Over at VentureBeat’s “GreenBeat” section, they’ve got a profile of a promising new Panasonic project, building batteries powerful enough to run your average suburban home for a week:

This is significant for two reasons. First, if home batteries like this one become commonplace, renewable sources of energy like rooftop solar and residential turbines could finally take off. The biggest roadblock [...]

PhysOrg reveals a new discovery (using old tools) of a single brain protein that does two very different things to help us think:

Details of the observation in lab mice, published Dec. 24 in Nature, reveal that semaphorin, a protein found in the developing nervous system that guides filament-like processes, called axons, from nerve cells to their appropriate targets [...]

The World of Weird Things blog has a pretty cool look at the part played by big black holes in the origins of the universe:

So this nearly 3,000 kilometer wide brute would be one of the last things to exist in the known universe and in its long life, we should probably expect it to merge with other [...]

Science Line doesn’t care if you’re not supposed to be able to hear spaceship engines go “whooosh” – they say we’re actually being quietly bombarded with sounds from space:

“If there was a way to take the signal and hook it into speakers, we’d be able to hear it,” says Scott Hughes, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The [...]

William Miller was an engraver and illustrator in the 1800s, known familiarly as “the Scotch Quaker.” He created wonderfully detailed plates of, well, nearly anything that required a technical illustration – lighthouses under construction, botanical specimens, tapeworms or, as here, parts of the human body. Many of the engravings in the marvelous Wikimedia Commons collection from whence this piece [...]

PopSci says the Russians are floating the idea of sending a monkey and robot to Mars. For real:

Russia’s Cosmonautics Academy is in preliminary talks with the [Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy] regarding a simulated space flight to Mars that would lay the foundation for a future mission.

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That’s where the story takes a real twist: to help the [...]

SONG: “Dear Winter” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Humans Have Hidden Sensory System”, LiveScience (via Yahoo! News), 8 Dec 2009, as used in the post “Skin sense.”

ABSTRACT: So, this is probably the geekiest thing I’ve ever done on here. Here’s an axiom: The longer one puts [...]

LabSpaces measures out the mathematics of beautiful girls:

Pamela Pallett and Stephen Link of UC San Diego and Kang Lee of the University of Toronto tested the existence of an ideal facial feature arrangement. They successfully identified the optimal relation between the eyes, the mouth and the edge of the face for individual beauty.

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“People have tried and failed [...]

MIT economists are weighing in on the science of creativity in a search for the source of big ideas:

“If you want people to branch out in new directions, then it’s important to provide for their long-term horizons, to give them time to experiment and potentially fail,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of [...]