flickering pictures

Burning corpses generates a lot of heat, and a crematorium in East Sussex plans to convert that energy into usable electricity to reduce its own power costs — essentially turning dead bodies into a renewable energy source.
“A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy,” says Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead. “We buy about £25,000 […]

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Just a little one today.
A Scottish study is shedding light on ways to safely manipulate hormone levels in men to decrease — or increase — sperm production. The result could finally lead to a long-elusive birth control pill for men, as well as new fertility-enhancing techniques for men with low sperm counts.
From the Times […]

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When I stumbled across a brief history of bartitsu on the Web, I assumed it was a Simpsons joke at best or a ninth-rate Shaq-Fu clone at worst. But as it turns out, bartitsu is a legitimate blend of jiujitsu, sumo wrestling, French kickboxing, stick fighting, and other martial arts. And despite all […]

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They said it couldn’t be done, but physicists at McGill University in Montreal have managed to amplify laser light with less energy and cooling than ever before, which means that fibre-optic communications, among other things, could get a whole lot cheaper.
From the press release:

McGill University researchers have successfully amplified light with so-called “colloidal quantum dots,” […]

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James Murray, an emeritus professor at both Oxford and the University of Washington, claims that his new “Murray marriage equation” can predict the success or failure of any romantic relationship 94 per cent of the time. He breaks people into three categories — respectful Validators, brooding Conflict Avoiders and less-than-pleasant Volatiles — and after […]

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According to these guys, at least.
I’d meant today’s post to be on FlowingData’s 16 excellent graphics explaining the financial crisis in über-simple terms for us regular folk, but their site seems to have imploded under the sheer weight of its own awesomeness and, I suspect, a lot of enthusiastic Diggers. So, here’s one that’s […]

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It’s a pretty blindingly simple design — the Amron Experimental toothbrush has a little groove on the back that directs water from the tap into your mouth. I’m not sure how many people picked one up at the original price — or what’s so experimental about this thing — but if some sucker actually […]

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A creepy-sounding outfit called the Fertility Institutes is offering parents the controversial chance to screen for blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned babies, and lots of people aren’t happy about it. For a fee, the Institutes promise to let you choose your baby’s features through “pre-implantation genetic diagnosis” — sort of implying that ugliness needs diagnosing. […]

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IBM has patented an armoured body suit that actually DODGES FREAKING BULLETS. Or at least it will, if it ever gets built.
For you geekier readers out there, here’s an excerpt from the patent explaining how this is supposed to work, via the United States Patent and Trademark Office:

A method of protecting a target from […]

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* = may not actually happen
If someone told you that IBM and the U.S. government were building the world’s most powerful supercomputer — one that could perform a staggering 20 quadrillion calculations per second — what would you think its purpose was? If you guessed curing cancer, studying climate change or running Vista smoothly […]

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