Thread: Science!!!

Originally Posted by Bill Hicks

Because Owls are Bad Ass

Batman can do that too.

Originally Posted by santiclaws

More Good News About The 'Scientific Accident That May Change The World' | Science | ReWire | KCET

This is awesome. Can't wait until there's no more risk of a chemical battery blowing up in my face when I'm using my electronic cigarette.

Sweat protects us from dangerous bugs - The Times of India

Ancient Chompers Were Healthier Than Ours : Shots - Health News : NPR

The Subjects

Australia's #1 sleep research centre in conjunction with the Aust Network for Arts & Tech put #1 NYT-bestseller Sean Williams in a week-long sleep deprivation study with Maker/TechnoEvangelist Fee Plumley, artist Thom Buchanan and lit author Jennifer Mills to see what happened to their creativity without light cues, under constant surveillance, and subject to strict scientific instruction. The result? We all went a bit crazy (predictably) but made some fabulous art.

From Seizure to Surgery: first-person account of what it's like to have a brain tumor | BoingBoing

Honey, It's Electric: Bees Sense Charge On Flowers : NPR

That's right — electric fields. It turns out flowers have a slight negative charge relative to the air around them. Bumblebees have a charge, too.

"When bees are flying through the air, just the friction of the air and the friction of the body parts on one another causes the bee to become positively charged," Sutton says.

It's like shuffling across a carpet in wool socks. When a positively charged bee lands on a flower, the negatively charged pollen grains naturally stick to it. The Bristol team wondered if bees were aware of this electrostatic interaction.

So, they designed an experiment — one described in this week's Science magazine. The researchers built a small arena full of fake flowers. Each flower was simple — a stalk with a small steel dish at the top. Half of the "flowers" held delicious sugar water. The other half held quinine, a substance that bees find bitter and disgusting.

When bumblebees explored this false flower patch, they moved around randomly. They chose to land on sweet flowers just about as often as bitter flowers.

But when the sweet flowers carried a small charge, the bees learned pretty quickly to choose the charged flowers. And when the electric charge was removed? They went back to their random foraging.

Long-lost continent found under the Indian Ocean : Nature News & Comment

Jamtveit and his colleagues suggest that rocks containing the wayfaring zircons originated in ancient fragments of continental crust located beneath Mauritius. They propose that geologically recent volcanic eruptions brought shards of the crust to Earth’s surface, where the zircons eroded from their parent rocks to pepper the island’s sands. The team's work is published today in Nature Geoscience.