Experts at Harborview Medical Center and the University of Washington are refining an ultrasound device that seals punctured lungs without invasive surgery, reports Science Daily. Just hold it over the affected area and push a button:

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises “bloodless surgery” with no scalpels or sutures [...]

New Scientist confirms the fever-dreams of many a fanatic gardener with the discovery that mammals didn’t take over right after the death of the dinosaurs – orchids did:

Santiago Ramirez of Harvard University and colleagues compared genetic information from the fossilised Meliorchis caribea with modern-day plants and reconstructed an evolutionary tree. It suggests that the first orchids bloomed [...]

Wired‘s “Danger Room” reports on like, wow, man, that’s one *TRIPPY* gun:

Paintballs laced with mind-altering drugs and drug-spraying robots sound like something for The Joker rather than the Marine Corps. But these are two of the more promising new methods for administering nonlethal chemical weapons (sorry, calmatives) being developed by the Pentagon, according to the latest report [...]

New Scientist strikes fear into the hearts of time travelers everywhere with a report that T. rex could have caught humans. Easily.

Which is kind of a “No, duh,” observation, but they have video:

“Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken, but dinosaurs are not built like chickens, nor do they run like them,” he [...]

This is how CERN is hoping to find the Higgs Boson.

At 40 feet long, it is the biggest superconducting solenoid ever made, costing $65 million, weighing about 485,000 pounds, and containing as much iron as the Eiffel Tower. From the outside it looks like a huge steel bullet protruding from the center of a steel cylinder [...]

Behold the science of engineering. LEGO engineering.

National Geographic reports on another Chinese river-dweller struggling to survive – the giant sturgeon, also known as the “underwater panda”:

Adult sturgeons, which can measure up to 4 meters (13 feet) in length and weigh 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms), migrate from the East China Sea into the Yangtze River to spawn….

But the Yangtze’s deteriorating environment and increased shipping traffic [...]

SONG: “Beautiful (Have Another Plum)” (To download: right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Baboon Birth Control” entry, from “Primates on the Pill”, New Scientist, 19 July 2007.

ABSTRACT: When I first read this article, I started hearing a baboon woman singing the word “beautiful.” Here’s a lady trying to keep a [...]

We’ve been watching this thing for four centuries, and we only now noticed it had a tail, as Nature reports. A really long tail:

Astronomers have found an unexpected treat on a star first described more than 400 years ago – the streak of a 13-light-year-long tail.
…
Seibert says that Mira’s “shockingly huge” tail gives scientists valuable insight into [...]