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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

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The German scientist discovered that by placing precious metals in acid he could create tiny ducts through corrosion. Once those channels are flooded with a conductive liquid, electrical currents can be used to harden the material and, if you change your mind about the brittle results, the effect can easily be reversed to make it soft again.

We have the technology.

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Apple software engineer Nirav Patel generates a key’s blueprint with the manufacturer’s lock code, which contains all the relevant bit dimensions. This information is fed into OpenSCAD, a program for creating solid objects, and finally churned out through his RepRap 3D printer.

Not sure I’m comfortable with that….

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For $199, the Nike Plus Sportswatch GPS is a smart watch that tells you how far you’ve gone, how fast and how often. The watch, which is powered by navigation company TomTom, also knows where you’ve been. It tells you how many calories you’ve burned and reminds you to run if you haven’t been running in a few days. Wonderfully, it also tells time.

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What differentiates Coursification from other course management and online learning platforms is that it helps teachers offer a tailored, personalized curriculum to each student based on their performance and learning schedule. Each online course begins with a diagnostic assessment that identifies student learning gaps (specialized to the subject). After the diagnostic test, each student receives a personalized study schedule, which the teacher can simply import into the platform. The schedule is customized based on student proficiencies and the duration of the course.

At last, some attempt is being made to leverage technology to automate the educational process.

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A Bangladeshi woman cut off a man’s penis during an alleged attempt to rape her and took it to a police station as evidence.

You go, girl.

Iowahawk is on the case.

I have never been much of a community activist, but I can no longer sit idly while America remains at risk of attack by the most nefarious identity thief in the history of Internet. And cheap page views are to be had.

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Massive collection of cheap sound effects.

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Most options for wood used in decks, outdoor furniture and siding are rarely entirely earth friendly, since they are often treated with heavy metals or toxic chemicals, or logged from unsustainable forests. One company is innovating in the space by altering the chemistry of the wood itself to make it weather and decay resistant.

This is really exciting stuff.

Accoya could be used in place of pressure-treated wood, although Ayala said the company sees itself as more competitive with tropical hardwoods such as teak and ipe. According to the company, Accoya wood requires less maintenance than its tropical counterparts, and comes with a 50-year warranty for wood used above ground.

I have this vision of a world full of paint-free wood.

“No natural moisture can penetrate that wood,” Halvarson said. “If you try and put a water based stain on it, it won’t take at all, but an oil based stain will wick all the way through the wood from one side to the other.” Since the wood is treated from the inside out, it can be cut and modified in a variety of ways without compromising protection.

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Batteries and motors are heavy and inefficient in that they expend a significant percentage of their power just moving their own mass. This is especially apparent in climbing robots, which spend most of their time hoisting themselves vertically upward. Researchers from Zhejiang University in China have developed a robot that’s capable of sticking to smooth surfaces, climbing vertically, and washing windows, relying almost entirely on water pressure.

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The National Museum of Computing has finished restoring a Tunny machine – a key part of Allied code-cracking during World War II.

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Some day we will have AutoDocs and health care prices will start to come down.

That’s assuming, of course, that the government doesn’t regulate it to death.

They do that, you know.

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I can see a place for this in dense cities, much as for mass transit, where there’s enough of a non-motile customer base to make it viable. Don’t think it would work in the suburbs, though, especially for perishables; people with cars prefer to get stuff from their local store, where they can see the quality before they buy.

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We have the technology.

More here.

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But exactly what an English major makes in a lifetime has never been clear, and some defenders of the humanities have said that their students are endowed with “critical thinking” and other skills that could enable them to catch up to other students in earnings.

Turns out, on average, they were wrong.

What? You mean to say that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t a Communications major?

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Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing the results with equivalent tests on French and US schoolchildren.

The Mundurucu showed comparable understanding, and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces.

Arithmetic, not so much — see Congress.

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Well, that’s what evolution is all about: Change and trim, change and trim.

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

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Said to be the strongest material ever measured, an improvement upon and a replacement for silicon and the most conductive material known to man, its properties have sent the science world – and subsequently the media – into a spin.

Well, yeah.

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Historical recordings from the Library of Congress.

Freeberg has more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.

A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”.

Factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”, and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean “similar but not the same”. The Washington Times described Mailer’s new word as referring to “something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact”.

In contrast with the factoid, the fektoid is not only true, but easily proven so.It succeeds indisputably as it stands on its own; but as the foundation for an argument to be constructed on top of it, it fails glamorously.

The correct response to the appearance of a fektoid is: ‘Yeah. So?’

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The Oregon man, Rob Summers, was paralyzed below the chest in 2006, after getting hit by a speeding car. This week, however, doctors announced that Summers can now stand up on his own and remain standing for up to four minutes. With the help of a special harness, he can even take steps on a treadmill and can move his lower extremities for the first time in years.

We have the technology.

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Find extraterrestrial intelligence? I’m sure there’s an app for that.

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Hey, whatever else you can say about the guy, at least he loves his mother.

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A clever device that is not much known in the U.S.

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And no doubt blamed the Americans.

An Egyptian princess who lived more than 3,500 years ago is the oldest known person to have had clogged arteries, dispelling the myth that heart disease is a product of modern society, a new study says.

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Gotta love Australians.

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Photovoltaics suffer from gross inefficiency, despite incremental improvements in their power producing capabilities. According to research by a team led by a University of Missouri professor, however, newly developed nantenna-equipped solar sheets can reap more than 90 percent of the sun’s bounty — which is more than double the efficiency of existing solar technologies. Apparently, some “special high-speed electrical circuitry” is the secret sauce behind the solar breakthrough.

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The converter employs up to one thousand tiny cantilevers attached to a one square inch surface (e.g. a computer chip) to produce between one and ten milliwatts of electricity — admittedly a very small amount of energy. However, it’s creators are quick to point out that a slew of these converters could generate enough power to perform small tasks in the heat-generating device — things like sensing when a server room gets too hot for comfort.

This is pretty cool.

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In the wonderful new world that’s being lovingly sculpted by the nice people who know what’s best for us, peace on Earth will apparently never come until everyone everywhere is either offended or apologizing all the time.

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Thousands of artifacts dating to between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago were uncovered by researchers led by Michael R. Waters of Texas A&M University. They report the discovery in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The find was located 5 feet below materials left by the well-known Clovis culture, which was once thought to have been the first American settlers around 13,000 years ago.

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Their latest project, Mycoform, places mushroom roots known as mycelium spores into a mold and feeds them with agricultural byproducts like buckwheat husks. In just over a week at 80 degrees, the spores grow to fill the form, resulting in a light yet solid structure. The brick is heated to 100 degrees when complete to kill the spores, preventing further growth.

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Well, you don’t want to rush into these things.

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Just in case you want to know what you’re missing.

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More germane to showers, we rarely admit how much of who we are is driven by our subconscious minds.  We know our dreams, which are owned and operated by our subconscious, can be incredibly creative.  But on a busy day in modern times we are bombarded with information, and our conscious mind dominates. It’s only when we have quiet time, going for a walk, getting some exercise, or taking a shower, that our conscious minds quiet down enough for our sub-conscious to be heard. And that’s why you get ideas in the shower. The other inputs to your mind are quiet, your body (which is connected to your brain) is relaxed, and the way is clear for the rest of your brain to bubble up interesting thoughts. (Chapter 1,  6 and 12 of The Myths of Innovation explores the science/history of, and advice on, how creativity works – sample chapters here (PDF)).

The Other McCain is on the case.

You’ll excuse my factual description of the event, but I haven’t seen so many dogs in one place since the AKC grand championship show.

Paris, Lindsay, and Britney were apparently otherwise occupied.

You aren’t allowed to disagree with feminists, you aren’t allowed to criticize feminists and, most of all, you aren’t allowed to make fun of feminists. It’s time people wake up and smell the totalitarianism.

He does these things so that you don’t have to.

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Or many of them, anyway.

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The process behind the innovative new brick is known as microbial-induced calcite precipitation, or MICP, and utilizes microbes on sand to “glue” the grains together using a chain of chemical reactions. And the end product is fairly strong – according to Metropolis Mag, it resembles sandstone but can be as strong as fired-clay brick or even marble depending on how it is made.

Read it. And watch the video.

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Columbia University, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution have pooled their expertise to create the world’s first plant identification mobile app using visual search—Leafsnap. This electronic field guide allows users to identify tree species simply by taking a photograph of the tree’s leaves. In addition to the species name, Leafsnap provides  high-resolution photographs and information about the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds and bark—giving the user a comprehensive understanding of the species.

Boy Scouts of the world, rejoice.