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

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Old-time egalitarian societies were just too stable to survive in a dog-eat-dog world, according to Stanford University researchers, a situation which led to them being overrun by the stratified societies which dominate humanity today.

The study used a computer simulation to compare demographic stability and rates of migration for societies that shared everything equally and those that had a class structure with those on top controlling most of the resources.

 The researchers found that, when resources were consistently scarce, egalitarian societies didn’t have the motivation to change their ways because they shared out the pain, but in unequal communities, the have-nots tended to go in search of a better life when things got bad.

If resources fluctuated, the class societies were the ones that were stable because the ruling class always had plenty, so they expanded, while the sharing and caring communities found it hard to adapt and once again stayed as they were.

I hope this isn’t the same computer software they use to do the Global Warming simulations.

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When your alarm clock doesn’t go off, you can thank a humble enzyme for getting you out of bed, scientists at the Salk Institute reveal in research published today.

Researchers examining the mechanisms that control our sleep have found the chemical reaction that makes us stir abruptly, throw the cat off the bed and stumble blinking into the bathroom.

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Supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Schlein and his research partner Günter C. Müller concocted an array of nectar poisons known as Attractive Toxic Sugar Baits that are easy to make, environmentally friendly and inexpensive.

In tests in Israel and in West Africa, the baits knocked down mosquito populations by 90 percent. Even better, they nearly eliminated older females, the most dangerous mosquitoes. (Only females bite humans, and only mosquitoes that have already picked up malaria, dengue or another disease from one human can inject it with their saliva into another human.)

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All your Crayola questions answered.

Starting with a fresh box of twenty-four Crayola crayons I measured each with an i1 pro spectrophotometer to create a set of spectral power distributions (SPD) of the reflected light. You may not know this, but a spectrophotometer is good for much more than creating screen and printer profiles—for instance, I can tell you with some precision the color of my tongue (and my dog’s).

Well. There it is.

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Good. I hate those damned things.

When Keith Wearne goes grocery shopping, checking out with a cashier is worth the few extra moments, rather than risking that a self-serve machine might go awry and delay him even more.

Most shoppers side with Wearne, studies show. And with that in mind, some grocery store chains nationwide are bagging the do-it-yourself option, once considered the wave of the future, in the name of customer service.

“It’s just more interactive,” Wearne said during a recent shopping trip at Manchester’s Big Y Foods. “You get someone who says hello; you get a person to talk to if there’s a problem.”

And you provide jobs for young people, partially disabled people, and those on the left side of the bell curve who, let’s face it, don’t have a lot of options.

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Sarah Dutton of CBS News crunched the numbers from the latest CBS/New York Times poll and found that of the last 6 presidents, only Jimmy Carter had worse CBS/NYT polling numbers at this point in his presidency. His approval is 7 points below his disapproval numbers — a minus 7 overall.

Only Jimmy Carter had a negative number at this point — minus 18.

Obama has the highest disapproval number — 50%. Even Carter’s disapproval was not that high, at 49%.

But hang in there, Barry; you’ve still got a year to go.

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A route planner with all main roads and cities of the Roman Empire, based on the Tabula Peutingeriana.

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A previously unknown painting by Francisco de Goya has been found hidden underneath one of his masterpieces, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has announced.

The unfinished work was discovered underneath Goya’s Portrait Of Don Ramon Satue, using a new X-ray technique.

It is thought to depict a French general, and may even portray Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother, Joseph.

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The Russians know the stakes, and know what to do about it.

Aaron Renn does the numbers.

Let’s take a look at the top level data. While reviewing, keep in mind that the data for the US as a whole actually includes Texas. If you stripped the Texas data out of the US total, the comparisons would generally get even better for the Lone Star State.

I don’t thing it’s so much what Texas is doing right as it is that Texas is refraining from doing the wrong things that California and Michigan are so fond of.

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Ceramics, metallic alloys, bone powder, wood or stem cells are just some of the substances doctors have used to replace or heal broken bones so far. Now a group of researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, led by Professor Junzo Tanaka, has come up with an alternative: fish scales.

According to the professor, using fish scales comes with three advantages (when compared to using collagen from pig skin, for example): it’s safer (viruses don’t migrate from fish to humans), the artificial bones are stronger, and the material converts to bone about two times faster.

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Quick, somebody call Sarah Palin….

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What if you could ask the author of a book a question while you were reading the book? That’s the kind of world Amazon wants to offer with its new @author feature, which the online bookstore launched on Wednesday with a group of writers including Susan Orlean and self-help guru Tim Ferriss. Readers can ask questions directly from their Kindles while they are reading a book, and the question gets sent to the author’s Twitter account as well as to their home page at Amazon.

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Amazon on Wednesday announced the launch of its previously-promised Kindle library lending, which will allow Kindle and Kindle app users alike to borrow ebooks from 11,000 local libraries in the United States.

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This is Willis’ first Robert Heinlein award, though she is the recipient of numerous Hugo Awards (11), Locus Awards (11), and Nebula Awards (8). Her most recent book is the multiple award-winning two-part time traveling novel ‘Blackout/All Clear’.

And well deserved, too. Connie Willis has been consistently one of the best authors in the field, and is on my small ‘buy automatically’ list.

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The HEXAGON’s twin optical bar panoramic mirror cameras rotated as the swept back and forth as the satellite flew over Earth, a process that intelligence officials referred to as “mowing the lawn.”

Each 6-inch wide frame of HEXAGON film capturing a wide swath of terrain covering 370 nautical miles — the distance from Cincinnati to Washington — on each pass over the former Soviet Union and China. The satellites had a resolution of about 2 to 3 feet (0.6 to nearly 1 meter), according to the NRO.

In other words, they could probably tell what kind of car you were driving.

In a fascinating footnote, the film bucket from the first KH-9 HEXAGON sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in spring 1972 after Air Force recovery aircraft failed to snag the bucket’s parachute.

The film inside the protective bucket reported contained high resolution photographs of the Soviet Union’s submarine bases and missile silos. In a daredevil feat of clandestine ingenuity, the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Vehicle Trieste II succeeded in grasping the bucket from a depth of 3 miles below the ocean.

As I recall, the film Ice Station Zebra (with Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, and Patrick McGoohan) was based on something similar.

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A new federal proposal to give all patients in the U.S. direct electronic access to their lab results could make it easier to track important health markers like cholesterol levels and the body’s response to blood thinners – – with an iPhone.

The  rules proposed by the Dept. of Health and Human Services are part of a broader effort to give patients more access to their own medical data, so they can become more engaged in their care. They would replace a confusing patchwork of state laws and privacy statutes  and affect more than six billion lab tests a year.

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Waiting for some Muslim to paint a swastika on it….

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You first.

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In one of those freak accidents that sometimes occur in science, where someone is looking at something for one purpose and finds another for it, Dan O’Sullivan has found a use for a byproduct of harmless bacteria commonly found in the human gut; called bisin, it appears to work as a sort of super-preservative for meat, dairy and eggs, allowing them to go unspoiled for perhaps years.

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Two thirds of EU officials are cashing in on an expat perk that gives them an extra 16 per cent on top of their salary for their entire working life at a cost of £200 million a year.

As Jerry Pournelle often observes, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

And, as John Derbyshire (Patron Saint of Dyspepsia) always says, ‘Get a government job!’.

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We have the technology.

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Desmond FitzGerald, the 29th and last Knight of Glin who died on September 14 aged 74, was a connoisseur of the decorative arts who worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum and the fine art auctioneers Christie’s and, as a campaigning president of the Irish Georgian Society, helped to save many architectural treasures over the Irish Sea from dereliction or insensitive development.

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I never realized before how much Henry Waxman does, indeed, look like Gollum.

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Archaeologists working outside Vienna, Austria, have discovered the remains of a huge school for ancient Roman gladiators—a complex so extensive that it rivals the training grounds outside Rome’s Colosseum.

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The startup’s site aggregates information on plants and vegetables, offers growing skills and techniques, hints and tips for needed activities to become a personal farming resource. Through the site’s social functionality, users can share opinions or growing advice, connecting to each other and even exchanging produce. Grow The Planet is also location-enabled, allowing users to view a map to see what users are close, what they’re growing, and pops down (instead of pins) tomatoes and other veggies so you can see what produce is available around you. And, hey, even offer a neighbor a snack of cucumbers.

However, the core of the platform lies in the possiblity for each user to design their own vegetable garden, on their balcony or indoors, and receive tips on what is needed to grow vegetables according to the season, climate zone, weather, etc. The startup brings in extensive research on growth statistics and the integration with climate data and user input to add breadth to the platform.

Kind of like one of those electronic pets, that people spend money on and abandon within a month or two.

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A Japanese company claims to have invented the world’s first artificial intelligence “chat robots” designed specifically to converse with English language students.

Forget them, the people who need it are the ones learning Japanese.

An Informative Chart.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Be the first on your block.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

We have the technology.

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More than 500 days of talks to form a government have seen Belgium take from Iraq the dubious honor of taking the longest time ever to form a government, prompting attacks by bond vigilantes as well as international ridicule.

But with economic growth in the country now surpassing that of many of its euro zone peers, are Belgians having the last laugh? The Belgian economy grew 0.7 percent in the second quarter, outpacing growth in the euro zone as a whole and significantly better than Germany, traditionally Europe’s growth engine, which recorded a meager 0.1 percent growth in the second quarter.

Maybe we ought to try that in the U.S.

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I wish I’d seen this before the speech.

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I’m somewhat surprised that they picked Beinecke (The Clock Radio) rather than Sterling Memorial at Yale. But I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

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Following yesterday’s ousting of Carol Bartz as the CEO of Yahoo, the former chief executive is now eligible for a hefty severance package.

A form 8-K the company filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today notes that Bartz was “removed from her role” as CEO, and will receive severance benefits “for termination without cause.”

According to some number crunching by CNN, that includes $3 million in cash, as well as a pro-rated yearly bonus worth somewhere between $1 million to $2 million. Add in company stock and you get an extra $5.2 million, a payout figure the company floated in December of last year, which is now higher.

On top of all that are restricted shares that have not vested that Bartz could still get, CNN notes.

Sometimes being a failure is more profitable than being a success. That could explain a lot about our government.

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As Mulder always said, the truth is out there.

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For Perry, Paul is like that little bit of manure you can’t quite get off your shoe.

One of the few dependable facts about politics: If politician A releases an ad attacking politician B, it’s sure and certain proof that politician B is kicking politician A’s ass in the election, as judged by the person in the best position to know.

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NPR shores up its reputation for quirkiness with an article about type fonts.

But with great power comes great responsibility … and some didn’t use their typeface forces for good. To wit: Comic Sans. If you’ve ever printed signs to advertise a yard sale or sent invitations to your child’s birthday party, chances are you’ve employed the wildly popular Comic Sans. The playful letters became so overused that it inspired a backlash. Garfield is hardly a fan, but he comes to Comic Sans’ defense.

“The key thing with Comic Sans and with all fonts is really the use to which it’s put,” he says. “If you used it … to invite people to your school fair, that was great. [It was] not so great, however, when it began appearing on the sides of ambulances and gravestones.” Garfield recalls one member of the Ban Comic Sans “movement” saying: “If you use it in the wrong place it’s like inviting a clown to a funeral.”

I happen to like Comic Sans. Apparently this means I’m not among the Cool Kids.

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Engineers in Sweden have announced the development of a prototype tank which is covered in “pixels” that enable it to disappear from thermal images – or to disguise itself as something else.

Because, of course, Sweden has a crying need for an invisible tank.

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It’s not the first single-molecule nano-motor, but it’s the first one to be driven by electricity: a Tufts research team has demonstrated that you can “provide electricity to a single molecule and get it to do something that’s not just random” (as team leader Charles Sykes put it).

We have the technology.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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

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We have the technology.

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A graphic from NASA shows sea levels have dropped 6 mm in the last 6 months, wiping out the rise over the past 2 years.

Well. So much for Global Warming flooding out all the Blue states. (Shucks.)

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

Get one.

Courtesy of John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia.

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A second quake, in June, caused further damage, shattering stained glass panels.

The city has yet to decide on a long-term replacement for the landmark and has commissioned architect Shigeru Ban to create a structure that will be ready by the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and last until the Anglican cathedral can be restored to its original condition.

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By tapping into Albert Einstein’s idea of “spooky action at a distance,” researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute have discovered what might be the key to completely secure data transfer — keeping particles “entangled” for up to an hour.