LiveScience reports on the tantalizing possibility of creating a Jurassic Park for bearded boat-warriors:

Jorgen Dissing of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues say they retrieved the genetic material from the freshly sampled teeth of skeletons dating back to around A.D. 1000 and found at a non-Christian burial site called Galgedil on the Danish island of Funen.

Apparently, Dissing wanted to [...]

Well, I’d certainly be terrified. Not only does this amphibian have hair, but New Scientist reports, it also snaps its own bones to create claws – by pushing the fragments through its skin:

“Some other frogs have bony spines that project from their wrist, but in those species it appears that the bones grow through the skin rather than [...]

Nature (subscribers only) has announced that the plan to release sterile mosquitoes into the wild (mentioned months ago in this free Wired report) is going forward:

Nature:
Malaysia is looking to battle dengue fever by releasing mosquitoes that have been genetically engineered to be sterile. Although these efforts have stirred public concern, the country’s Academy of Sciences is likely [...]

There it is – the key that unlocked ancient Egypt. One message in three alphabets.

From the Library of Christian Theological Seminary, found on Wikimedia Commons.

SONG: “Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltonii” (To download: right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Colossal Squid Comes Out Of Ice”, BBC News, 28 April 2008, as used in the post Drip. Drip. Drip .

ABSTRACT: It is very hard to write a song in five, and harder to write it in 5/5. I think that’s [...]

New Scientist on the third-largest hurricane in the solar system:

Now, a third red spot, about half the size of Red Spot Junior, has broken out on the giant gaseous planet. The spot, previously a white storm, now appears red in Hubble Space Telescope images taken on 9 and 10 May. The observations were led by Imke de Pater of [...]

Rice University researchers – some of the pioneers of nanotechnology – have declared that carbon nanotubes may be… may be… as dangerous as asbestos:

…[T]he authors tested the hypothesis that long straight nanotubes act like long straight asbestos fibers and cause mesothelial injury. Samples consisting of suspensions of long, straight MWCNT, short tangled MWCNT, long-fiber amosite (asbestos), short-fiber amosite [...]

Scientific American ruins my naive illusions about love with their expose of the orgasmic mind:

Neuroscientist Gert Holstege of the University of Gro­ningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues attempted to solve the male side of the equation by asking the female partners of 11 men to stimulate their partner’s penis until he ejaculated while they scanned his brain using [...]

Well. LiveScience shares the news of a 9-year-old girl in Greece discovering that she actually had a twin sister… growing inside her stomach:

“They could see on the right side that her belly was swollen, but they couldn’t suspect that this tumor would hide an embryo,” hospital director Iakovos Brouskelis said.

Sometimes, these things happen.