flickering pictures

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 […]

[Read more →]

Check out this simple and fascinating primer on how to visualize ten dimensions by Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Every so often — and it doesn’t happen often — I’m just really glad we have physicists.
(Apologies if this video loads slowly — Bryanton’s site got Boing-Boinged and doesn’t seem to be […]

[Read more →]

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, […]

[Read more →]

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,” […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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. […]

[Read more →]

* = 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 […]

[Read more →]

Ever wondered why Mario can jump many, many times his own height? Or why he can then fall safely back to the earth at a speed that would crush the eyeballs out of a regular mortal’s head? So did this guy over at the Physics Factbook:

Gravity is [the] force which is responsible for […]

[Read more →]

A company called BioArts International has started selling clones of long-lost pets under the slogan “What if you could be best friends again?”, and wants your beloved Mr. Tinkles to be next. From the press release:

BioArts International announced today that they have delivered the world’s first commercially cloned dog, a 10-week old Labrador named […]

[Read more →]