In case you were wondering, gold atoms are cool.

New Scientist stops the clock with timely news about skin. Apparently, skin is pretty deep – it’s somehow tied to the brain as part of our internal clock:

“Knowing that skin clocks ‘tick’ in the same way as brain clocks provides a nice tool to address whether a person is likely to be an early or late riser,” says [...]

Man, what, are teddy bears next? The Lancet reports on a survey of studies that, combined, seem to show that night lights are causing cancer (registration required, but free):

Among the many different patterns of shift-work, those including nightwork are the most disruptive for the circadian clock.

Six of eight epidemiological studies from various geographical regions, most notably two [...]

LiveScience notices something odd that’ll have some hard-minded skeptics practicing their eyebrow raises. Medical magnets – one of the old staples of alternative medicine pseudoscience, have gotten a strange boost from a study that shows these magnets really can do something:

In a tightly controlled study—a rarity in the world of alternative medicine—Thomas Skalak of the University of Virginia [...]

Human anatomy explained as an allegory for astrology, or vice versa. From the collection of the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.

New Scientist reports on Japanese space scientists creating origami that’s out of this world:

The origami space plane will be a similar design, Suzuki says, but only about 20 centimetres long and with a rounded nose to minimize aerodynamic heating.

It will also be chemically processed to incorporate silicon in the paper structure, increasing its heat resistance….

When released from the [...]

The Telegraph reports on the strange findings of Iain Douglas Hamilton and his colleagues, who appear to have discovered evidence that elephants are evolving smaller tusks due to ivory poaching:

In the last 150 years, the world’s elephant population has evolved much smaller tusks.

The average size of an African elephant’s tusks has gone down by half in the [...]

SONG: “You’ve Got Power” (To download: right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “PopSci’s Best of What’s New 2007: Innovators”, Popular Science, December 2007, as used in the post One word: Plastics.

ABSTRACT: I like this story because I think there’s something poetic (and goofy) about turning trash into treasure. It’s really [...]

Nature discusses new findings about how we’ll all get superpowers, like heat vision and wings, just by breathing! Well, what they really said was that air pollution mutates sperm (here’s a non-subscriber version):

Epidemiological studies in humans have suggested a link between air pollution and reduced male fertility, but such studies are often confounded by other lifestyle [...]