Today’s news is dedicated to long-time user, Nostra. I wonder if he’ll guess why?
- Australopithecines may have been knock-kneed.
- Volcanically Heated Soup Not So Tasty for Early Life.
- Waterworld: how life on Earth will look 1,000 years from now.
- Two physicists have developed a new family of solutions to Einstein’s equations – in five dimensions.
- Want to make a complicated decision? Just stop thinking – tough problems are best left to the unconscious mind. Well, I guess that solves Greg’s search-engine problem.
- Rats may be smarter and more like humans than previously suspected.
- Remember Captain Kirk beaming back to the Enterprise, and two versions of him arriving in the transporter room? Though no starship commander was involved, scientists have just managed something strikingly similar.
- New videos of sprites help explain mysterious flashes above Earth. Includes video links. Check out this still image.
- Brightest Galactic Flash Ever Detected Hits Earth.
- Parkes telescope find a new kind of star.
- Cassini tracks massive storm on Saturn.
- Science warns that the amount of ice that Greenland’s glaciers dump into the Atlantic Ocean has almost doubled in the last five years because the glaciers are moving faster.
- Rise in CO2 is draining world’s supply of fresh water by making plants sweat less.
- In the beginning… How life on Earth got going is still mysterious, but not for want of ideas.
- The Iceland Experiment: How a tiny island nation captured the lead in the genetic revolution.
- Unlike transgenic GM, tilling relies on mutation of natural genes to tweak plants for better health. Maybe they should focus on making plants sweat more.
- Researchers discover how a ‘botanical chastity belt’ allows most plants to avoid incest. Many commercial plant species have lost this ability.
- Sex is an evolutionary housekeeper that reorders genes and removes deleterious mutations.
- Study suggests that publicly available genome data may contain small but significant errors.
- Engineering ‘nerve jumper cables’ which can be transplanted en masse for spinal cord repair.
- A grapefruit a day keeps high cholesterol at bay.
- $10,000 reward offered to all hackers who find a previously unknown “critical security hole” in Windows, i.e. a hole that could be used by a computer worm to spread, without any action on the part of the user.
- Loud music prolongs the negative effects of ecstasy for up to five days. UPDATE: Here’s a much better version.
- Psychic dreams reveal killer.
- Research shows you only have a 50-50 chance of correctly ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message.
Quote of the Day:
But it’s not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It’s important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well. It’s important to maintain high standards. It’s important to think before you write.
Wired Commentary, Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone, by Tony Long, copy chief at Wired News, who believes that all business majors should be required to study Latin and minor in English lit.
