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Titanium alloy is also used for medical implants, and is well thought of in that role. But it seems that the miracle metal – as strong as steel but half the weight – is inconveniently stiff. The human bone that it replaces is bendier, and superstiff titanium replacements can cause adjacent bones, relieved of loads which would normally be put on them due to their yielding neighbours, to atrophy from lack of work. Also a normal titanium implant, though it often bonds well with the bone it is attached to, can break free.

Not only is titanofoam bendy like a bone, it is also easier for living bone to bond to, according to the remorseless Fraunhofer scientists of the Institut für Fertigungstechnik und Angewandte Materialforschung (IFAM) and the Institut für Keramische Technologien und Systeme (IKTS).

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It was always thought the Titanic sank because its crew were sailing too fast and failed to see the iceberg before it was too late.

But now it has been revealed they spotted it well in advance but still steamed straight into it because of a basic steering blunder.

According to a new book, the ship had plenty of time to miss the iceberg but the helmsman panicked and turned the wrong way.

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But I thought the Europeans all wanted to ride the trains?

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Go, granny, go.

Check it out.

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Everybody needs a hobby. I doubt that it will float, though — or fly.

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Bearing in mind, of course, that what journalistas think is ‘far-Right’ is actually moderately conservative. Still, it’s a healthy sign, considering the galloping dhimmitude toward which Sweden has been on track for the last few years.

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“There was a time when the 3,000 miles was a good guideline,” said Philip Reed, senior consumer advice editor for the car site Edmunds.com. “But it’s no longer true for any car bought in the last seven or eight years.”

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Ummmm, okay.

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

Makes you wonder what the Inca were up to, though, doesn’t it?

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Toast is a near-universally popular snack because it reminds us of happy childhood memories, scientists have found.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

What would we do without scientists?

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And about time, too.

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The Vatican Library is to reopen to scholars after a three year, £7.5 million renovation, with 21st century technology enlisted to safeguard books and manuscripts dating back nearly 2,000 years.

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A Roman bronze helmet complete with face-mask – thought to be one of only three of its kind to be found in Britain – has been discovered by a metal detector enthusiast in Cumbria.

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Uh-oh. It’s a white male. How did that happen?

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A recent addition to the autopsy workflow is the possibility of conducting postmortem imaging — in its 3D version, also called virtual autopsy (VA) — using MDCT or MRI data from scans of cadavers and with direct volume rendering (DVR) 3D techniques. At the foundation of the VA development are the modern imaging modalities that can generate large, high-quality datasets with submillimeter precision. Interactive visualization of these 3D datasets can provide valuable insight into the corpses and enables noninvasive diagnostic procedures. Efficient handling and analysis of the datasets is, however, problematic. For instance, in postmortem CT imaging, not being limited by a certain radiation dose per patient means the datasets can be generated with such a high resolution that they become difficult to handle in today’s archive retrieval and interactive visualization systems, specifically in the case of full body scans.

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A Chinese woman is suing a cinema and a film’s distributors for wasting her time by showing 20 minutes of adverts before it started, according to state media.

What an excellent idea.

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This predictive model starts with the point where a person was last seen and incorporates the amount of time he or she has been missing. The method combines this information with topographical data, vegetation, slope and terrain of the area and uses that to update the statistical estimates to help in the search.

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And we would have been happy to get it.

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The End Times must be near. Better go pack.

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Alexander the Great was killed by a deadly bacterium found in the River Styx, rather than by a fever brought on by an all-night drinking binge in ancient Babylon, scientists believe.

American researchers have found a striking correlation between the symptoms suffered by Alexander before his death in 323BC, and the effects of the highly toxic bacterium.

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Extinction of mammoths, camels, giant sloths and other large mammals in the New World may have cooled the global climate about 11,500 years ago, suggest paleobiologists.

The culprit? Less of the greenhouse gas, methane, emitted by the massive herbivores.

An Informative Chart.

Thanks to Catherine for this one.

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I later realized that I was looking at the project as I would a school assignment. I took it for granted that the instructions I’d been given were set in stone and must be followed precisely. But in the office, requirements are always changing, and the person who designs form questions is not necessarily a design expert. When I graduate in a year and transition from college to industry, I’m going to have to make a mental shift from accepting projects as they’re assigned to examining instructions more critically. After all, why would I be given a project if whoever assigned it didn’t think I had some expertise on the subject?

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Gotta love Australians.

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Borat would be pleased.

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Arizona voters overwhelmingly favor even the most controversial provisions within SB 1070, according to a poll released Wednesday Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

“What surprised me was the level of support in both Republican and Democratic parties,” said David Daugherty, the Morrison Institute’s director of research. “Even when you sort of tear the bill apart and look at the pieces, people support it.”

“I’ve been doing research for 30 years, and it’s really hard to get any group to have more than 90 percent agreement on any issue,” Daugherty said. “The size of the majority supporting [these provisions] is a little eye-popping.”

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Sir Peter Gwynn-Jones, who died on August 21 aged 70, was Garter Principal King of Arms, the effective head of the College of Arms, from 1995 until earlier this year; during his tenure as Garter he steered the heralds through a period of technological change, while his designs helped to reinvigorate the ancient art of heraldry.

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In his 20 years as a researcher, first at Stanford University, now at the University of Toronto, Dr. Redelmeier, 50, has applied scientific rigor to topics that in lesser hands might have been dismissed as quirky and iconoclastic. In doing so, his work has shattered myths and revealed some deep truths about the predictors of longevity, the organization of health care and the workings of the medical mind.

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Slate magazine, a Voice of the Crust, expands on the perennial Crustian meme of ‘First World Bad, Third World Good’.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

Actually quite a lot of the new diesels are in the better-than-battery ballpark, according to UK government figures. The notional battery car considered by the EMPA analysts was a Volkswagen Golf with its normal drivetrain replaced by a battery one: but it seems that you would be doing slightly better for the environment to buy an ordinary new Golf with a 1.6 litre “BlueMotion” injected turbodiesel – which would be a lot cheaper. That would consume 3.8 l/100km, not 3.9.

So would a new Mini Cooper D hatchback or a new Ford Focus, actually. And if you could bear to go for something a little smaller – VW Polo rather than Golf – you’d be streets ahead on the environmental front, down as low as 3.4 l/100km with more than 15 per cent of the car’s in-service emissions clipped off compared to the 3.9 l/100km battery-car baseline. As the Swiss boffins tell us, it’s the in-service energy use and emissions which count most.

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Detractors have pointed out that Dr. Galembeck’s team may be generating the droplets’ electrical charge by the act of pumping the air over the metals — which might imply you couldn’t practice this technique with still, humid air — while there’s also the rather large caveat that the little electricity they were able to collect from vapor was a hundred million times less than what you could obtain from a solar cell of equivalent size. Still, it’s another new door unto a potential alternative energy source and we don’t ever like having to close those.

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Mohammed Coefficient (abbreviated MC): The statistical measure, given as a decimal or a percentage, of the incidence of the name “Mohammed” among a group of perpetrators of evil deeds. Variant names that contribute to the MC include Mahmoud, Mahmud, Mahomet, Mamadou, Mehmed, Mehmet, Mehmood, Mehmud, Mihammad, Mohamed, Mohammad, Muhamed, Muhammad, Muhammed, and Muhammet, and all other cognates of the original Arabic name of Islam’s prophet.

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If you know what a duvet it, chances are the maid is changing the cover, not you. But it’s still useful stuff.

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Can’t really say he’s wrong….

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A Harry Potter-style wand that can change television channels with the flick of a wrist has attracted a record investment from Dragons’ Den, the BBC2 show for entrepreneurs.

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Gotta love Australians.

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A couple of years ago Jeff blogged  about wage and hour lawsuits created by the wave of employer-issued Blackberry and other PDA devices. At the time, it seemed unlikely that we’d see many of these suits for two reasons: 1. most people who are issued a PDA by an employer tended to be professional or executive employees, exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions; and 2. fear of retaliation would deter employees from complaining.

Indeed, it’s taken a couple of years for a high-profile case to hit the press. Now, a Chicago police sergeant has brought a class action against the city seeking compensation for overtime connected with his Blackberry use.

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For the past two years polls have shown that people liked Barack Obama personally, but they hated his policies. There was a great disconnect. But over the past seven or eight months, the tide has been turning. More and more people are deciding they don’t like Barack Obama personally.

This is, if you will recall, the opposite of what happened with Bill Clinton. In Clinton’s case, people thought he was a scumbag, but they loved his Presidency and policies. They just didn’t want their wives or daughters around him.

There are a lot of books out and coming out that will examine Barack Obama and his Presidency, but none so far have actually examined Obama’s character and conduct as President. In essence, no one has examined how well Obama is handling the Politics 101 of his job — being liked by those who elected him.

Only David Limbaugh has done this. His new book, Crimes Against Liberty, is just out and I’ve read through it. (Full disclosure: our sister company, Regnery Publishing, which is also publishing my book, published David’s) David Limbaugh really gets into the play of personality and conduct of Obama — the bully behind the bully pulpit.

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

Read it. No, it’s not The Who.

Behold, we are mutants, and we are coming to get you. Bwah-ha-ha.

Unfortunately, we are also related to all of these brown-eyed people. How boring is that?