…from a solar-powered toothbrush, of course.

The invention, from University of Saskatchewan professor Kunio Komiyama and his colleague Dr. Gerry Uswak, uses electrons to replace toothpaste. Apparently, according to a piece on canada.com, it utterly destroys the two types of bacteria responsible for most peridontal disease.

Komiyama’s first model, which was described 15 years ago in the Journal [...]

UN Scientists looking at the weather have found that over the past 500 years, climate change has marched hand in hand with war, New Scientist reports:

The 100-year warming period would have briefly relieved social tensions, …[says Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology]. But, from the early to mid-1800s, temperatures dropped again, and conflicts resumed.

Although the world [...]

SONG: “Across the Night” (To download: right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant. Yes, me again.

SOURCE: The post “Virtual Mars mission – 500 days in a box,” 12 Nov 2007.

ABSTRACT: Let me get this out of the way: Yes, I’m a week late. Thanksgiving plus working out how this Reaper thing worked [...]

Arthropods are the creatures that have armor-like skin and jointed legs – the group that includes crawfish, scorpions, spiders and insects. The bugs. The largest arthropod currently crawling around Earth is Macrocheira kaempferi, the Japanese spider crab, which has a 2-foot long body and long, skinny legs stretching as wide as 13 feet.

Sure, it’s big, but [...]

Despite being dead for, oh, 65 million years or so, dinosaurs still turn up in the darnedest places. Mainly museums, of course, but even there, the dusty shelves can still be full of surprises, as New Scientist reports:

PhD student Mike Taylor spotted a fossil vertebra, which he says “leapt out” at him as being entirely unfamiliar. What makes [...]

That’s the not-terribly cheerful news from Nature on the vaquita (Phocoena sinus), a porpoise from Mexico’s Pacific coast:

In 1999, researchers estimated there were 567 vaquitas left in the northern Gulf of California. Mexican biologist Armando Jaramillo-Legorreta, lead author of the new report, says that the rising number of fishing boats is killing the porpoises at a rate of [...]

Polarization-microscope image of C-Phase liquid crystal, taken by Wikimedia Commons user "Minutemen."

BECAUSE YOU ASKED FOR IT…

Big band theremin. So soothing. So Golden Age of Radio. So heady with nostalgia and ether.

I hope you’re enjoying your Thanksgiving, American readers.

From the description of the video on YouTube:

The main theremin was passed through iZotope Trash, an awesome software guitar effects plugin. The video was edited entirely in Adobe After Effects. The hand on the carpet was to simulate wind noise, definitely cause for confusion. This also means all the parts of [...]