Miniature Crossbow Fires Flaming Bolts

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YouTube user T. Shamir, who made the excellent tiny cannon that we featured last year, has machined a crossbow from gold, silver, and steel. It comes with a tiny aperture sight and a pull of 5.9 pounds. The above video shows the impressive capabilities of this little crossbow and the various bolts that Shamir made…

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Chocolate Compound Beats Codeine for Cough-Suppression

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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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Embracing Our Inner Cyborg

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The emerging market for smartphone peripherals is set to explode

Futurist Thomas Frey:  It recently occurred to me that I was pulling my iPhone out of my pocket several times an hour to check information. Over the past few months I‘ve become very self-conscious about the addictive nature of information and the OCD-like mannerisms that follow, and this constant checking-in is only one of several habit-changers I’ve noticed that accompany smartphones.

 

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Dead Animals on Display at Zoo

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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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One In Three US Citizens Live 50 Miles Or Less From A Nuclear Reactor

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All manner of wonderful graphics are being created from the newly-available 2010 US Census data. A new sort of nuclear family, for example, is portrayed with this mouse-over map showing the population density inside 10 and 50 mile evacuation radii around the US’ 65 nuclear power plants (containing a total of 104 reactors).

The upshot: One in every three Americans currently resides less than 50 miles from an operating nuclear reactor. MSNBC mapped the details in Nuclear neighbors: Population rises near US reactors …

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Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born

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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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Underground Telescope Could Give Scientists First Glimpse of the Dawn of the Universe

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Scientists could get their first glimpse of the dawn of the universe from a telescope buried up to half a mile underground.  This new device is designed to detect gravitational waves.  Gravitational waves are an elusive phenomena created by some of the most violent events in the universe such as black holes, neutron stars and the Big Bang.

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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