New Scientist is being reassuring – sort of – when it declares that this swine flu pandemic business isn’t any kind of surprise:

But in 1998, says Richard Webby of St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, swine H1N1 hybridised with human and bird viruses, resulting in “triple reassortants” that surfaced in Minnesota, Iowa and Texas. …

By 1999, [...]

The Colbert Report recently made science news over the space station naming controversy. Well, unbowed and unbloodied, the “right-wing” “pundit” once again “made the news” – this time showing up on the Huffington Post and elsewhere as a tool. A tool for studying how conservative leanings affect perception of satire:

The International Journal of Press/Politics:
Additionally, there was [...]

You’d expect that meditation would improve your ability to remember things, I suppose. But this study mentioned in New Scientist shows that it really depends on how recently you meditated – and if you’re doing it in a particular way:

The Sechen monks proved no better at determining whether the second shape was identical to or the mirror image [...]

Proteles cristata, the earth-wolf of southern Africaraman amplifier. He’s got a guilty look about him, doesn’t he? He knows what the other hyenas have been hiding. They’re his cousins.

They eat carrion and whatever they can kill; he eats termites – as many as 300,000 a night, lapping them up with his long, sticky tongue.

What. What [...]

SONG: “64 Actuators” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Jacket Lets You Feel the Movies”, IEEE Spectrum, 18 March 2009, as used in the post “Jacket makes movies feelies,” (with perhaps a side order of “The satellite feels” and “Touch the vision.”)

ABSTRACT:
This song feels more like… more like [...]

The FASEB Journal makes me uneasy with a new biochemical study. I’m beginning to worry that any minute now, government agents will be arresting my head:

Scientists made their discovery by first extracting several small proteins, called peptides, from the brains of mice and determining their amino acid sequence. The extracted proteins were then compared with another peptide previously [...]

Forget Hebrew, Latin and Old Norse – the Page F30 blog reports on folks out there working to bring back a really old language:

That’s the concept behind the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language, a language that is believed to have been spoken around 3000 BC to 2500 BC, at least two millenia before Latin began to achieve any [...]

The Telegraph, among other news sources, revels in my obsolescence. I am biologically and genetically surplus to needs. I am a man, and they’ve found the first species that’s done away with men altogether:

Researchers were first drawn to Mycocepurus smithii by its skill at cultivating various different fungal crops for food but closer inspection raised questions about the [...]

Happy 4/20, all you stoners.

This is where rope comes from. And paper, and oil, and birdseed, and cheese, and fabric, and…. duuuuude.

Image found in a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.