Because I know that what the internet really needs is more people putting sad, hungry monkeys* on their cellphones, here’s my latest attempt to sell out: ringtones sampled from “Beautiful (Have Another Plum)”.

Even low-fidelity home recordists can make our own ringtones now. Download the format you need here, and enjoy your calls in a way that’s bound to [...]

The BBC has us imagining that sound as New Zealand researchers thaw a colossal squid:

“They’re incredibly rare – this is probably one of maybe six specimens ever brought up,” said Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa centre.

“It’s certainly the one that we’re being really careful about, completely intact and in [...]

Scientific American closes in on the “Pioneer Anomaly” – the strange fact that the Pioneer deep space probes aren’t traveling at exactly the right speed. Researchers now think it might be a problem with plutonium:

A group of some 50 researchers, including Turyshev, is now trying to match the data to a detailed computer model of the craft’s inner workings. [...]

Click to embiggen

A dicey bit of racial taxonomy from The New Students Reference Work (1914), edited by Chandler B. Beach, associate editor Frank Morton McMurry.

I’m not sure how I feel about my children seeing this, but it’s a part of the history of anthropology. Somebody definitely seemed to have it in for the Mangune.

Scanned by Wikimedia [...]

New Scientist has a gas with the latest alternative energy source, flammable ice.

…[I]t could be the world’s last great source of carbon-based fuel – assuming we can mine methane hydrates, crystal lattices of ice that trap methane beneath ocean beds and permafrost.

Apparently it’s really tricky getting the gas out without either melting all the ice or somehow triggering massive, [...]

SONG: “After the End” (To download: right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Arctic ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Opens”, Science Friday, 7 Mar 2008, as used in the (April Fools) post Doomsday Seed Vault Cooked and Eaten .

ABSTRACT: So, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Somebody somewhere said this would be a good source [...]

Electronic music pioneer Bebe Barron has passed away.

She’s best known for composing the score to Forbidden Planet with her husband, using living circuits – electronic components that were designed to grow and gradually burn out and die as the recorders rolled. She was also buddies with John Cage and Anais Nin.

EurasiaNet reports on archaeologist Klaus Schmidt’s excavation of Gobekli Tepe, a 12,000-year-old city that could rewrite human history:

“Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture”, says Ian Hodder, a Stanford University Professor of Anthropology, who, since 1993, has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey’s [...]

Diagram from Wikimedia Commons.

It’s like op art.