moonbuggy

‘Question: What is one horsepower? Answer: One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second.

The law of gravity says it’s not fair jumping up without coming back down.

Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime.

Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they’re there.

Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so sometimes it’s brother against brother.

We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on.

Water vapor gets together in a cloud. When it is big enough to be called a drop, it does.

We keep track of the humidity in the air so we won’t drown when we breathe.

The wind is like the air, only pushier.’

‘The language you speak can affect how you see the world, a new study of colour perception indicates. Native speakers of Russian – which lacks a single word for “blue” – discriminated between light and dark blues differently from their English-speaking counterparts, researchers found.

The Russian language makes an obligatory distinction between light blue, pronounced “goluboy”, and dark blue, pronounced “siniy”. Jonathan Winawer at MIT in the US and colleagues set out to determine whether this linguistic distinction influences colour perception. [..]

Russian speakers, by comparison, were 10% faster at distinguishing between light (goluboy) blues and dark (siniy) blues than at discriminating between blues within the same shade category.’

‘Brazilian and US scientists are looking into using spider venom as a possible treatment for male impotence.

Their investigation follows reports that men bitten by the Phoneutria nigriventer experienced priapism – long and painful erections.

A two-year study has found that the venom contains a toxin, called Tx2-6, that causes erections.

Further tests are being carried out in the US before the substance can be approved for human use.’

‘In praise of the opaque green liqueur beloved by his creative contemporaries, Oscar Wilde once posed the rhetorical question, “What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”

The prosaic answer, at least for Americans, has long been one of legality: sunsets can be freely enjoyed, but absinthe was forbidden because it contained thujone, a potentially toxic compound.

Intrepid drinkers have worked around the ban by ordering imported bottles off the Internet or smuggling them back from Eastern Europe. Now they have a third, less dodgy option: Lucid, which is being marketed as the first legal, genuine American absinthe in nearly a century.’

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‘One compound, cannabidiol, or CBD, made people more relaxed. But even small doses of another component, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, produced temporary psychotic symptoms in people, including hallucinations and paranoid delusions, doctors said.

The results, to be presented at an international mental health conference in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, provides physical evidence of the drug’s damaging influence on the human brain.

“We’ve long suspected that cannabis is linked to psychoses, but we have never before had scans to show how the mechanism works,” said Dr. Philip McGuire, a professor of psychiatry at King’s College, London.

In analyzing MRI scans of the study’s subjects, McGuire and his colleagues found that THC interfered with activity in the inferior frontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with paranoia.

“THC is switching off that regulator,” McGuire said, effectively unleashing the paranoia usually kept under control by the frontal cortex.’

‘[..] That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that “astounding” discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine’s newest frontiers: treating the dead.’

‘A new study by Indiana University media researchers finds that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly calls “a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.”

The study documented six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials “using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.” Researchers found that O’Reilly “was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes — such as ‘villians’ or downright ‘evil’ — to people and groups.’

‘How do you get rid of the body of a dead astronaut on a three-year mission to Mars and back?

When should the plug be pulled on a critically ill astronaut who is using up precious oxygen and endangering the rest of the crew? Should NASA employ DNA testing to weed out astronauts who might get a disease on a long flight?

With NASA planning to land on Mars 30 years from now, and with the recent discovery of the most “Earth-like” planet ever seen outside the solar system, the space agency has begun to ponder some of the thorny practical and ethical questions posed by deep space exploration.’

‘What they found surprised them — corkscrew-shaped oviducts, with plenty of potential dead-ends.

“Interestingly, the male phallus is also a spiral, but it twists in the opposite, counterclockwise, direction,” said Yale ornithologist Richard Prum in a statement.

“So, the twists in the oviduct appear designed to exclude the opposing twists of the male phallus. It’s an exquisite anti-lock-and-key system.”

Brennan believes females evolved convoluted oviducts to foil the male rapists.

“You can envision an evolutionary scenario that, as the male phallus increases in size, the female creates more barriers. You get this evolutionary arms race,” Brennan said.’

‘From the moment of birth, we begin the battle against death — against the inevitable. Statistics say that a newborn child can expect to live an average of 76 years. But averages may not be what they use to be.

In 1786, life expectancy was 24 years. A hundred years later it doubled to 48. Right now, it’s 76.

“Over half the baby boomers here in America are going to see their hundredth birthday and beyond in excellent health,” says Dr. Ronald Klatz of the American Academy of Anti-Aging. “We’re looking at life spans for the baby boomers and the generation after the baby boomers of 120 to 150 years of age.”‘

‘Scientists have identified the Godzilla of fungi – a giant, prehistoric fossil that has evaded classification for more than a century.

A chemical analysis has shown that the 6-metre-tall organism with a tree-like trunk was a fungus that became extinct more than 350 million years ago. [..]

“No matter what argument you put forth, people say it’s crazy,” says C. Kevin Boyce, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, US. “A 6-metre-fungus doesn’t make any sense, but here’s the fossil.”‘

‘The Internet’s blog sites have become overgrown with a variety of unpleasant content, including porn, offensive language, hate posting, and malware, a new threat analysis has suggested.

According to Scansafe’s Monthly Global Threat Report for March 2007, a surprisingly high percentage of the Internet’s blog sites — up to 80 percent — contain “offensive” content, with six percent hosting active malware.

To be added to the list of those deemed potentially offensive within a business context, a site merely had to contain a single post containing profanity, or worse.’

.. on an unrelated note, I’m now hosting a goatse image. :)

‘On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where life can develop. And the deep sea, which has been immersed in total darkness since the dawn of time, occupies 85% of ocean space, forming the planet’s largest habitat. Yet these depths abound with mystery. The deep sea is mostly uncharted—only about 5 percent of the seafloor has been mapped with any reasonable degree of detail—and we know very little about the creatures that call it home. Current estimates about the number of species yet to be found vary between ten and thirty million. The deep sea no longer has anything to prove; it is without doubt Earth’s largest reservoir of life.’

‘Workers digging at the site of a future Wal-Mart store in suburban Mesa have unearthed the bones of a prehistoric camel that’s estimated to be about 10,000 years old.

Arizona State University geology museum curator Brad Archer hurried out to the site Friday when he got the news that the owner of a nursery was carefully excavating bones found at the bottom of a hole being dug for a new ornamental citrus tree.

“There’s no question that this is a camel; these creatures walked the land here until about 8,000 years ago, when the same event that wiped out a great deal of mammal life took place,” Archer told The Arizona Republic.’

‘US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.

The scientists ran a “cortical simulator” that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.

In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.

Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.’

‘A stream of water is split into two streams and falls through two bottomless cans into two buckets. The falling water creates opposite electrical charges in the buckets, and high voltage arcs jump between them periodically.’

Generating 10-20kV potentials with a dripping pipe and some buckets. Kinda cool. :)

(14.4meg Flash video)

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‘A group of American aerospace engineers have written a book on how to defend the earth against alien invasion.

Travis Shane Taylor, Bob Boan, Charles Anding and T Conley Powell hold a variety of PhDs and other degrees in hard sciences and technology. All have worked on weapons and aerospace programmes for defence contractors, NASA and various parts of the US forces. Taylor and Boan also claim expertise in various kinds of technical military intelligence-gathering.

Their book An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion is out now in paperback, and getting a fair bit of play in the media.’

‘Lesbians are twice as likely as heterosexual women to be overweight or obese, which puts them at greater risk for obesity-related health problems and death, US researchers said.

The report, published in the American Journal of Public Health, is one of the first large studies to look at obesity among lesbians.

Ulrike Boehmer of the Boston University School of Public Health and colleagues looked at a 2002 national survey of almost 6000 women, and found that lesbians were 2.69 times more likely to be overweight and 2.47 times more likely to be obese.’

‘The marijuana being sold across the United States is stronger than ever, which could explain a growing number of medical emergencies that involve the drug, government drug experts on Wednesday.

Analysis of seized samples of marijuana and hashish showed that more of the cannabis on the market is of the strongest grade, the White House and National Institute for Drug Abuse said.

They cited data from the University of Mississippi’s Marijuana Potency Project showing the average levels of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in the products rose from 7 percent in 2003 to 8.5 percent in 2006.

The level had risen steadily from 3.5 percent in 1988.’

‘The strange boundary between the macroscopic world and the weird realm of quantum physics is about to be probed in a unique experiment.

Scientists have created a minute cantilever arm on the surface of a silicon chip that they hope will leave the world of classical physics and enter the quantum realm when cooled to near absolute zero.

The experiment will be the first time scientists have ever scaled an object in the observable world down into the slippery world of quantum mechanics.

“I think it’s really possible to observe quantum effects (in the cantilever arm) with this experiment,” said Peter Rabl of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who isn’t part of the experiment.

“Either you have a real, macroscopic object in a quantum state — or you find out that quantum mechanics doesn’t work for the macroscopic world,” he said. “In either case, it would be quite fascinating.”‘

‘As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.’

‘For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for “life in the universe.”

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a “red dwarf,” is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.’

‘The technological explosion is even bigger than the mobile phone explosion that preceded it. And, as with mobiles, it is being followed by fears about its effect on health – particularly the health of children. Recent research, which suggests that the worst fears about mobiles are proving to be justified, only heightens concern about the electronic soup in which we are increasingly spending our lives.

Now, as we report today, Sir William Stewart (pictured below right), the man who has issued the most authoritative British warnings about the hazards of mobiles, is becoming worried about the spread of Wi-Fi. The chairman of the Health Protection Agency – and a former chief scientific adviser to the Government – is privately pressing for an official investigation of the risks it may pose.’

‘Seven clusters of cancer and other serious illnesses have been discovered around mobile phone masts, raising concerns over the technology’s potential impact on health.

Studies of the sites show high incidences of cancer, brain haemorrhages and high blood pressure within a radius of 400 yards of mobile phone masts.

One of the studies, in Warwickshire, showed a cluster of 31 cancers around a single street. A quarter of the 30 staff at a special school within sight of the 90ft high mast have developed tumours since 2000, while another quarter have suffered significant health problems.’

‘Russian military pilots have described how they created rain clouds to protect Moscow from radioactive fallout after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

Major Aleksei Grushin repeatedly took to the skies above Chernobyl and Belarus and used artillery shells filled with silver iodide to make rain clouds that would “wash out” radioactive particles drifting towards densely populated cities.

More than 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to save the Russian capital from the toxic radioactive material.’

‘More and more media reports are mentioning the potential merits of marijuana. The most recent headlines say the active ingredient in the drug cuts tumor growth in common lung cancers in half and greatly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread.

Researchers at Harvard University tested marijuana’s main ingredient, delta-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, in both lab and mouse studies and say their experiments are the first to show THC inhibits the growth of cancer.’

‘Eating large quantities of cured meats like bacon could damage lung function and increase the risk of lung disease.

A Columbia University team found people who ate cured meats at least 14 times a month were more likely to have COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

COPD, which includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, kills around 30,000 people in the UK each year.’

‘Australians would take more sick days if the government banned cold and flu tablets in a bid to stop the medicine being used to manufacture the drug ice, doctors say.

The government has asked health and law enforcement officials to examine the implications of a blanket ban on the sale of products that contain pseudoephedrine, which includes cold and flu tablets.

Pseudoephedrine can be used to make methamphetamines such as ice and crystal meth.

But Australian Medical Association president Dr Mukesh Haikerwal said he doubted the ban would stop the ice epidemic as drug makers would source pseudoephedrine from elsewhere.’

‘The brain, not the heart, is responsible for high blood pressure, a study by British researchers says.

The researchers said hypertension, which can lead to heart attacks, strokes and kidney damage, was an inflammatory vascular disease of the brain rather than the heart.

They discovered that a protein in the brain, JAM-1, trapped white blood cells, which can cause inflammation and obstruct blood flow.

Professor Julian Paton, of Bristol University, said the findings could lead to new ways of treating hypertension.’