Month: April 2008

New York Times profiles a bizarre ailment that has me wondering how one could contract it halfway. It’s a syndrome that causes uncontrolled creativity:

In 1994, Dr. Adams became

Scientific American introduces us to a whole new family of (rather cute) flat-faced fish:

First photographed in January off Ambon Island, Indonesia, the critter has crooked, leglike

New Scientist says old dudes like Charles Darwin really should be shacked up with younger women like Scarlett Johansen because of science. Humans, they say, are primed for May/December… Read the rest “As Matthew McConaughey said in Dazed and Confused….”

Wired opens wide and spits out a story on a dental breakthrough. If you happen to have lost any of your teeth (ahem), you don’t have to get crowns or dentures any more. Now, you can grow… Read the rest “Grow Your Own Teeth.”

Yep, he might be an 11-year-old kid, but at least he was paying attention in class:

Since it opened in 1981, millions of people have paraded past the museum’s Tower of Time, a display

Discover reviews a new book that proves Devo was right – big brains aren’t an evolutionary advantage. The book, called Big Brains, looks at the Boskops, a kind of human who died… Read the rest “Big Brains? So What.”

New Scientist reports on the discovery that amputees experiencing phantom limb pain – the unscratchable itch on a missing limb – can give themselves a virtual massage by looking… Read the rest “Empathic Healing: Imaginary Massage for Phantom Limbs.”

They’re squeezing oil from pond scum for real:

The facility, located in Rio Hondo Texas, will produce an estimated 4.4 million gallons of algal oil and 110 million lbs. of biomass

So much for planet Earth’s future. The Norwegian scientists behind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – a facility described as “Noah’s Ark for Earth’s Agriculture”… Read the rest “Doomsday Seed Vault Cooked and Eaten.”