Per aspera

Today’s sign of the impending apocalypse:
Monkeys control robots with their minds - CNN.com
This can lead to no good.

On the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, I found a post about hole punch clouds, which took me to this perfectly wonderful site: The Cloud Appreciation Society. The very existence of a Cloud Appreciation Society website makes me happy and full of love for humanity. Then from this image of a tornado, […]

Eric and I were discussing renewable energy at Christmas dinner, and how the challenge isn’t generation, it’s storage. I described hearing about pumped hydro storage, which was a new idea to the table (I’ve only run across it once myself, in, I think, a comment thread at Matt Yglesias‘ blog). So I googled […]

Comet Holmes Bigger Than The Sun
Formerly, the Sun was the largest object in the Solar System. Now, comet 17P/Holmes holds that distinction.
Spectacular outbursting comet 17P/Holmes exploded in size and brightness on October 24. It continues to expand and is now the largest single object in the Solar system, being bigger than the Sun (see Figure). […]

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings links to an article about a cat who lies down, apparently without fail, next to people in the dementia ward of a nursing home, when they’re about to die.
Twenty-five minutes later, the door finally opens, and out walks a nurse’s aide carrying dirty linens. “Hello, Oscar,” she says. “Are you going […]

Richard Dawkins takes us to church (which is to say, he gives a speech about things we already know, but assembles them meaningfully, and reminds us of a useful way to look at the world around us).

It’s good, I think, to remember that what we percieve is not what is. It’s just a map […]

Scientists Put Shrimp on a Treadmill
The shrimp treadmill, invented and built by Scholnick, allows researchers to measure the activity of an exercising shrimp for a set period of time at known speed and oxygen levels.
“As far as I know this is the first time that shrimp have been exercised on a treadmill and it was […]

Scientists Determine the Nature of Black Hole Jets
Most quasars have jets. A quasar is bright galaxy core fueled by a supermassive black hole containing the mass of millions to billions of suns confined within a region about the size of our solar system. The particle jets, usually in opposing pairs, shoot off perpendicularly from the […]

“To test what happens when a DNA molecule is overwound, the DNA was stretched between a glass coverslip and a paramagnetic bead, while a fluorescent avidin-coated rotor bead was attached to the DNA just below a biochemical nick.”
Fuckin’ ZOOM!
(via Ellis)

From Slashdot:
Ten years later, most scientists believe that everything in the meteorite can be explained by non-biological processes. “We certainly have not convinced the community, and that’s been a little bit disappointing,” said David McKay, a scientist behind the ‘life on Mars’ paper. Unfortunately, David McKay’s own brother is one of his critics. “He [David] […]

When I were a lad, my mom had a boxed set of the Boston Pops doing — wait for it — popular songs. Among them was one of her favorites (a family favorite, really), “Mah-Nah-Mah-Nah.” Family consensus regarded the Boston Pops version as a cover tune, though. Everyone knows that if “Mah-Nah-Mah-Nah” […]

Boing Boing: Bacteria eats chocolate and shits electricity
I imagine vats of these little bastards, metabolizing away underneath the local Shell station:
Microbiologist Lynne Mackaskie and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham in the UK have powered a fuel cell by feeding sugar-loving bacteria chocolate-factory waste. “We wanted to see if we tipped chocolate into one […]

Bird flu’s coming, and we live in a banana republic.  The government’s taking a market-based approach to preparation (”People will help each other out!  It’ll be like a country-wide Amish barn-raising of disaster relief!  You’ll be happy about bird flu before it’s all over!  Government help?  I guess we’ll probably arrest some looters or something, at […]

Via Majikthise:
Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition envision their work giving Army Rangers 360-degree unobstructed vision at night and allowing Navy SEALs to sense sonar in their heads while maintaining normal vision underwater — turning sci-fi into reality.
The device, known as “Brain Port,” was pioneered more than 30 years ago by […]

Via this thread at Pharyngula, about killing wee creatures by the bushelful in the name of Science, we get a link to a rather specialized advertisement: “Only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds.”
Accept no substitutes.