The idea of falling snow being flavored is an abomination on nature, and in return, one of the best idea I have ever heard of! Will it really ever happen, probably not, but we can all hope that science will eventually get this out.

The Cloud Project is a tricky little concept that would spray flavored condensation and liquid nitrogen into clouds, “seeding” them, and forcing flavored snow to fall from the heavens. It’s pretty much straight of of a children’s book.

The whole thing is purely conceptual for now; it involves certain bacteria and ice nucleation and a lot of other science-y sounding words and phrases I don’t understand. What I do understand is the phrase “It will snow ice cream,” and what I wish I didn’t understand is “The technology is a long ways off.” Don’t be fooled by the existence of an actual Cloud Project van—it’s purely for illustrative purposes, and only functions as a regular ice cream truck/science information center.

I am practically getting a sugar high just sitting here thinking about it. I mean the only flavored snow I have seen was yellow, and it wasn’t very good.

(Via Gizmodo and The Cloud Project)

Apparently, people are sick of Wikipedia being so bland with only it’s informative text and all.  Now the next time you wiki Coltrane you will get photos and music clips all on one page.   Because opening a new tab in your browser is hard work! Man my index finger is tired from all that clicking.  I’m gonna take a nap…

Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? Take the Wikipedia article for Sony’s Rolly, for example, where the device is depicted as “an egg-shaped digital robotic music player.” If you have never seen a Rolly before, this cryptic description won’t help much. After reading about it in Wikipedia, you’ll then need to look it up on YouTube or Google Image Search to see what it actually looks like.

This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article. And it actually works pretty well. Look up “Sony Rolly” using Navify and you not only get the original Wikipedia text but also hundreds of related pictures and videos (pulled in from Flickr and YouTube) by clicking on the tabs Navify puts on top of each article. Look up “Pulp Fiction” and the service retrieves the Wikipedia article itself plus screenshots, covers, posters and trailers from the movie. You get the picture.

(Via TechCrunch)

Ever read a wiki and think, “Duh, I could have written that.” Well, this post is not for you.  As a matter of fact, if you’ve ever thought that, then go screw yourself.  This post is for people who read a half a wiki and get distracted by pics like this.  If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour… wait, there’s no way that thing is going anywhere.

Marty McFly: Wait a minute, Doc, are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me?
Dr. Emmett Brown: Precisely.
Marty McFly: Whoa, this is heavy.
Dr. Emmett Brown: There’s that word again; “heavy”. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull?
Marty McFly: This is heavy.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Again But Slower is basically a wiki for people like me…

Wikipedia’s a great resource for learning more about complex or esoteric subjects, but sometimes the dense, insider language can be a bit off-putting. Free mashup tool Again, But Slower compares original Wikipedia entries with their simplified re-writes.

Those rewrites come courtesy of Simple English Wikipedia, a site with over 59,000 Wikipedia articles written for those at early stages of English learning or otherwise needing scaled-down encyclopedic articles. Again, But Slower simply shows those entries and the original Wikipedia entries side by side, allowing you to learn how complex scientific terms and other phrases are being used, and getting a possibly faster-moving read on a subject you need to catch up on.

via LifehackerTechnorati Tags: wiki,

I was in a geography bee once.  It’s a good thing I was in it too because I get asked about Timis County on a daily basis.  Plus being in a geography bee scares away all those pesky, horny teenage girls.

Yang, of Griffin Middle School in The Colony, Texas, won the annual competition during a tie-breaker round with this question: "Timis County shares its name with a tributary of the Danube and is located in the western part of which European country?"

The answer, Romania, comes with a U.S. $25,000 college scholarship, a lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society, and a trip to the Galápagos Islands with Jeopardy! host and Bee moderator Alex Trebek.

Along with the scholarship, the 13 year old has won a lifetime full of virginity.

via National Geographic Technorati Tags: geography , bee

When I was a child, nothing smelled better, and was more fun to play with, then WD-40. You used it to lubricate, and more importantly, to shoot an awesome flame. In an effort to be better for the environment (total BS), WD-40 changed the propellant to CO2. While it might have lost some of the glamour of my childhood, WD-40 is still one of those things I love. Wired has a write up on all the ingredients.

Mineral Oil
Seriously. WD-40 is mostly a mix of baby oil, Vaseline, and the goop inside homemade lava lamps.

Decane
WD-40 contains an abundance of alkanes—hydrocarbons that match the formula CxH2x+2, usually in a long, zigzagging chain. This one, C10H22, which is also a common ingredient of gasoline, helps WD-40 remain a liquid at cold temperatures. Decane doesn’t freeze until around -21 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nonane
Another alkane. One reason these molecules are so handy here: Their hydrogen atoms don’t hold a charge, so they can’t connect to the hydrogen or oxygen in water, which makes alkanes water-repellent. WD-40, after all, stands for “water displacement, 40th attempt.”

Tridecane and Undecane
Freeze-resistant? Check. Water- repellent? Check. Contains an alkane that is the major product of the red-banded stinkbug’s scent gland? Check! Many alkanes are naturally produced by living creatures. Undecane, part of the pheromone trail left by cockroaches and ants, is present.

Tetradecane
Another alkane! Zzzzzz.

Dimethyl Naphthalene
Here’s the thing: This stuff (C12H12) comes in 10 forms, called isomers. One of them is a harmless hormone given off by potatoes. Another is used in high-performance engineering plastics. Our analysis can’t determine which ones are present here, but if you’re using it as a solvent, as is likely the case with WD-40, they all work just fine.

Cyclohexane
That cyclo prefix means that unlike standard alkanes, which come in chains, this one’s a ring. The shape gives cycloalkanes a higher melting point. And huffing them will knock you out cold. (Or so we’re told.)

Carbon Dioxide
The WD-40 company claims that by using this gas as a propellant, it avoids using smaller gaseous alkanes (possibly butane and propane), which can be hazardous to the environment. As if CO2 isn’t.

If your really into what everything is take a at the Wired link below. They actually have a link for every ingredient, but I didn’t want to steal ALL of their hard work.

(Via Wired)

Much has been made out of the start up of Wolfram|Alpha. I have not paid much attention, even though it has been carried by Gizmodo, Slashdot, CNET, and everyone else. They even had a live video of the launch, in which it crashed I might add.

So today I ran a couple of searches. My number one result:

Which just proves that i have no clue WTF I am doing. So the only other thing I could think to search for is ‘the answer to life’. And that my friends is how I got the results in the very first picture. Now that I know they put in that tidbit of information I am pretty sure this search engine will take off and rule the world!

In keeping with todays movie poster theme, we are going to talk about the crock of global warming. Anyone that actually knows me, knows that I think global warming is a sham. Finally someone in a congressional meeting tells the truth.

Why did you help write the 2001 IPCC report and the 2003 AGU statement on climate change if you disagreed with their fundamental conclusions?

With the 2001 IPCC report, the material in there over which I had control was satisfactory to me. I wouldn’t say I agreed with other parts. As far as the AGU, I thought that was a fine statement because it did not put forth a magnitude of the warming. We just said that human effects have a warming influence, and that’s certainly true. There was nothing about disaster or catastrophe. In fact, I was very upset about the latest AGU statement [in 2007]. It was about alarmist as you can get.

When you testified before Ways and Means, did you have any sense that committee members on either side were open to having their minds changed? Or are views set in stone at this point?

Generally people believe what they want to believe, so their minds will not change. However, as the issue is exposed in terms of economics and cost benefit – in my view, it’s all cost and no benefit – I think some of the people will take one step backward and say, Let me investigate the science a little more closely.

In laymen’s terms, what’s wrong with the surface temperature readings that are widely used to make the case for global warming?

First is the placement of the temperature stations. They’re placed in convenient locations that might be in a parking lot or near a house and thus get extra heating from these human structures. Over time, there’s been the development of areas into farms or buildings or parking lots. Also, a number of these weather stations have become electronic, and many of them were moved to a place where there is electricity, which is usually right outside a building. As a result, there’s a natural warming tendency, especially in the nighttime temperatures, that has been misinterpreted as greenhouse warming.

Are there any negative consequences to this localized warming?

It’s a small impact, but there is an indication that major thunderstorms are more likely to form downwind of major cities like St. Louis and Atlanta. The extra heating of the city causes the air to rise with a little more punch.

Have you been able to confirm your satellite temperature readings by other means?

Weather balloons. We take satellite shots at the same place where the balloon is released so we’re looking at the same column of air. Our satellite data compares exceptionally well to the balloon data.

During your House Ways and Means testimony, you showed a chart juxtaposing predictions made by NASA’s Jim Hansen in 1988 for future temperature increases against the actual recorded temperature increases over the past 20 years. Not only were the actual increases much lower, but they were lower than what Hansen expected if there were drastic cuts in CO2 emissions – which of course there haven’t been. [Hansen is a noted scientist who was featured prominently in Al Gore's global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."] Hansen was at that hearing. Did he say anything to you afterwards?

We really don’t communicate. We serve on a committee for NASA together, but it only deals with specific satellite issues. At the Ways and Means hearing, he was sitting two people down from me, but he did not want to engage any of the evidence I presented. And that seems to be the preferred tactic of many in the alarmist camp. Rather than bring up these issues, they simply ignore them.

I know you think there’s been something of a hysteria in the media about melting glaciers. Could you explain?

Ice melts. Glaciers are always calving. This is what ice does. If ice did not melt, we’d have an ice-covered planet. The fact is that the ice cover is growing in the southern hemisphere even as the ice cover is more or less shrinking in the northern hemisphere. As you and I are talking today, global sea ice coverage is about 400,000 square kilometers above the long-term average – which means that the surplus in the Antarctic is greater than the deficit in the Arctic.

What about the better-safe-than-sorry argument? Even if there’s a chance Gore and Hansen are wrong, shouldn’t we still take action in order to protect ourselves from catastrophe, just in case they’re right?

The problem is that the solutions being offered don’t provide any detectable relief from this so-called catastrophe. Congress is now discussing an 80% reduction in U.S. greenhouse emissions by 2050. That’s basically the equivalent of building 1,000 new nuclear power plants all operating by 2020. Now I’m all in favor of nuclear energy, but that would affect the global temperature by only seven-hundredths of a degree by 2050 and fifteen hundredths by 2100. We wouldn’t even notice it.

This is all part of a Fortune interview that sheds some light on some interesting points.

(Via CNN)

I assume this lady is being treated for her chronic back problem.  I know whenever my back aches, I like to stick red and white needles in my face so that it makes it look like I have weird side burns.  Then I go out in public and the fear in the all the kids eyes that look at me some how soothes my aching back.

Acupuncture brought more relief to people with back pain than standard treatments, whether it was done with a toothpick or a real needle, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that raises new questions about how acupuncture works.

They divided patients into several groups. One got seven weeks of standardized acupuncture treatment known to be effective in back pain. Another group got an individually prescribed acupuncture treatment.

A third group was treated using a toothpick in a needle guide tube that did not pierce the skin as regular acupuncture does, but targeting the correct acupuncture “points”.

A fourth group just got standard medical treatment, which included medication and physical therapy.

A fifth group was treated with kitchen knives.  Oddly, this group of patients did not see any improvement in their condition.

(Via Reuters)

Where I live, there are Mosquitoes, and not just a few, tons of big Mosquitoes. I blame New Orleans, move back to your own backyard! That is why I am excited about this little flower.

I have actually read about it several times, and now it has moved a little closer to production. US News has a little more information coming out on it:

The ProVector uses sugar, chemicals and a biopesticide called Bacillus thuringiensis to attract and kill the bugs. The insects feed on the deadly nectar through a metal screen on the artificial flower.

Kollars is now looking to market the devices where mosquito-borne illnesses thrive. He said the ultimate design is expected to cost between $7 and $10.

“One man can’t defeat mosquitoes,” he said. “They have killed more people than all wars combined. But I can start being part of the team that defeats them.”

Amen kind sir! I will gladly drop a grand to make my yard look like some kind of acid trip, where do I sign up?

(Via US News.)

Some other decent info here.

In an effort to make dogs a more socially acceptable food, Koreans are making them glow.  Mmm… nothing hits the spot like Kentucky Fried Glowing Puppy.

South Korean scientists say they have engineered several beagles that glow red using cloning techniques that may one day help scientists study human diseases.

The first born, named “Ruppy” a combination of the words “ruby” and “puppy” and her siblings look like typical beagles under normal light conditions.

But they glow red under ultraviolet light, and the dogs’ nails and abdomens look red even to the naked eye.

via National Geographic