thing, the scientists say, the find suggests that the Olmecs, who flourished on the southern gulf coast of Mexico, exerted wide influence in the Guatemalan highlands as well. All told, they add, the Guatemalan lode was worked for millenniums [sic], as compared with centuries for the Burmese one.

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Quel dommage.

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No one I know puts “scale” into perspective better than Randall Munroe at xkcd. If you haven’t seen the latest, you should take the time to dive into what may be his largest image ever (and he’s known for creating large images) dealing with money. I warn you, though, it may suck up a lot of time as you go through it:

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We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

Now, that explains a lot.

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Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books.

This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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More than 2 million years ago, scores of whales congregating off the Pacific Coast of South America mysteriously met their end.

Chilean scientists together with researchers from the Smithsonian Institution are studying how these whales, many of the them the size of buses, wound up in the same corner of the Atacama Desert.

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A jobseeker from Florida who responded to a bogus Craigslist ad for a job on a southeast Ohio cattle farm was found dead, buried in a shallow grave, and another from South Carolina was shot but escaped by running away through the woods, a sheriff said Thursday.

Well, that’s one answer to the unemployment problem. I don’t think it will scale, though.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The future is arriving on track #4; please have your tickets ready.

This is actually very unsettling — we have seen the disruption caused by the flow of information losing most of its friction; what will happen when the creation of goods goes the same way? Read Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age for a hint, but really, there’s no telling how this will shake out.

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Boffins at California’s HRL Laboratories have developed what they claim is the world’s lightest material, a nickel structure that is a hundred times lighter than styrofoam.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. (Coulda been worse; coulda been a moose….)

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Titanium dioxide does a couple of clever tricks that mean we may well be seeing a lot of it in the future: it’s self-cleaning, and it breaks down pollutants in the air.

And the fact that thin films of it are clear is the reason that a number of manufacturers use it in glass applications such as skylights.

Read it. And watch the video.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have figured out how to neatly fold plastic using infrared light and an inkjet printer. Deep black lines are printed onto the plastic sheets, which then absorb the light and cause the material to fold without anyone having to touch it. The wider the line, the greater the angle of each fold, so it’s possible to set, say, a 90-degree bend for a cube or 120 degrees for a pyramid.

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Further news on the Analytical Engine project.

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The game is called – perhaps inevitably – Persian Incursion, and is the brainchild of technothriller writer Larry Bond, formerly well known as a designer of tactical combat games (Bond has collaborated with Tom Clancy, and it’s said that his games were used extensively in development of such seminal Cold War works as The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising).

Give Obama a copy, maybe he’ll learn something.

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Or maybe aliens with anger management issues. You never really know.

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Computer scientists and pathologists at Stanford University now have a computer system that can look a tissue sample and diagnose breast cancer more accurately than a human doctor. The computer system, called C-Path (Computational Pathologist), even went one step further and identified previously-undiscovered cellular structures that can be used by computers and humans alike to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer patients in the future.

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Talk about a renewable resource….

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The cephalopods’ abilities are a defence mechanism, apparently arising from the fact that they operate on the depth boundary between two main kinds of deep-sea predators who might fancy them for lunch.

Many of the hungry enemies of J heathi and O banksii spot prey by seeing its silhouette against the light waters above, illuminated by the sky. To avoid these, staying transparent is best. Those parts of the cephalopods which can’t be fully see-through – for instance their guts, filled with food – are reflective, as that’s the next best thing.

Deeper down, however, many ocean hunters use bioluminescent lighting of their own to illuminate prey. The transparent condition, used against these, would be a bad idea as the predators would easily detect the cephalopods’ reflective innards. Thus, when J heathi and O banksii notice that they are being illuminated strongly by certain wavelengths of light – blue is favoured by ocean creatures as it penetrates water better, as any diver will know – they swiftly turn themselves dark.

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A prototype fingerprint scanner has been developed that can detect the presence of opiates, cannabis, or cocaine in the sweat on a user’s fingertip.

We have the technology.

The device uses special cartridges to take a fingerprint, which are then processed using both chemical testing and a unique photo scanning system. This takes a high resolution image of the fingerprint and its residue, so that the output from individual sweat pores can be measured.

And … how convenient … they now have your fingerprint. One-stop-copping, you might say.

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Contrary to what the Food and Drug Administration might insist on having you believe, high-sodium diets may not be so bad for you afterall, a new meta-analysis finds.

Specifically, the new analysis found that reducing sodium intake increases cholesterol levels by 2.5 percent and triglycerides by seven percent.

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Let’s get some to Michael Moore and watch him vanish like the Wicked Witch of the West.

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The machine on the drawing boards at the Science Museum in London is the Babbage Analytical Engine, a room-size mechanical behemoth that its inventor envisioned but never built.

The project follows the successful effort by a group at the museum to replicate a far less complicated Babbage invention: the Difference Engine No. 2, a calculating machine composed of roughly 8,000 mechanical components assembled with a watchmaker’s precision. That project was completed in 1991.

The new effort — led by John Graham-Cumming, a programmer, and Doron Swade, a former curator at the museum — has already digitized Babbage’s surviving blueprints for the Analytical Engine. But the challenges of building it are daunting.

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The London Philharmonic Orchestra has just released “The Greatest Video Game Music” featuring full orchestrations of all of your favorite themes including Super Mario Brothers, the Legend of Zelda, and Halo. That’s right: Angry Birds finally has its own multi-part score and trilling woodwinds.

And the cover art, featuring a soldier playing a cello, is wildly goofy.

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At Watts Up With That, data from the National Climatic Data Center are reviewed. The results are quite startling. Every region of the continental United States has shown a cooling trend during the winter from 2001 to the present, and five of the nine regions have also had a cooling trend during the summer. With respect to annual mean temperature, only one of nine regions–the Northeast–has gotten warmer; the other eight have gotten cooler.

But the science is settled! Global warming! We’re all gonna drown! AlGore said so!

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The percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Democrats has dropped from 50 percent in early 2008 to 43 percent now, while the percentage of those who consider themselves Republicans has gone up, from 37 percent to 40 percent.

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Cornwall should adopt its own currency to protect itself from economic downturn and keep money in local communities, local groups have urged.

Scott Johnson at Power Line does the honors.

It’s tough to keep up with the crime wave associated with the Occupy encampments around the United States and Canada, but we’re doing our best.

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The market for maple syrup offers an odd inversion. The thin, pale fluid labeled Fancy or Grade A Light Amber commands the highest prices. It is the white bread of condiments, an inoffensive accompaniment to more flavorful fare. The robust, thick syrup marked Grade B fairly bursts with maple flavor, but sells at a significant discount. So why does the nominally inferior grade offer decidedly superior flavor? The answer lies in the history of maple syrup, a product that has long served as a symbol of American authenticity. As our sense of American identity has evolved, our syrup labels have not always kept pace.

I recall someone telling me once upon a time that the stuff from New Hampshire is better than the stuff from Vermont, but all I’ve ever seen in the stores is Vermont syrup, so there it is.

A Useful Chart.

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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Well, if you can boil a kettle with a bulb, why not crank up the dial and zap bugs with UV? Philips is doing exactly that with InstantTrust, a new instant water disinfection solution that is petite enough to be used in household appliances like taps, water filters and even water pitchers. The ultra-violet system is able to nix those nasty microbes at a rate of around four liters of water per minute and, unlike other bacteria-zapping systems, at any water temperature.

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The July issue of the science journal PLoS One detailed an explosive finding: a drug that creates a kind of viral self-destruct switch. In years to come it could be used to eradicate diseases from HIV to the common cold. “Forget the flu shot,” wrote Men’s Health. “How about a flu cure?”

Even more impressive, the study’s main researcher isn’t a doctor. Todd Rider entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 at age 17 and left nine years later with four degrees, including a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. He also minored in relativistic quantum field theory and solid state and optical physics. “Once you start on the path of the dark side, you are hooked,” jokes Rider of his obsession with science.

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Italian physicist and inventor Andrea Rossi has conducted a public demonstration of his “cold fusion” machine, the E-Cat, at the University of Bologna, showing that a small amount of input energy drives an unexplained reaction between atoms of hydrogen and nickel that leads to a large outpouring of energy, more than 10 times what was put in.

The physicists who were invited to the demonstration in April gave the E-Cat a solid thumbs-up. It produced too much excess heat to have been originating from a chemical process, they wrote in their report, adding that, “The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production.”

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RJ Balson and Sons, a butchers based in Bridport, Dorset, boasts an astonishing history that is almost 500 years old.

Experts have traced the businesses roots back through 25 generations to when founder John Balson opened a stall in the town’s market on South Street in 1535.

Since then dozens of family members have worked as butchers in the market town, passing their skills down the generations.

And 476 years later, the shop remains a thriving business and has been named Britain’s oldest family run retailer.

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“Our findings suggest that this human propensity toward optimism is facilitated by the brain’s failure to code errors in estimation when those call for pessimistic updates,” the authors write in the online version of Nature Neuroscience.

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If you are a calendar geek (as Roy obviously is), this will tell you EVERYTHING THERE IS TO BE KNOWN about calendars.

So there.

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My question is: With what?