[Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
- Tentacle prosthesis
- [Futurismic - Paul Raven]
- A 75,000-year-old human settlement may lurk beneath the Persian Gulf
- [io9 - Annalee Newitz]
Evidence is mounting that the first human civilization outside of Africa probably evolved in what is now the Persian Gulf. Recent discoveries suggest that we're about to find a fairly advanced civilization sunk beneath the waters of the Gulf.
- X Particle Explains Dark Matter and Antimatter at the Same Time
- [Wired: Science - Lisa Grossman]
…this picture could explain another particle-physics puzzle: why there is only five times more dark matter than regular matter in the universe. To physicists, five is a really small number. If dark matter and regular matter didn’t spring from similar origins, there’s no reason why there should be roughly the same amount of both of them.
- Crab Nebula’s Violent Outbursts Shock Astronomers
- [Wired: Science - Ron Cowen]
[I LOVE this headline. -L]
- Then and Now: Repeat Photography Captures Changing Landscapes
- Taking photos from the same vantage point years apart…
For 50 years, the U.S. Geological Survey has been building an archive old photos of desert landscapes and revisiting the sites to take new photos. The result is the largest collection of repeat photography in the world…
We have a few of the most interesting repeat photographs in this gallery that show changes such as the retreat of glaciers seen above, the birth and death of cactus forests, the excavation of ruins and the shifting of a river channel.
- Fake Watchful Eyes Discourage Naughty Behavior
- [Wired: Science - Wired UK]
- More farmers work away from fields to pay bills
- More than half of America's farmers work a job off the farm to make ends meet, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
- How the giant panda lost its taste for flesh
- The iconic bear lost its umami taste receptor 4 million years ago, which coincides with it becoming vegetarian
- Monty Python inspires the first space-matured cheese
- If you were launching a spacecraft on a historic voyage, what would you choose as your secret payload?
[I can't believe it! Wallace and Gromit was robbed! -L]
- New Chemistry, Less Energy Could Yield Greener Cement
- Making cement is one of the world’s most carbon-intensive endeavors, but German researchers think they’ve mixed a better building solution.
- Ancient Egyptian mathematics
- The New York Times has an interesting piece about the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, a 3,600 year old document that contains 85 different math problems.
- Worth a Thousand Words
- [PLoS Blogs - Jen Laloup]
…a catalog that holds data on what colors flowers appear to be, to bees.
- Anti-Sharia Advocates: We’ve Not Yet Begun to Fight | Mother Jones
- And then there's Arizona, which, in characteristic fashion, made everyone else's bill look somewhat tame. Brought to the floor by two legislators who authored the state's birther bill and the S.B. 1070 immigration law, the act (pdf) would have also added canon law, Halacha, and… Karma to the forbidden list. Banning Karma? I see no way that could come back to bite them.
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
The Of interest (Fri, Dec 10th, 5pm) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.