jaredthewilddog  reports that Disinformation reports that Tom's Guide reports that Malaysian national news agency Bernama reports that Russian news agency Itar-Tass reports that the scientific journal Nature reports that Japanese scientists at Tokyo University have created a new "elastic water" substance-made of 95% water, a bit of clay, and some unnamed organic ( Read more... )

Astronaut Wakata Koichi performing stunts recommended by the Japanese public:

Click to view

Via New Scientist and Pink Tentacle.

(Reprinted without permission from National Geographic's June 2009 issue; unavailable on the Web site.)

After Israel invaded Gaza last winter, protests sprang up in Europe. Firebombs and tear gas were part of the mix-though not in Sweden, thanks to a new kind of crowd control ( Read more... )

Took a snippet from Quirks & Quarks' recent pod cast starring the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to begin operation this Wednesday.  (MP3, 708KB)
There are all these what we call `virtual Higgses' permeating the vacuum; and that's all to do with quantum mechanics, because quantum mechanics tells you that, for instance, the vacuum-it's not just ( Read more... )

Provided by mmsword:

A Hat, By Hubble @ Space.com.
Broken symmetry, a Wikipedia geometry-related physics stub.

I wish to wear that galaxy as a hat. This may require require breaking many laws of physics and/or Photoshop.

NIST atom interferometry displays new quantum tricks @ Physorg.com

From the article:
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a novel way of making atoms interfere with each other, recreating a famous experiment originally done with light while also making the atoms do things that light just won't ( Read more... )

A Miracle of Science is a wonderful web comic that everyone should read.  (^*^)  I just finished plowing through it myself yesterday, and it is goodness. It finished earlier this year; the story was outlined from beginning to end before it was actually written and drawn. One of the few whole stories in web comics, versus all the continuing and ( Read more... )

Bit of physics awesomeness: Ultra-Dense Optical Storage -- on One Photon, thanks to sixteenbynine

More awesome in the health front: Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers, snagged from heron61

High-resolution structure of photosynthetic catalyst holds promise for clean energy

From the article:Contact: Dan Krotz, (510) 486-4019, dakrotz@lbl.gov
BERKELEY,CA - About 3.2 billion years ago, primitive bacteria developed a way toharness sunlight to split water molecules into protons, electrons andoxygen, the cornerstone of photosynthesis that ( Read more... )

Today in biology I learned that both the development of agriculture and the industrial revolution happened around 1600.. maybe my teacher should probably stick to teaching the biology. She's scatter-brained enough as it is..

Exploring Stephen Hawking's Flexiverse @ New Scientist
HERE'S how to build a universe. Step one: start at the beginning of ( Read more... )