science

Monday 18 February

  • A robot that acts out your dreams (14:02) - I spent a night at The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in Albany, NY. There they wired me up with a variety of sensors, recording everything from EEG to EKG to eye positioning data. We then took that data and... | 1 Comments

Friday 28 September

  • Sine-Wave Speech and Perceptual Insight (11:45) - Sine-wave speech is a form of artificially degraded speech first developed by Robert Remez and Philip Rubin at Haskins Laboratory. In this work, Remez and colleagues demonstrated a dramatic change in the way in which sine-wave speech sentences are perceived,... | 0 Comments

Wednesday 22 August

  • Apocolypse Scale (20:51) - Class 3a: Human Extinction, Engineered. (examples: targeted nano-plague, engineered sterility)... | 0 Comments

Wednesday 27 June

  • Body Integrity Identity Disorder (21:01) - Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), a.k.a. Amputee Identity Disorder or Apotemnophilia is the overwhelming desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs or other parts of the body. The body parts in question usually feel foreign to those afflicted, and... | 0 Comments

Thursday 7 June

  • Are you Racist? (18:37) - Harvard researchers have put together a interactive test to determine if you prefer white people, black people or are indifferent. The current results (as of this posting) show that 70% of those who have taken the test show a preference... | 0 Comments

Wednesday 6 June


Tuesday 15 May

  • 11 Days Without Sleep (12:12) - Beginning yesterday, Tony Wright began his quest to break the now 43 year old world record for sleep deprivation. He is attempting to go sleepless for over 11 days. You can track his progress online and watch him via webcam... | 3 Comments

Friday 20 April

  • Rare Clouds (14:59) - Photographs of rare cloud formations from around the world. Some of these are just bizzare and almost hard to believe they are real. ... | 2 Comments

Tuesday 3 April

  • The Flat Earth Society (15:26) - FAQS and Forums dedicated to discussing "flat Earth theory." Yes, some folks still believe the world is flat. I give Polamex a week before he says to me, "dude... I think the world might actually be flat. No seriously, did... | 0 Comments

Monday 12 February

  • pimp (19:18) - | 0 Comments

Sunday 3 December

  • Rickenbacker Spaceport? (14:57) - State and local officials in Ohio are considering an incentive package that would lead the Canadian-American rocket venture PlanetSpace to put the manufacturing and landing facilities for its suborbital spacecraft at a former military air base near Columbus. If PlanetSpace... | 0 Comments

Thursday 24 August

  • When I was a kid we had 9 planets! (11:16) - PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight. After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of... | 4 Comments

Sunday 4 June

  • Mysterious red cells might be aliens (11:32) - As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis's laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the... | 1 Comments

Saturday 5 November

  • Stellarium (17:42) - Stellarium is free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL. It is available for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope. I've... | 2 Comments

Sunday 23 October

  • Can you handle the horror? (20:20) - I was perusing the internet the other night and came across an interesting article on pointless waste of time. It's a pretty funny and interesting piece based on scientific materialism. Materialism is a philisophical theory that says the only thing... | 11 Comments

Tuesday 20 September


Wednesday 6 July

  • Event Horizon wasn't just a great movie... (13:46) - ...but maybe also something to come? I read an article in the Frankfurt paper yesterday about the Itor Nuclear Fusion Reactor. The article stated that the earliest predicted use of Nuclearfusion for power is 2050. Besides enjoying the funny and... | 5 Comments

Wednesday 1 June

  • Kazakhstan's Spaceship Junkyard (10:47) - All space-bound rockets consist largely of fuel tanks and booster stages that fall back to earth when spent, never reaching orbit. In landlocked Baikonur, Russia's primary launching complex in Kazakhstan, these spaceships crash to earth. This photo essay visits the... | 4 Comments

Thursday 19 May


Sunday 10 April


Thursday 31 March

  • Good News (and Parenthetical Statements) (11:21) - My paper (submitted last April) was accepted (with mandatory minor revisions) to IEEE Transactions on Image processing (a very prestigious journal). Yeah for me! Also, Ryah, Tobin and I are going to Philly this weekend: The sign is from... | 15 Comments

Tuesday 15 March

  • 'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots (10:06) - Th SFGate has a piece on the great divide in Physics between the supporters and the skeptics of string theory. Not very technical, but it boils the issue down to some key differences between the two. The dispute has split...

Friday 11 March

  • $1 million prize for sustainability (15:00) - The Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability's first $1 million challenge is for finding a cheap, scalable solution to arsenic poisoned water. Most of us wouldn't consider the developing world as a good place to market products but $1 million should...

Tuesday 15 February

  • How to pack a brain (13:40) - These instructions outline the procedures of packing a fresh brain for shipment to the New York Brain Bank at Columbia University. Mmmmmm, fresh brains! ...

Friday 28 January

  • Monkeys will pay to look at porn (12:31) - In a finding that deepens our understanding of animal social cognition, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have demonstrated for the first time that monkeys, like humans, value information according to its social content. People readily pay to see...

Thursday 27 January

  • Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy (10:43) - Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish...

Friday 21 January

  • Professor to study why women flash (01:18) - CALGARY - A study into why women flashed crowds of Calgary Flames fans during last year's NHL playoffs should shed light on current Canadian attitudes about female nudity, says a Calgary professor."There are gender role issues here," said Mary Valentich,...

Wednesday 19 January

  • You, Robot (14:35) - Scientist Hans Moravec says humans will download their minds into computers one day. So he's put his money where his mouth is, and started a robotics firm to pioneer the journey from warehouse drones to Robo Sapiens. ...

Tuesday 4 January

  • What do you believe is true? (14:27) - "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of The Edge, a Web site devoted to...

Tuesday 9 November

  • Apply Current, Boost Brain Power (13:18) - Sending a weak electrical impulse through the front of a person's head can boost verbal skills by as much as 20 percent, according to a new study by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.In the study, researchers...

Thursday 23 September

  • Science in the Developing World (23:34) - Last week stood out with a flood of great news on about infrastructural progress in science all over the developing world as covered by SciDevNet. In Costa Rica, Central America's first nanotech lab opened with an initial investment of only...

Thursday 9 September

  • Aliens Have Been Found (23:58) - Scientists at UCLA have used genomics software to reconstruct the likely history of all plants and animals (including people, of course) on this planet back to a single cell. Mentioned are "archae", the exotic, neither plant, animal, or bacteria creatures...

Monday 6 September

  • Are we being contacted? Part II (23:57) - Update: Seti@home. Is the previous story misleading? via Space.com. You can also check out this video from eBaumsworld. It really has nothing to do with the story above, I just thought it was a sweet vid. Some have suggested the...

Friday 3 September

  • Are we being contacted? (00:05) - Astronomers have been reviewing radio transmissions from deep space for some time now. Recently they came upon SHGb02+141 (signal name). It's being transmitted from 1000 light years away at 1,420 megahertz. Is the signal artificial or natural? They really don't...

Monday 26 July

  • Why I hate giant pandas (14:23) - Last night I watched an episode of Nature called "The Panda Baby" I learned that the giant panda is so endearing that people are willing to spend millions of dollars to maintain the species in captivity. Even though giant pandas...

Tuesday 13 July

  • War on Drugs is damaging Colombian science (15:32) - Scientists from Colombia experience disproportionate difficulties obtaining visas to attend conferences in foreign countries. Isolating Colombian researchers from others in their field stifles progress (on both sides) by limiting knowledge transfer from and to the Colombian scientists. According to Wasserman,...

Tuesday 22 June

  • Energy From Space or A Job For SpaceShipOne (13:19) - Wired News is running a story right now about beaming concentrated solar energy from orbit back to Earth. Unfortunately, it seems that NASA has given up on funding research on the idea as a matter of priority. Another victim of...

Monday 21 June

  • Beam Me Up Scotty (17:01) - Scientists have performed the teleportation of atoms without using a physical link for the first time. While it might not bring the away team back to the ship safely, the technology may offer quite a performance boost to quantum computers....
  • SpaceShipOne (16:46) - Reuters and everyone else is reporting on SpaceShipOne's successful voyage to space and back this morning. The privatization of space travel is a very exciting prospect when compared to NASA's rather stagnant record of advancing travel....

Tuesday 8 June

  • Self Cleaning Glass (14:54) - The Pilkington Activ glass has a special nano-scale - extremely thin - coating of microcrystalline titanium oxide which reacts to daylight. This reaction breaks down filth on the glass, with no need for detergent. When water hits it, a hydrophilic...

Friday 28 May


Thursday 27 May

  • Geeks looking for something to do (22:37) - Smart? Bored? Check out http://www.geekdiy.com/ and build yourself a catapult, or a G4, or a stungun. Or a catapult that launches G4's that stun people... The site looks a bit new, but a blog dedicated to geek projects seems promising....

Thursday 6 May

  • U.S. Falling Behind in Science (09:19) - I guess it happened quietly. I won't go as far as saying this is a sign of a declining empire. But I think sustaining America's economy in the future will require more than just rhetoric about how tuff Americans are....

Wednesday 5 May

  • Surplus Science Equipment (18:51) - Here is a long list of surplus science equipment shops. Need something to do with all this equipment? Go to the amature science hobbyist....

Monday 15 March

  • Auroravision (02:26) - At least once before I die I'd like to go up north to witness firsthand the Northern Lights (while blazin' some Northern Lights, naturally). Until then there is the AuroraWebCam broadcasting to you from Fairbank, Alaska....

Saturday 6 March


Tuesday 10 February

  • Internet Medicine (02:30) - News: People are using online medical consultation. It's becoming more convenient to talk to your doc online with off the shelf software packages and more convenient for doctors to bill you, with the American Medical Association taking care of some...

Sunday 8 February

  • Spot the faker (12:20) - Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling. How well can you spot...

Friday 6 February

  • Methuselah Mouse (00:11) - The Methuselah Mouse is one of those contests that even kids can participate in. All you need is a mouse and some time, the goal being to keep alive the former the longest amount of the latter. As my personal...

Wednesday 4 February

  • Science in the South (12:50) - There's a great inequity in the amount of scientific output as measured in numbers of articles published between developed and developing nations, which is a serious problem according to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in this PLoS Biology open access journal...
  • Click'n'Clone (02:09) - It's still not a DIY home cloning kit, but the Genetic Science Learning Center at the Eccles Institute of Human Genetics, University of Utah has a little Flash Click'n'Clone toy with which you can clone a mouse. Hey, it doesn't...

Monday 12 January

  • The Mars Underground (02:40) - In the sleepy late 70s after we had failed to find evidence of life on Mars a grassroots effort lead by graduate students at the University of Colorado in Boulder set about on a mission of Mars exploration and possible...

Wednesday 24 December

  • The Importance of Science (02:58) - Fantastic article about the importance to democracy of a scientificly literate population. In a system where each individual basically holds the same amount of power (well, most of us) to make decisions in courts as juries and in politics as...

Monday 1 December

  • Speedcubing (02:33) - Speedcubing. What could it be? You probably guessed "solving Rubik's cubes with mad speed, the ultimate combination of athleticism and algorithm" and you are correct. With Minh Thai being featured in a recent Giant Robot, you know it's not long...

Tuesday 14 October

  • Homosexual Necrophiliac Mallard Ducks (15:27) - The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass façade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost...

Monday 1 September

  • Attn: Mad and/or Upset Scientists (20:39) - Need some extra cash to fund your pet narcoterrorism regime remixing project? Earn Fast Cash finding solutions to various scientific "problems". "InnoCentive has awarded a total of $457,500 USD to 26 scientists in the InnoCentive Solver community." (I am currently...