Category Archive

…and chances are you’ve never heard of him. Norman Borlaug was honored with the Congressional Medal of Honor yesterday, to go nicely with the Nobel Peace Prize that he received in 1970. What did you do to earn these honors? Oh, he only saved a billion lives, that’s all. None of the papers covered it, so I thought I would … Read More

Lose the remote control? Australian scientists have reportedly  come up with a box that lets television viewers change channels, switch on the DVD player or switch off an irritating presenter with the wave of a hand. The controller’s built-in camera can recognise seven simple hand gestures and work with up to eight different gadgets around the home, reports The Daily … Read More

A 75 year old woman in Sweden now has the fastest Internet connection, thanks to her son, who invented the principle behind it. She gets 40 gigabytes per second. That’s thousands of times faster than what you get.  To get an idea of how fast that connection is, she could watch 1,500 HDTV broadcasts simultaneously.  She could download a fully-featured … Read More

Yes, it’s possible: Peanut butter is being turned into diamonds by scientists with a technique that harnesses pressures higher than those found at the centre of the earth. Edinburgh University experts say the feat is made possible by squeezing the paste between the tips of two diamonds creating a "stiletto heel effect". The scientists also revealed they can turn oxygen … Read More

Yeah, it’s cool and good-looking and golly gosh gee whiz, but you know what?  It’s really just a cell phone, and when all is said and done, that’s mostly what people are going to use it for.  The iPod part is nice, but I really don’t need to surf the web on something that small. And then there’s this: iPhone … Read More

Via Neatorama, they have some pretty amusing old-timey computer ads up at Computerworld.  Two of my faves: Just for comparison’s sake, a typical cable modem today can transfer about 600,000 bps (buts per second). Comparison: today, you can get a 4 gigabyte (roughly 4,000 megabytes) flash memory card for $49.99.

Q: Can you clean a computer keyboard by putting it in the dishwasher, without ruining it? A:  No: Studies show that computer keyboards have more bacteria than toilet seats. But it’s hard to clean all those keys. So some people advocate an extreme solution: Throw your keyboard in your dishwasher. At first glance, this seems insane. But the computer-keyboard-in-the-dishwasher advice … Read More

Is rock, paper, scissors really so difficult that we need an electronic version of the game?

CNN: Cockroaches have a memory and can be taught to salivate in response to neutral stimuli in the way that Pavlov’s dogs would do when the famed Russian doctor rang his bell, Japanese researchers say. Such "conditioning" can only take place when there is memory and learning, and this salivating response had only previously been proven in humans and dogs. … Read More

If you’re like me, you have a hard time with captchas. What are captchas, you ask? They are those widgets on the Internet consisting of letters and numbers that you fill out so that the Internet site can make sure you’re a human and not a computer, thus keeping spammers from infiltrating your website or blog.  Here are examples of … Read More

Yeah, I do think it’s going to change the way we compute.  Once the price comes down.

Did you know that having half a brain may actually make you smarter?  And if you lost half your brain (or had it removed), it probably wouldn’t affect you that much? Not that I would recommend it…

I’m seeing a lot of these kind of stories lately: An escaped gorilla terrifies Rotterdam Zoo patrons Orangutan runs amok at Taiwan zoo Grizzly bear mauls man taking pictures at Yellowstone UPDATE:  And…. Snakes on a plane (almost)

New Scientist is reporting that extremely small doses of Viagra help hamsters deal with their jet lag: Hamsters that received small doses of sildenafil, sold under the name Viagra, adjusted more quickly to laboratory simulations of a six-hour time-zone change than animals in the control group. The researchers found that a single dose of sildenafil helped the animals adapt up … Read More

A star about 150 times the mass of the sun has just exploded in a galaxy a mere 240 million light years away in what astronomers are calling the brightest and most powerful supernova explosion ever observed. Okay, it didn’t "just" explode — it exploded 240 million years ago, but the light from the explosion is just reaching us now.  … Read More