Evidence of water ice on mars.
It’s official: the Phoenix Lander has discovered ice on Mars.
A few days ago, the lander exposed some bright white chunks of material
while retrieving a soil sample. These spots have since disappeared over
the following days, suggesting they’ve melted. An additional trench
found a hard layer at the same depth as the original ice.
The spacecraft team has been dealing with some data storage issues as well and will be pushing a software patch soon.
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It takes a country…
The Canadian Senate wants to make spanking your children illegal and a Quebec judge quashes a dad’s grounding of his 12-year-old daughter.
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The Smithsonian on Flickr
The Smithsonian has a Flickr page as part of the Flickr Commons program. So far there are 6 sets, Portraits of Scientists and Inventors, Portraits of Artists, American Celebrations, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, People and the Post and Smithsonian’s First Photographer, featuring the work of Thomas William Smillie.
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You know less about Tetris than you think
Tetris has changed over the years. The latest game mechanics are well-documented and allow for techniques more complicated than those of us used to earlier iterations could possibly imagine. And of course, you can have it any way you want it.
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My Favorite Moisturizer
You may have elbow germs and not even know it. Eeeww!
“The crook of your elbow is not just a plain patch of skin. It is a
piece of highly coveted real estate, a special ecosystem, a bountiful
home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. Even after you have
washed the skin clean, there are still one million bacteria in every
square centimeter.” Beware some of these germs may be on your hockey equipment.
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Weezer – Pork and Beans
The music video for Pork and Beans by Weezer is an homage to every viral web video. Ever.
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Download – Print – Cut – Fold
Cubecraft – Stormtrooper, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Iron Man, Mario etc. More (Sonic, Ninja Turtles etc) here.
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Revolt of the Lab Rats? Or Voyeur Caught Watching?
When your research subjects notice you watching…. The fine folks over at Little Green Footballs discovered
“a pile of results and code” from an observation of their on-line
discourse on a server at Carnegie Mellon. That led to a heated thread
of sometimes paranoid speculation that eventually calmed down
(somewhat) when the researcher’s academic advisors posted a good-natured mea-culpa (wea-culpa?) and explanation.
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Spain arrests ‘prolific’ hackers
Spanish police have arrested five hackers they describe as being among
the most active on the internet.
The hackers, who include two 16-year-olds, are accused of disrupting
government websites in the United States, Asia and Latin America.
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That’s just insane!
Some of the most insane journeys in recent time include Harry Lee ‘The Hawk’ McGinnis’ walk around the world, Helen Thayer’s 4,000-mile trek across the Sahara, Andrew Thompson’s speedwalk across the Appalachian Trail (2000 miles), and others.
These along with some of the other world records (epic journeys) should give you an idea of the limits of physical human endeavor.
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Eeek!
Tips for getting ahead in the increasingly competitive low cost small laptop market: When you go to Getty Images, grab some stock photography of smiling kids in a classroom and photoshop in your product, you better make sure your competitor hasn’t used the exact same image.
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Science of orgasm
This month’s Scientific American Mind unpacks the neurology of orgasm.
It summarizes some very intriguing and also controversial research. For
example, brain scans seem to show that orgasms aren’t just about
heightened arousal but also the silencing of the brain’s “center of
vigilance” to lose all inhibitions. From Scientific American Mind:
To find out whether orgasm looks similar in the female
brain (as it does in the male brain), (University of Groningen
neuroscientist Gert) Holstege’s team asked the male partners of 12
women to stimulate their partner’s clitoris–the site whose excitation
most easily leads to orgasm–until she climaxed, again inside a PET
scanner. Not surprisingly, the team reported in 2006, clitoral
stimulation by itself led to activation in areas of the brain involved
in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that part of the body
and in describing a body sensation–for instance, labeling it “sexual.”But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected
happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons
sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern
self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there,
the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and
inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the
dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral
reasoning and social judgment–a change that may be tied to a suspension
of judgment and reflection.Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a
depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally
showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their
female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all
costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can
see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so
far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human
Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not
have any emotional feelings.”
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Scary sign for giant edible “wings” in New York
Photoshop disasters posted this ad for humungous “wings.” The Monte Python sketch below is a good fit:
Customer: What flavor is it? Man: It’s a bird mate, it’s a bloody bird, it’s not any bloody flavor. Albatross!
Customer:
It’s got to be some flavor, I mean everything’s got a flavor. Man: All
right, it’s bloody albatross flavor, it’s bloody sea bloody bird bloody
flavor. Albatross!Customer: Do you get wafers with it?
Man: Course you don’t get bloody wafers with it, it’s a bloody albatross innit. Albatross!
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Man loses money trying to double it by marinading
In Norway, a French gentleman (F) told a Vietnamese gentleman (V) that
he could double his money using a special liquid solution. V gave F
$35,000, hoping to turn it into $70,000 overnight. Dumbass.
This unidentified man was told by a 32-year-old Frenchman
that if he mixed the real cash with blank bills and then marinate them
in a special liquid for one night, he would have double the amount of
the cash.The gullible Vietnamese believed the Frenchman’s story and gave
him 180,000 kroner (35, 000 U.S. dollars). But when he prepared to
collect his money the next morning, both the cash and the Frenchman
disappeared.
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Spying on our animal friends
We’re all used to animal cams at the zoo. You can watch animals in the wild or in captivity. But how about a live animal cam at…the library!
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Goin’ to the chapel and we’re / Gonna get ma-ha-harried!
The California Supreme Court has just overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriages. Read the decision.
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What am I, chopped liver?
Geese are on the run once again in Chicago, as the City Council overturns its recent ban on foie gras, which had been prompted in part by prodding from animal rights activists. Many chefs (although not all) were furious when the ban was enacted, missing the “exquisite taste, silky texture.” They had threatened civil disobedience and even filed a lawsuit. And now epicurians as well as Jewish grandmothers rejoice.
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How to land at the Martian north pole.
Seven minutes of terror. A short video on describing how the Phoenix probe will land at the North Pole of Mars on May 25th. Follow updates to the mission via Twitter and the blog.
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The Essential Man’s Library
100 Must-Read Books (for dudes)
Men just have different … needs … than women, so apparently they
need to read different books as well. However (as a chick myself) I
tend to check this sort of thing out in a futile but ongoing attempt to
figure out men. Hmmph. Men. Go figure ….
RobDurdle.com 
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