flickering pictures

Antarctica is cold, barren, and an expensive place to send a research team. So what’s the best way to track penguins on the frosty bottom of the world? You rig a satellite to look for giant smears of penguin poop. Duh. From the Guardian: Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have used satellite images, [...]

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From Slashdot: “Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” [...]

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The Food and Drug Administration says the promises of decreased cholesterol and heart disease prevention on Cheerios boxes mean that America’s best-selling cereal is not actually food, but a drug. From the FDA’s warning letter: Based on claims made on your product’s label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is [...]

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So the posting here has been a little slow for the last week or so — mainly because the rest of my life has been anything but. I’ve got reams of work to plow through and don’t even really have time to be posting right now, but this story was exactly the kind of odd [...]

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The Vatican has rejected yet another potential U.S. ambassador — Caroline Kennedy this time — because even though she’s Catholic, she isn’t anti-abortion. And as if to drive home the point, the Vatican chose Easter to express its outrage at Washington’s “calculated insult to the Holy See.” Washington’s previous nominee, a former lawyer for Reagan [...]

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The constant hijackings off the Somali coast aren’t really news — or rather, they’re news that everyone else is already reporting, and I don’t usually go into that sort of thing here. But every time I hear about one of these hijackings, I wonder why people keep sailing their tankers and transport ships into the [...]

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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 [...]

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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 applying [...]

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Much as I hate to admit it. A new study involving half a million people has found that eating just 4 ounces of red meat or cold cuts each day makes middle-aged and elderly folks 30% more likely to die within a decade. Daily doses of poultry and fish actually decrease your chances of death [...]

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Boasting an impressive 51.7 mpg (21.97km/litre) in city driving, the Tata Nano might be the cheapest and cleanest production car in the world. And at $2,000 apiece, India’s roads are going to see a lot of them. The Nano has five seats, a maximum speed of 60 mph (about 97km/h), twice the fuel efficiency of [...]

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