Two faces are not better than one.
Doctors at Holy Family Hospital in Rawalpindi have been trying to save a baby born with two faces, as he has been having breathing problems. They have been unable to feed the baby through the mouth, sources have said. The baby is the third child of a couple from Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Paediatric Ward Senior Registrar Dr Qaisar Aziz said that the new born baby has been shifted to the intensive care unit of the children’s ward and was being take good care of…
“The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world.”
From Open Culture:
Doc Zone, a documentary series produced by CBC Television, is now airing a four part investigation into the great financial meltdown of 2008…
Continue reading… “Meltdown – The men who crashed the world”
Is Wi-Fi the new spy eye?
Neal Patwari of the University of Utah discovered that breathing affects Wi-Fi signal strength. Chest expansion during a breath bends the wireless signals and they lose some power. This slight drop can be measured and used to calculate your breathing rate.
Measuring someone’s breathing rate is helpful, but the use of this technology as a spy tool is where things get interesting…
Continue reading… “Wi-Fi signals may be used to track your movement inside your house”
Did you ever wonder?
The Visible Barbie Project is part of the Foundation for Unnatural Research’s long-range plan for advancing the state of human knowlege of things that no normal person would ever think to wonder about.
The project began with the acquisition of a suitable marked-down subject at a nearby toy store and ended approximately six hours later, not including the time required to pick out the bits of hair that got stuck in the bandsaw.
The cause of the subject’s markdown was unknown, but we didn’t care; all that mattered was that the gross physical anatomy of the body was intact…
Art or not art?
Culture officials in Rome are mulling a ban on “living statues”, arguing that dressing up in costume and standing on the street to solicit spare change has no artistic merit.
“Living statues demonstrate no artistic activity, to the extent that they can’t be compared to mimes, and they amount to a veritable racket,” said Federico Mollicone, deputy culture chief in Rome’s mayorship…
Information is now moveable in the brain.
This is uncanny: A Tel Aviv University team lead by Professor Matti Mintz have developed a synthetic cerebellum that can receive sensory inputs from the brain, analyze them, and return information to other parts of the brain!
The device is now working in rats, and has effectively restored lost brain functions caused by damaged tissue. However, the most important thing is that this proves that brain-to-machine communication can work in a bi-directional way, with a machine getting information from the brain, analyzing it and then talking back to the brain. As Mintz puts it…
Continue reading… “Scientists can now extract, record and return information to the brain”
Get a hold on your privacy with Facebook Disconnect.
If you want to use Facebook, but don’t want Facebook’s tendrils extending all over the internet and following your account, you’ll want this. A product called Facebook Disconnect completely blocks the social network’s ability to track your account around the web…
Continue reading… “How to stop Facebook from tracking you across the Internet”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rYj_0foJYA&hd=1[/youtube]
Google and the Israel Museum have made high quality images of the oldest know biblical manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and have made them available online for the first time.
Continue reading… “Dead Sea Scrolls online for the first time ever”
Will rent-a-pet services take off around the world?
Guinea pigs are sociable animals and Swiss law prohibits owners from keeping the furry rodents on their own. But what happens when one dies? Don’t fret, just call Priska Küng, who runs a ‘rent-a-guinea pig’ service to provide companionship for grieving, lonely animals in the twilight of their years. She lives with around 80 of the furry, squeaky little creatures, in addition to six cats, a number of rabbits, hamsters and mice in the village of Hadlikon, some 30 kilometers from Zürich.
Küng, 41, rents out her guinea pigs, a service that has been in high demand in the Alpine nation ever since animal welfare rules were tightened up a few years ago. Switzerland has forbidden people from keeping lone guinea pigs because the animals are sociable and need each other’s company. As a result, the sudden death of a guinea pig, shocking enough in itself, can also place the hapless owners outside the law if they only had two of the pets. That is where Küng comes in…
Continue reading… “Rent-a-guinea pig service takes off in Switzerland”
Look at all the colors.
Want to see an enduring source of scientific dispute and perplexity? Go to your refrigerator, open a carton of eggs, and look at their speckles. Bird-egg coloration has been studied for more than a century. In a review in the Journal of Avian Biology, biologists Golo Maurer and Phillip Cassey present no fewer than seven possible explanations for eggshell color. Each focuses on how colors might shape an embryo’s fate by modulating sunlight hitting its shell…
How else will 3D printing change the world?
This 3D printed bicycle, exhibited at this week’s London Design Festival, is claimed to be as strong as steel. It was printed from layers of fused nylon, using a technique more commonly deployed in satellite manufacture…
Continue reading… “3D printed nylon bicycle that’s “as strong as steel””
This weekend NASA published an awesome time-lapse flyby of planet Earth taken from the International Space Station. Awesome, but jerky—until now. Someone interpolated the original frames to achieve this smooth as silk motion film. It’ll leave you stupefied…
Continue reading… “This fluid fly-by video shows astonishing view of Earth”