March 2008
This has got to be the lamest/strangest excuse for a crime ever: blaming bigfoot for being a child molester! A man who claims that he was molested by Bigfoot as a child was ordered to serve 20 years in prison yesterday for his own molestation-related activities. Morrill told an investigator preparing his pre-sentence report about being sexually assaulted by the legendary Bigfoot, a North...
Mar 31st
EIROforum / CERN A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector. Click on the image for a larger version. The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet. ...
Mar 27th
IEEE Spectrum has published the last interview with the late, great Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Spectrum editor Harry Goldstein emailed me, “In January, we sent Saswato Das to Sri Lanka to interview Clarke, who was in the hospital at the time. We were planning on putting the article and the audio up tomorrow anyway. Eerie timing.” From Das’s Spectrum article: I started our interview...
Mar 20th
As seen on MC Gilles.
Mar 20th
Meet Floyd and Justin Bebee, a father and son team and obviously forehead tattoo enthusiasts. The Smoking Gun has the story: In a TSG interview, Floyd Bebee, a father of eight, said that he has a tattoo on the back of his head reading “Got-R-Did.” The ink on his forehead cost $125 and took about 45 minutes to complete, Bebee said, adding that he was the family trendsetter when it...
Mar 20th
Gravity waves are global events. Much like the ripples on a massive pond, these large-scale waves can propagate from an atmospheric disturbance over thousands of miles. These waves are maintained by the gravitational force of Earth pulling down and the buoyancy of the atmosphere pushing up. Until now it has been hard to link atmospheric gravity waves with other atmospheric phenomena, but new...
Mar 19th
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Mar 14th
Who needs church if you can get together and reason together? First it was Boston; now other cities are joining in with gatherings of fans of skepticism and science. Here are your opportunities: London, England: Saturday, 15 March, 7:00pm, at the Doric Ach near Euston station. Anchorage, Alaska: Thursday, 20 March, 7:00pm, at the cafe in the Barnes and Noble on Northern Lights Blvd. We shall take...
Mar 12th
Mar 12th
This is a familiar experience for most of us: getting stuck in a traffic jam only to find out later that there is no obvious cause (like accident, construction work or bottleneck). Well, Japanese scientist Yuki Sugiyama of Nagoya University has finally found the answer: the traffic jam is caused by … too many cars! In the New Journal of Physics a study by his group explains why we’re...
Mar 5th
Filed under: Home Entertainment We’ve always believed that the perceived quality boost that comes from using high-end cables is really just a trick of the mind (read: justifying the ridiculous cost of premium cables to yourself) — if you’ve dropped enough cash, you can probably hear anything you want. Still, our belief is one thing — cold hard proof is another, and it looks...
Mar 4th
It sounds like a headline from the spoof newspaper The Onion, but for physicists, this is actually an achievement: Two teams have stored nothing in a puff of gas and then retrieved it a split second later.
Mar 2nd