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Evolution, and breeding. We don't all have the same ancestry. For everyone who wants to cry "racism!" so quickly, is it not at least a little bit possible that Neanderthals were better at some things than Homo sapiens sapiens (and worse at others) and that a tiny bit of that carried forward to their descendants? Why is it OK to not be surprised that a Kenyan wins a marathon if all racial heritages are supposed to be identically capable in every respect?

I do take exception to your characterization of spear-throwing Native Americans, though. Firearms didn't make it from China to the Middle East and Europe until the 1300s or so. Columbus landed just over 100 years later. You can't really characterize the Native Americans as technologically backward for not having an invention that Europe had only acquired a century earlier. And as someone who visited Little Big Horn last week, I can assure you that they made up for lost time.

It's also visible in infrared, that hints at what they are hiding.

http://news.discovery.com/space/black-exoplanet-kepler-110811.html

I remember reading that "absurdly powerful" laser light on contact with a gold target will generate copious antimatter emmisions.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/12/01/antimatter-laser.html

If something similar happens with thorium, it 'might' induce decay reactions through antimatter reactions in the already unstable nuclei of the thorium...

Two, a new one entered the ring recently.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

I've thrown all the feeds from each of these sites into Google Reader. In no particular order:

wired.com
slashdot.org
spectrum.ieee.org
scientistscanvas.com
arxiv.org
techcrunch.com
techdirt.com
news.discovery.com
physicsworld.com
newscientist.com
physorg.com
nationalgeographic.com
scienceblog.com

I have plenty more. Any RSS feeder app works. You get some repeats but there's a constant stream of science news.

I can't find the link I was after but here is a similar one

I wouldn't use the word belief. Its just my observations and I'll be happy to change it given evidence. Without some external "magical" process the simplest explanation is that thought occurs within the brain. Thoughts appearing, without the processing of external inputs or internal feedback, sounds very similar to divine inspiration, and we are back at god. What do I have against god? Once god is used as an explanation it is no longer possible to have a reasonable conversation or argument.

While I have seen babies born, I can't speak about your personal experiences. However, The womb is not the dark silent cave you may imagine. There is plenty of inputs for the brain to start processing. I would rather search for the reason behind your second child's anger rather than believe it was due to an unexplainable spontaneous emotion.

For what it is worth, I think this is the "overhead projector" that John McCain cited in a presidential debate as a $3 million example of government earmark abuse by Obama. Gosh, it's amazing what ordinary office equipment is capable of these days! It's nice to know the government has absolutely no interest in inspiring and educating children, advancing technology, and attracting tourism.

(By the way, that earmark, and the bill it was attached to, never became law)

If you've not seen it, try and find Tanks on the Moon, it's all about the Soviet rover program.

http://science.discovery.com/tv/tank/tank.html

If you do some research about where and how they mine the minerals to make the batteries for those cars then you'll find out it's more destructive to the environment than a regular car, not to mention that much of the electricity in the USA is still produced from polluting sources.

False.

Animations Here are some nice animations of the path of the asteroid.

These microbes weren't growing in space, but they survived being unprotected.

I'm a software developer and a friend, who is develops hardware solutions, and I teamed up with a small sewing company, which we are also friends with, to discuss wearable electronics. We spent an entire day pouring over documents, examples, internet content, blogs, existing products etc. to come up with marketable ideas such as complete products, hobby components, kits anything and anything else except we just couldn't come up with anything.

You were trying too hard.

Want wearable? This is wearable. An artistic, eco-conscious statement that transcends old-skool geekery yet subtle enough to appeal to the common man.

No idea as to whether any of the buttons work.

http://news.discovery.com/animals/mammoth-cloning-technology-reserrect-110117.html "The long-extinct pachyderm could be back to life in five years time." - Just like any other awesome/game-changing discovery/technological feat!

In the program Science : Physics of the impossible http://science.discovery.com/videos/sci-fi-science-designing-a-light-sabre.html

Link to a Sci Fi Science episode where they evaluate the design of a lightsaber using components available today. Some other episodes have related topics discussed in the comments.

Link to a Sci Fi Science episode where they evaluate the design of a lightsaber using components available today. Some other episodes have related topics discussed in the comments.

This one has a much better view. It's the mir station though.

You think there is little or no waste on MythBusters? What they air is highly edited to be entertaining and fit the time constraints. I just watched the "Aftershow" on their site and they were talking about the "dodging a bullet" episode (missed that one, I'll catch it in reruns). Jamie related how he built this elaborate bullet shield with multiple panes of plexiglass with water between them to test dodging a real bullet rather than just a paintball but they never used it because they decided they didn't want to air a real gun shooting at a real person. How much waste was that? I'll bet if you asked Jamie and Adam would say there's plenty of wasted effort on the show, they just don't put most of it on the air unless it's particularly interesting.

Waste is an inescapable piece of the human condition. Perfection is something to strive for but will seldom if ever be achieved.

I was somewhat incorrect in my understanding(it wasn't actually poisonous but rather resistant to weed killers) but it was indeed considered potentially unsafe due to hormone levels....

http://news.discovery.com/earth/is-genetically-modified-corn-toxic.html

Sure, but sometimes a division of labor leads to a lack of knowledge about the effort involved in said labor, which then leads to a lack of respect for the laborers or the end product itself.

Killing your own food might be one of the more extreme ways to address this - there are certainly people who can eat meat but are too squeamish at the sight of blood, and they have a right to eat meat just like the rest of us - but there are other plenty of other ways to address this, too.

For example, Dirty Jobs is all about showing how some of the manual jobs in our country get done, and celebrating the fact that there are people out there willing to do them for us. Matthew Moore's Digital Farm Collective project is designed to show non-farmers the effort involved in the production of their vegetables - if you knew that it took the use of a small bit of our fertile planet and some of our precious water for 140 days just to grow one single carrot, might you be a little more invested in the appreciation of that carrot in your dinner? Would you be less likely to let it rot in your fridge?

Additionally, some stars are so large, that some surface (=Photosphere) features can actually be "seen" with a sufficiently large telescope. The topmost picture in this article shows some surface features of Betelgeuse. I don't know if this has ever been used to confirm the spin of any star.

gotta be working for Mike Rowe Soft !

They cancelled LISA?! D=

It would appear so. Well, not cancelled, just... well, "resting".

Project Daedalus envisions sending a probe to Banard's Star, about six light years away. The journey would take 50 years.

apparently we have here and here. I'll give you that the first link is a blurry mess, and the second link doesn't even have any pictures, only some weird line art ;)

And that makes me think of the wet burp:

Space Beer Reaches for Final Frontier
http://news.discovery.com/space/space-beer-reaches-final-frontier-110303.html

Surely any beer can be consumed in space, right? Wrong. Not only would the launch costs be astronomical to get a crate of Stella into orbit, it's a physical impracticality to consume any carbonated beverage in space.

Why? Zero-G has a rather nasty side effect of the "wet burp" phenomenon.

Think about it, what happens when you swallow a mouthful of beer on Earth? It goes down your throat and sits in your stomach. Gravity ensures the fluid stays in your stomach, allowing the carbon dioxide bubbles to expand and rise to the top of the fluid. You can then sit back and let out an impressive burp to impress your friends as the carbon dioxide is vented out of your mouth.

Now try doing that in space.

There's little gravity to keep the fluid in your stomach, but you still need to vent that carbon dioxide that is expanding inside your belly. You try to burp.... but you end up venting the carbon dioxide, beer, and whatever else was inside your stomach through your mouth and nose. This, my friends, is called a "wet burp"; an explosive near-vomit experience guaranteed to gross out anyone who has the misfortune to be floating around with you.

By the time you get sucked out of that plane, you are a goner.

If anyone actually read TFA, you'd see there's a big hand just above the jet that would catch you.

The link on "Ian O'Neill" leads to the relevant reasons. In short:

1. For a bright object, it's not making on the reflective dome below it shine.

2. Even though several videos came out, considering the location (a popular tourist attraction), there should be even more videos and eyewitness accounts.

3. Two of the videos have evidence of tampering.

http://news.discovery.com/space/jerusalem-ufo-almost-certainly-a-hoax.html

No on the dinosaurs, probable on the dodo.

Weisman has an agenda? Oh for Christ's sake! Why do I get the feeling this is a case of, "There exists knowledge that might counter my worldview, therefore the person who provides evidence contrary to it is probably suspect and all of the evidence can be ignored." Try growing some balls and challenging yourself sometime.

Apparently you feel that there has existed a species who had a bigger impact on biodiversity than mankind. Name it. The best I can think of are the bacteria that caused the oxygen holocaust, and I don't think that would count since all life then was unicellular.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp

They also contain mercury, a fact that causes no small amount of concern in light of how dangerous that substance is. Yet the amount housed in each bulb is very small, about 4 or 5 milligrams, which in volume is about the size of the period at the end of a sentence. (By comparison, old-style mercury thermometers contain about 500 milligrams of mercury, an amount equal to the mercury found in 125 CFL bulbs.) And, provided the bulbs aren't broken open, none of that leaches into the home.

http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/which-mercury-exposure-risk-cfl

Therefore, although CFLs contain much more mercury than fish, fish pose a greater danger of exposing us to mercury because we eat the fish.

The damn battery in your watch contains more mercury then a CFL. I'm also willing to bed more mercury gets released into the atmosphere by the burning of coal to power your incandescent then the breaking of my CFL. Way to externalize the costs there buddy.

Or there is the fact that if everyone replaced one incandescent bulb in their house it would equal removing hundreds of thousands of cars from the road.

Coal-fired power plants emit mercury into the air as part of the electricity-producing process. These plants account for 40 percent of all the mercury released into our environment [source: GE]

The URL is http://science.discovery.com/ WTF, Slashdot?

The URL is http://science.discovery.com/ WTF, Slashdot?

OTOH, plump, farm-raised, hormone-injected turkeys? I guess they can't fly.

They also can't mate. Too much bird gets in the way. I can't make this shit up... Do not stroke the tom more than twice.

Yay for having a fiance in her last year of a Bachelor of Animal Science degree... Imagine what I'll learn when she goes for her Master's...

Ironic that someone criticizing someone else for being stupid, cannot manage to spell "blimp" repeatedly.

Watch http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-clips-hindenburg.html again.
The "myth" that they were testing (remember, this is formulated as a binary pass/fail for their show) is that it wasn't the hydrogen but was the skin that caused the blimp to burn as fast as it did.

Using exactly the results you list:
Simple fabric burns.
Hydrogen with simple fabric burns.
Thermite fabric (no H2) burns faster, but still not to the point of the event.
Thermite + H2 = boom.

Ergo, the myth that it was JUST the skin, was in fact busted.
Jaimie discusses at the end that the skin clearly was an accelerant, and had a significant impact, but the specific of the myth was shown to be untrue.

Not sure why this was too complicated to understand.

That's why it's always fun to go to the hospital and say "I don't feel good. I've felt like this for the last couple months. I was looking online and I'm pretty sure I have Ebola"

    Just kidding, I've never done that. Well, never been serious when I did. :)

    I wonder how many people have watched Discovery channel, House, or whatever show with some obscure ailment, and then rush off to the hospital sure that their lingering ailment is what they just showed.

That's why it's always fun to go to the hospital and say "I don't feel good. I've felt like this for the last couple months. I was looking online and I'm pretty sure I have Ebola"

    Just kidding, I've never done that. Well, never been serious when I did. :)

    I wonder how many people have watched Discovery channel, House, or whatever show with some obscure ailment, and then rush off to the hospital sure that their lingering ailment is what they just showed.

Actually, they do form gravitational lenses, and we've measured this.

Basically, the process is to find a galaxy cluster, measure the lensing to determine where the mass is, and subtract out the mass of the individual galaxies. What you're left with is the location of the dark matter.

http://news.discovery.com/space/hubble-3d-map-universe-dark-matter.html

Where you're wrong is that there's no "central galaxy." Dark matter is still closely associated with normal matter (after all, they do attract each other gravitationally). I think maps like this have shown that most galaxies actually have a "halo" of dark matter surrounding them.

Of course, the shape of this halo can vary quite a bit:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/17/

Wow! Are those gorgeous pictures or what!

The explanation is, of course, that the 7 Hz field is only 2 Hz from the infamous Brown Note Frequency of 9 Hz. You can read all about it here.

maybe someone will register on their forum and post the suggestion http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/9701967776

They recently published this. It's about cooling with relatively hot water (60 degrees Centigrade/140F). They probably researched this because the water is cheaper to cool by air when it's hotter.
Also in 2008 they published this, a solution to cool inside stacked dies.

So now we learn the real reason Jamie & Adam visited the White House recently...

>> 24 Launch “myth-busters” education campaign

And you can use them to test whether your crash test dummy has sustained damage when you blow him up/throw him of a building/crash a car with him in it.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/flying-car-gets-faa-approval.html One down

Some links that have more information, without having to give money to the Chemistry of Materials:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/material-could-collect-sunlight-from-roof-and-windows.html

http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/scientists_produce_transparent_light-harvesting_material.html

Oh, and one more thing:
Buckminster Fuller strikes again! AHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahaha... hah.

--
I want my Dymaxion

http://news.discovery.com/animals/boa-constrictor-virgin-birth.html http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/e0l98/a_boa_constrictor_has_a_virgin_birth_resulting_in/ saw this on digg a few days ago

I was curious as to what this gene actually did.

This article says it's the 7R variant, which is tends to cause a "novelty seeking" personality type.
Here's the wikipedia article on DRD4

Or...

Under-the-skin indicator for blood sugar levels in diabetics.

There is actually a tattoo in the works that does this. Here is the link: diabetes tattoo But using leds instead could work too.

If you have followed the mess the Chinese created, you'd guess the US probably wouldn't blow it up. They are still (and rightfully) angry about it.
They could, however, allow it to stay in one piece and disable it some other way. Extremely powerfull and very directed EM radiation would fry all it's circuits for example.

Let's connect the dots.....
China wants to drive.
They're adding more cars on the road a year than the US and Europe combined (~2-3mil/year national car parc growth)
Chery, their biggest independent car maker, has signed a deal with Better Place. They're almost completely leapfrogging the Internal Combustion Engine altogether. Beijin's mayor deputy has visited Better Place in Israel multiple times.
Right now, anyone who ignores what the hybrid-entrenched car companies (Read: Toyota, Chevrolet, Honda) are saying and has his ear to the ground knows one thing:
Once an electric car stops being a greenie status symbol 10K$ more expensive than an ICE car, and starts being 10K$ cheaper than an ICE car (which is what the Better Place model does), Multi-Trillion-Dollar-Industry (Oil and Automotive combined) undergoes BIG disruption happens. All hell breaks loose.
Priuses have moved in production from 10,000car/anum to 100,000car/anum.
Renault, on the other hand, the boldest pure-EV company (and Better Place's biggest partner), just geared up for a 1,000,000car/anum production in Turkey. They know one thing: When Better Place starts running cross-subsidy ("Free iPhone on a 3-year-plan") on a car that's 10K$ car cheaper (batteries not included), subsidized by government to the tune of another 5K$-10K$, and is 5K$ cheaper than hybrid/ice because there is no ICE, and starts giving away cars for free... ... and this is not distant future. This is 60,000 presold vehicles in Israel today, and retail rollout in the upcoming 4 months....
Then Renault doesn't have a demand problem like Toyota do. They have a supply problem. It becomes a question of how many cars you can hand out for free.

All the big players - namely countries - know this. It's no secret, and Shai Agassi is all over YouTube like a rash. Everyone is watching Israel, Denmark and Australia very closely.
This is why Japan, China, Europe and the US have dumped 4 BIL$ into car battery production, when nobody is actually producing anywhere near this many cars yet.

By 2015-2016, there will be more electric cars sold than ICE ones.

And in the middle of it is the one technology pretty much all the big car players have agreed on - Lithium Ion. Afghanistan and Bolivia, large as their stash may be, is not happening anytime soon.
It'll be Argentina & Chile's salt flats, slightly more expensive Lithium from spodumene ore in Australia, China (and to lesser extent North America and some other locations in the world), and for countries that are willing to pay premium for national security and divorcing workforce driving to work from import dependence like Korea - production from ocean seawater.

China is concerned wants to make sure it's lithium needs are served before everything else.
This development is anything but surprising.