Step back, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Telegraph reports on a new a levitation machine:

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts [...]

From the TECH MEANS WASTING TIME Desk: As you all probably know by now, Scrabulous is down. You probably also know it’s due to a lawsuit launched by Hasbro, the makers of Scrabble, and you might have heard that there’s some kind of officially endorsed replacement game.

But that strange scratching noise… that’s the sound of million fingernails [...]

Stanford researchers have discovered something strange about microscopic worms, ScientificBlogging reports. These nematodes have specific genes that regulate the aging process:

The researchers examined the regulation of aging in C. elegans, a millimeter-long nematode worm whose simple body and small number of genes make it a useful tool for biologists. The worms age rapidly: their maximum life span is [...]

PhysOrg reports on a new treatment that aims at eliminating depression by directly stimulating the brain:

DBS [Deep Brain Stimulation] uses high-frequency electrical stimulation targeted to the specific areas of the brain involved in neuropsychiatric disease. Twenty patients received SCG DBS for 12 months. Twelve of 20 patients experienced a significant decrease in depressive symptoms (defined by a 50 [...]

An early telephone schematic found in a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.

“…and stripped half the crust off the planet.” That’s a new theory about the Red Planet reported in Science News and elsewhere.

The problem: The north half of Mars is very smooth, while the southern half is covered in craters and craggy plateaus. The proposed solution is the title of this post.

By mapping surface elevations, crustal thickness and [...]

Symmetry unveils the biological oddity of animals with organic metal parts:

The metals accumulate after molting, as the animals grow into adulthood. Researchers monitored the percentage of metal deposits at different times during development and observed the channels through which the metals migrate into appendages. They found that different metals settle in different areas: zinc is found in the [...]

SONG: “We Climb.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Fossil fills out water-land leap”, BBC News, 25 Jun 2008, as used in the post “Four-legged Fish.” (There’s also a side-order of “Anti-evolutionary Bayou Seeping Into US Politics” in there, but you probably knew that.)

ABSTRACT: Well, we all [...]

I’m quite impressed by “Cosmology in 10 Minutes” by Danielle Fong, her attempt to explain why scientists believe what they do about how this all came to be:

Guth said, suppose you started with pretty much any initial universe. Suppose you also had an extremely strong, extremely smooth field of energy. If this field started dumping energy into [...]