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Four ‘stone’ is 56 pounds. Why Brits can’t use pounds (or even, God help us, kilograms) when talking about people-weight is just beyond comprehension.

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Indian defence chiefs have approved $11bn of funds to boost the country’s submarine fleet. The cash is intended to see India become the first non-Western nation to deploy long-touted, much feared “air independent propulsion” (AIP) submarine technology.

Back in World War II, nuclear propulsion wasn’t an option. Nazi engineers instead experimented with chemically powered AIP, in their case the system developed by Professor Hellmuth Walter. Oxygen from air was replaced by the use of hydrogen peroxide, an explosive oxidiser sometimes used in torpedoes or rockets, burned together with fuel oil in a special turbine.

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Quelle domage. I ask you, what’s the world coming to, when genocidal thugs must fear for their lives? Surely the UN will step in and commission a study.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Can we order some of those for Arizona? Perhaps we can get them to do the jobs that Americans won’t do.

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A drunk Australian tourist has been hospitalised after he broke into a reptile park and climbed onto the back of a 16ft-long crocodile called Fatso.

Gotta love Australians.

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‘Nuff said. I make it a general policy not to eat food from places where they’re moving from there to here (probably so they don’t have to eat the food any more).

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The fragment includes a partial text including the words “you,” “them,” and “later.”

Probably the Akkadian analog of a tweet.

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But I’m sure it will still cost you something.

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Weight Watchers courses would be an inexpensive and effective way to reduce the burden on the NHS caused by obesity, according to two new studies.

The weight loss programme, which focuses on changing people’s behaviour rather than simply their diet, produced better results than normal care and advice provided by GPs in the trials. a

Whatever would we do without scientists?

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The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a formula of “phantom” jams, based on the equations that describe detonation waves caused by explosions.

“Phantom” jams are those that occur for no apparent reason, in the absence of an accident or roadworks. In high density traffic, a small disturbance, such as a driver braking too hard, becomes amplified as the cars behind react more strongly. Eventually, many cars behind the initial disturbance, the small incremental increases become a fully fledged, self-sustaining traffic jam. The MIT team call such phantom jams “jamitons”.

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Women and minorities hardest hit.

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A vigorous 60-minute workout on a treadmill affects the release of two key appetite hormones, ghrelin and peptide YY, while 90 minutes of weight lifting affects the level of only ghrelin, according to a new study. Taken together, the research shows that aerobic exercise is better at suppressing appetite than non-aerobic exercise and provides a possible explanation for how that happens.

So the reason I get hungry is because I’m a slug? I’m okay with that.

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Sometimes we even get good news. Britain has been the epicenter for ‘libel tourism’ in recent years, which has had a chilling effect primarily on books and other publications exposing the dirty little secrets of Islam and those who enable terrorism.

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Hey, don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

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The ThunderCats cartoon writer Stephen Perry was murdered by his roommate, according to police in central Florida.

Everyone’s a critic….

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A metal detector enthusiast has unearthed the second largest haul of Roman coins ever found in Britain, little over a year after the discovery of the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’.

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Everything bad is good for you.

No wonder Microsoft gives everybody free soda. Can you imagine Steve Ballmer without it? The mind reels.

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Some days, even staying out of the water isn’t enough.

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East German communists helped fund the British miners’ strike in the 1980s, historians claim.

An uncharitable soul would take this as further proof that the leadership of organized labor are virtually communists anyway. But I would never do that.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Reading some of the comments that students and professors make these days, drugs seem to be the kindest explanation.

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Greek inventor Archimedes is said to have used mirrors to burn ships of an attacking Roman fleet. But new research suggests he may have used steam cannons and fiery cannonballs instead.

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The researchers hope that their work will end reliance on gases that can contribute to global warming.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

A temperature gradient can be generated by putting a stack of plates in the right place in a tube in which the sound wave is bouncing around. Some plates in the stack will get hotter and others colder.

All it takes to make a refrigerator out of this system is to attach heat exchangers to the ends of the stack.

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For the mass audience, war-strategy games first appeared on the horizon in the 1990s when Sid Meier’s Civilization became a sensation among PC gamers. Part Sim City, part war-strategy game, Civilization inspired a crop of imitators, such as Age of Empires and Total War. Ultimately, though, they were all derived from a species of semi-obscure board games which had, for nearly 50 years, been toying with ideas about war-strategy and counterfactual history.

I’ve always said that playing Civilization is the only opportunity I get to use my MBA skillset.

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Next challenge: Congressional legislation.

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I’m surprised Rice isn’t on the list. And I must confess I’ve never heard of Harvey Mudd College (sounds like something from a Star Trek episode).

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The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France has ruled that European countries currently prohibiting same-sex marriage are not violating the human rights of their citizens.

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Be the first on your block….

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Prof Jeremy Thomas, head of ecology at Oxford University, said it is only now that the climate is warming and suitable spots have been discovered in the Cotswolds that the species is able to start spreading across Britain once again.

Everything bad is good for you.

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Scottish and Canadian researchers used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show it places an unnecessary strain on your back.

They told the Radiological Society of North America that the best position in which to sit at your desk is leaning back, at about 135 degrees.

Guess Mom was wrong.

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And as an obsession with the lamestream media, now that one of their own  is President. Funny how that works.

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At the moment, perennial grains capable of matching annuals don’t exist. However, Reganold and Glover argue that they can be bred with sufficient effort: it’s purely a matter of resources put into research. It’s perhaps worth noting that there’s not as much obvious revenue in perennials for major agro firms as there is in some kinds of annuals – there would be no continual requirement for new seed.

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A typical day at the Colosseum would start with hunting spectacles involving big cats, deer and ostriches, followed by public executions at lunchtime and ending with gladiatorial contests.

Where’s Russell Crowe when you really need him?

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British and international boffins, having probed an Antarctic glacier which is thought to be a major cause of rising sea levels worldwide, report that increased polar ice melting may not be driven by climate change.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Heh. Everything bad is good for you.

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No sign of Tom Hanks or Harrison Ford. But they’ll keep looking.

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If not the future of education, this is certainly a future of education.

We need to do an end-run around the government-monopoly factory-style school. This could be one such.

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Turns out you just need more cowbell.

But Savory’s prescription seems shockingly simple–and it’s taken him 50 years of work to convince others that he’s not crazy. The core of Holistic Management is simply grazing local livestock in super dense herds that mimic the grazing patterns of big-game (which have since disappeared). Those livestock in turn till the soil with their hooves and fertilize it with their dung–thus preparing the land for new vegetation in a cycle that was evolved over millions of years.

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And about time, too.

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Hope springs eternal….

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Saltwater crocodiles, the world’s largest living reptiles, travel hundreds of miles and cross large areas of open sea by surfing ocean currents, scientists have discovered.

You want jaws? We’ll give you jaws….

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The exhibition is powerful. But that is not really because of Cleopatra; it is because a lost world is resurrected here. There are some 150 artifacts on display, and the vast majority were found buried in the silt and clay of the Bay of Aboukir, off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. Since 1992 those waters have been explored by Franck Goddio and his European Institute of Underwater Archaeology. Using a nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometer, Mr. Goddio mapped the geographic fault lines beneath the clouded waters and has brought to the surface a small fraction of what lies below.

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It’s that time of the month again. Yes: it’s time for Life-form of the Month.

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Everything bad is good for you, it seems.

This is why I don’t put any faith in the ephemeral pronouncements of ‘scientists’, because I’ve seen too many times when they’ve completely reversed themselves farther on down the road.

And this is why giving power to government bureaucrats is always a bad idea, because they take the latest trend in ‘scientific research’ and go rushing off to ‘do something about it’, typically making what might be a bad situation into one that is almost certainly worse.

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If you use an e-book reader, you need to know about Feedbooks.

If you’ve been hesitating to buy an e-book reader, you REALLY need to know about Feedbooks.

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Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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The secret of the strength and longevity of the Great Wall of China lies in the sticky rice that was used as its mortar, Chinese scientists have found.

Sort of changes your view of Chinese food, doesn’t it?