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A group of modders have launched a Star Wars themed takeover for Call of Duty 4, giving gamers the chance to play Modern Warfare as an Imperial Stormtrooper or Rebel Alliance soldier.

This is pretty slick. Very impressive work. I really wish I had the time to play these games.

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British scientists have produced a new study suggesting that the Sun is coming to the end of a “grand solar maximum” – a long period of intense activity in the Sun – meaning that we in Blighty could be set for a long period of much colder winters, similar to those seen during the “little ice age” of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Gotta love that Global Warming.

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Do you know what the Vikings ate for dinner? What a typical meal of a wealthy family in Roman Britain consisted of, or what food was like in a Victorian Workhouse? Why not drop into history cookbook and find out? This project looks at the food of the past and how this influenced the health of the people living in each time period. You can also try some of the recipes for yourself.

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Geologists say they’ve uncovered expansive new deposits of rare earth minerals, buried within a seabed some 20,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean surface. Research leader Yasuhiro Kato estimates that the deposits contain anywhere from 80 to 100 billion metric tons of rare earths, which, if commercially viable, could pose a serious threat to China’s global hegemony.

And it couldn’t happen to nicer people.

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I say, let’s just mash all of the latest technologies together and see what kind of a game that makes, what? Jolly good.

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And there was much rejoicing.

Oxford comma: Eats, shoots, and leaves.

Inferior comma: Eats, shoots and leaves.

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The wrinkles that develop on wet fingers could be an adaptation to give us better grip in slippery conditions, the latest theory suggests.

So why do our faces get wrinkled as we get older? Some scary thoughts there….

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Gotta like that.

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In other news, Bashar al-Assad claims that time is running out for Hillary Clinton.

Let’ see who leaves office first.

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And you can believe as much or as little of that as you care to.

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

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Three dialysis patients have received the world’s first blood vessels grown in a lab from donated skin cells. It’s a key step toward creating a supply of ready-to-use arteries and veins that could be used to treat diabetics, soldiers with damaged limbs, people having heart bypass surgery and others.

We have the technology.

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The Russian double agent who betrayed Anna Chapman and nine other Kremlin spies to the CIA last summer has been found guilty of state treason as a Moscow military court revealed a poignant final message he wrote to his wife.

A poignant reminder that just because the Russians are no longer Communist doesn’t mean they aren’t still our enemy.

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I’ll bet that was a surprise.

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In a federal announcement issued on Tuesday, famous crazytech company General Atomics was awarded a $39,833,499 contract for “High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) Phase 4, Demonstration Laser Weapon System”.

…

DARPA wants the HELLADS programme to produce a directed-energy weapon of war-grade power (say 150 kilowatts) and weighing no more than 750kg, light enough to put onto a US combat jet. Existing lasers are so heavy that they require at least a cargo plane or a monster jumbo to carry them.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

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Using a multiferroic alloy of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and tin, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered a method of creating green electricity from waste heat sources. This alloy could be placed near your car’s exhaust to create electricity — or in the cooling towers of power stations to convert wasted heat into electricity. Beyond creating the alloy itself, which is made from common and abundant elements, there are no extra costs — and no additional pollution, either.

No word on whether it comes with a free pony.

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By morphing and repositioning a small aircraft’s vertical tail to resemble the cranial crest of a pterosaur, researchers have shown that the aircraft’s turn radius can be reduced by 14%. The ability to make sharper turns is especially important for small aircraft that operate in urban environments and in the presence of obstacles.

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“This could ultimately be the cleanest, most efficient and cost-effective way of converting coal into electricity,” says Professor Meilin Liu, engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “And by providing an exhaust stream of pure carbon dioxide, this technique could also facilitate carbon sequestration without the separation and purification steps now required for conventional coal-burning power plants.”

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Keith McMillen Instruments of Berkeley, California, has released the SoftStep KeyWorx, a USB foot-operated input device that combines the company’s SoftStep USB/MIDI foot controller – a musician’s stomp-pad – with KeyWorx software to, as the company’s marketing blurb explains, “Get your feet in the game”.

But the SoftStep KeyWorx is not only designed to give “computer gamers a competitive edge.” It can also, the company claims, put to use the pedal extremities of video editors, programmers, and “data entry professionals”.

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Not so surprising when you realize that most military submarines are playing blind man’s buff – they go forward into the dark and rely on charts to avoid stationary obstacles and depend on their sense of hearing (sonar) to avoid moving objects. Using active echolocation would, of course, make things a lot safer, but the whole point of a military submarine would be sort of undercut by their emitting loud noises at regular intervals.

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How accommodating.

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Chinese developers are making knock-offs of European towns.

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I am not making this up.

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Being the last place that anyone would look.

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This would appear to be the famous ‘palm lock’ that we all know and love from classic science fiction stories.

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Scientists have designed a brain implant that restored lost memory function and strengthened recall of new information in laboratory rats — a crucial first step in the development of so-called neuroprosthetic devices to repair deficits from dementia, stroke and other brain injuries in humans.

Rats get all the good stuff….

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In 2006, serial inventor Cordani, 49, was experimenting with protective coatings to defend homes from hurricanes. At the same time, wildfires were raging in his home state of Florida. On a hunch, he took a sample of a viscous gel he’d developed and tried a few experiments.

“I stuck a Popsicle stick in it and tried to light it — it wouldn’t catch,” he recalls. “Then I sprayed it on a pine tree and tried to light the tree. I couldn’t.”

Very impressive.

FireIce is shipped and stored as a powder; it becomes a gel when mixed with water. Unlike firefighting foam, it does not contain noxious chemicals that remain in the environment after its use, Cordani says. (As if torching his hand wasn’t enough, Cordani has also eaten FireIce, to attest to how benign it is.)

Very nice.

It obviously blocks heat transmission. So when can we use it for insulation in houses and vehicles?

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What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

How about that Global Warming? We can all keep warm by laughing at AlGore.

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Now, a company called Avita Medical is taking wound and burn treatment to a whole new level with a new technology called ReCell. ReCell allows a doctor to take a small sample of healthy skin and cover a much larger area that has been injured. What’s really cool about this technology is that it’s a spray! That’s right, you lose a few layers of skin and doctors can now spray some back on! And from some of the before and after pictures seen below, ReCell shows promise as a breakthrough in treating skin injuries.

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The RPG is a mechanical rather than chemical approach to portable energy storage. Its energy capacity is potentially ten times greater than a typical battery, company representatives wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. That depends on the kind of fuel it uses— the invention is essentially a very tiny, highly efficient engine.

This looks very interesting.

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Modern photography using Victorian tools and techniques. At last it is revealed why most upper-class people in the 19th century looked dimwitted.

Pretty awesome.

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Archeologists in Croatia have identified what they believe is the world’s only triple-barrel cannon inspired by the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci.

The bronze cannon, from the late 15th century, bears a striking resemblance to sketches drawn by the Renaissance inventor, notably in his Codex Atlanticus – the largest collection of his drawings and writing.

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‘Precious Reynolds’? *sigh* On the other hand, perhaps it’s that name that helped to make her strong.

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Just goes to show that you don’t have to be stupid to be Green.

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Gotta love Australians.

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Detailed specs haven’t been offered, we only know that it will feature “cutting-edge internal components,” but we can tell you there are a bevy of customization options. You can choose everything from the wood stain color, to keyboard fonts, to etched brass lids or clockwork gears like the original design (except these will tick and turn).

And a beautiful thing it is, too.

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Scientists say they’ve finally discovered why smokers tend to gain some weight when they kick the habit.

It turns out that nicotine can rev up brain cells that normally signal people to stop eating when they’re full, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

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This is one of the most creative ideas I’ve seen in the rapidly disintegrating ‘artists trying to make some money from what they do’ space.

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Good. Perhaps now he’ll go away and quit bothering people.

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Sometimes the old ways  are best.

I’m waiting for some international environazi group to sue him for adding to global warming with his horse’s farts.

Hey, it could happen.

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An Adelaide-based entrepreneur has hit upon a novel method of fighting global warming: he intends to exterminate Australia’s vast population of feral camels by means of gunfire from helicopters and jeeps, so preventing the beasts from unleashing a deadly planet-wrecking miasma of greenhouse gas from their rumbling guts.

The idea is that the War On Dromedaries would be paid for – and indeed, turn a profit – by selling government carbon credits issued on the basis that a dead camel cannot be emitting methane by means of belch or trouser cough. Methane is a vastly more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂, so the elimination of even quite small sources of it can equate to a substantial carbon-emissions reduction.

Gotta love Australians.

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After trying to cram a cold and hot aisle into a single container, which is a bit on the cramped side for human beings, HP has figured out that if you put two containers side-by-side and then open them up, you can run a hallway down the middle and use that as a shared hot aisle in roughly the same dimensions as in an actual brick and mortar data center. The 240 part of the product name refers to the fact that it is based on two 40-foot shipping containers, the kind that come from China to the United States and Europe is far larger numbers than go in the reverse direction.

You, too, can do your part for Global Warming.

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Just waiting for SkyNet to make its move….

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What a wonderful world we live in, where people have the spare time and money to do this sort of thing.

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Last night, Kno quietly released its first digital textbook app for the iPad. It includes its own store of “over 70,000 titles at 30% to 50% off list” price. And the app is a full textbook reader.

Kno, whose CEO Osman Rashid previously founded textbook-rental service Chegg, originally developed its own oversized tablet for textbooks. But once the iPad and Android tablets hit the market, the company saw the writing on the touchscreen and bailed on its hardware efforts last April