flickering pictures

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal are hoping that mutant roundworms will help the West win its epic struggle with obesity. Led by researchers Patrick Narbonne and Richard Roy, the team discovered a genetic mutation that makes some C. elegans worms burn off fat extremely quickly, and are hoping to apply their new knowledge […]

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According to new data from a U.S. military satellite, the ionosphere — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space — is lower than it used to be, meaning the sky is quite literally falling.
The Air Force’s “Communications and Navigation Outage Forecasting System” satellite — C/NOFS for short — uses nifty-sounding instruments like an ion velocity […]

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A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Meg White, a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who’s working on an article about India’s space program. She had stumbled across my post on the Chandarayaan lunar missions, and wanted to bounce a few questions off a non-scholarly blogger type.
Because I though […]

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Germany’s world-renowned Max Planck Institutes, whose science and technology researchers are among the world’s finest, accidentally printed an ad for a Chinese brothel on the cover of its latest journal.
The Independent reports:

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text […]

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Following the post on impromptu jam sessions in the backs of London’s black cabs, here’s a much, much better version of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love,” for those of you who love his music as much as I do.
Many thanks to Gen for the link.

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Cracked.com features eight of the most pathetic exercises in futility in Guinness history.
Featured record attempts include a mass fire-walking event, a fellow who attempted to break the sound barrier by free-falling from 34 kilometres up, and something called “smurfing.”
Story via Mental Floss.
Image via the Science Creative Quarterly at the University of British Columbia.

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Yesterday’s Boston Globe featured an unbelievable collection of photos of the ongoing anarchy in Athens. Nearly any one of these shots, if you took them, would be the best photo you’d ever take.
The riots were sparked by the police shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old boy who was allegedly with other youths who threw […]

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Muntadhar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Cairo-based Al-Baghdadia television, threw both his shoes at President Bush at a press conference in Iraq yesterday. He called Bush a “dog,” and as the shoes sailed harmlessly by Bush’s head, al-Zeidi yelled that “this is from the widows […]

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Information Week reports:

Despite her lifelike appearance and 32-23-33, anatomically correct measurements, Trung insists Aiko is not a sex doll. “I’m attached to it, but do I sleep with it? No.”

You heard it here first, folks.
Creepiness aside, Aiko can read, do math and recognize people, and responds to touch and voice commands. She can also […]

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The BBC reports:

On Thursday, [Zimbabwe president Robert] Mugabe said a deadly cholera outbreak had been stopped, as aid workers warned it was worsening.
He said Western powers were plotting to use cholera as an excuse to invade and overthrow him.
The World Health Organization says the outbreak has not been contained and the death toll has […]

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