Hot n Horny Beer in the UK!
Royal Virility Performance, a limited-edition beer soon to be made available in the U.K., will contain lashings of viagra, which is available without a prescription there…
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Chocolate Compound Beats Codeine for Cough-Suppression
Chocolate to help a cough?
A compound found in chocolate outperforms over-the-counter and codeine-based cough-suppressants in clinical trials. The compound, theobromine, was written up in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal following a small placebo-controlled study at Imperial College London. Our GP told us that the best thing for a cough was a spoonful of honey, and it’s pretty much all we use around our house (well, that and the vile, repulsive, disgusting, incredibly effective Buckley’s Mixture — but that’s a last resort).
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Dead Animals on Display at Zoo
Dead animals are easier to display.
The Cologne zoo has a special animal exhibition on display: a collection of 20 animals including an elephant, a giraffe, and an ostrich, preserved through a process called plastination. German anatomist Gunther von Hagens became famous for his controversial exhibition displaying plastinated human bodies…
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Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born
Is this the origin of language?
A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists…
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Startup Aims To Build Billboards That Target You, Personally
Digital billboards that display different ads depending on who is looking at them were once only found in Minority Report. But a recently launched startup aims to make targeted billboard advertising as ubiquitous as targeted online advertising.
Immersive Labs introduced its smart billboard technology at TechStars‘ Demo Day in New York on Thursday. The software combines video analytics with environmental factors and Twitter and Foursquare information to decide what the best ad to display at that moment is…
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Whale “Pop Song” Sweeps the Ocean
Listening for one Whale of a song.
Just like humans, whales also have “pop songs,” complete with music mania that sweeps across the ocean:
The findings are based on 11 years of recordings from underwater microphones slung over the sides of boats, which were collected by marine biologist Ellen Garland of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues. Picking out the patterns took a while; the team had to listen to 745 songs in total from six whale populations across the South Pacific over the 11-year period. The researchers identified 11 distinctly different styles (audio). Sometimes the “hit song” contained snippets from previous seasons, sometimes it was entirely revolutionary…
IBM PC Inventor Explains How Control + Alt + Delete Was Born
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_lg7w8gAXQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Ah, control + alt + delete. CTRL + ALT + DEL for short. On the Mac, it’s a little more complicated: Command + Option + The Media Eject Key. Still, they all do the same thing… they reboot your computer without yanking the cable out of the wall or hammering a physical button.
You probably never gave the actual provenance of Control + Alt + Delete much thought. Clearly, it’s a shortcut birthed by some coder or another in the early days of computer lore, but you probably assumed that the guy who actually invented Control + Alt + Delete had his name forgotten by history because ultimately no one cared…
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Researchers Create Printed Battery That Stores 40% More Energy
If you can store more you get more.
A new manufacturing process developed by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) will increase the energy a lithium-ion battery can store by 40%. The technology is similar to that of printed solar cells…
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Will Electric Cars Be The Next Red/Blue Divide?
Focus-ing on a new perspective.
Ford–which is about to release an all-electric version of the Focus–just put out the above map of the United States with the cities it feels are best suited to electric car ownership. And with a few exceptions, it looks like the flyover states aren’t making preparations for the messianic arrival of the electric car. What do you want to bet that in the next presidential election, we’ll add “electric-car” to the litany of liberal-associative words like arugula, lattes, and sushi.
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Make’s Roundup of DIY Radiation Detectors
It may not be pretty but it gets the job done!
John Baichtal says: “MAKE’s interview with hardware hacker Akiba highlighted a fascinating trend: individuals and small groups taking their safety into their own hands by creating, modifying, and networking radiation detectors, a.k.a. Geiger counters, rather than relying on governments for information…
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Sold to the Highest Bidder: 3 Used Space Ships
Blasting off to the highest bidder.
Last week there were used battleships for sale on e-bay, this week we’ve got used space shuttles. But not going as cheaply as the warships and not being turned into pots and pans either.
NASA has been trying to flog these space shuttles for a while now; they have already been marked down from $42M to $28M. And it looks like they may have finally found a new, earth-bound, home.
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Scientists Created Embryonic Eye in Test Tube
Eye see you!
Scientists from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Japan cultivated embryonic stem cells in a test tube and added proteins to coax them into developing. They had wanted it to form a recognizable organ, but were stunned to find that over 10 days, the stem cells had formed an embryonic eye:
Professor Yoshiki Sasai, lead author said: “What we’ve been able to do in this study is resolve a nearly century-old problem in embryology, by showing that retinal precursors have the inherent ability to give rise to the complex structure of the optic cup.”
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