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science // tech // futurism

April 26, 2006

 

fun thing i learned today

Female spotted hyenas copulate and give birth through their clitoris....
Posted by xtop at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)
 


September 05, 2005

 

smash your head against the wall

My computer is now an amnesiac. Due to an inability to boot up, I've had to put all its memory in a little box and then wipe it clean. Of course, I can't install an OS, so now I'm running it off the aforementioned little box and hoping against hope I can get my brainbox back up and running sometime sooner than later. Until then, I'm back to being out of touch,...
Posted by xtop at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)
 


April 04, 2005

 

my math hero: paul erdös

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." He was allowed back into the United States in the 1960s, and from 1964 his mother, now in her mid-eighties, began travelling with him. Apart from his family and old friends, Erdos had no interest in a relationship which was not founded in shared intellectual curiosity and he was content to remain a bachelor. Nor did he see the need to...
Posted by xtop at 11:52 PM | Comments (6)
 


January 12, 2005

 

preserved sounds

Inside a bombproof vault a few blocks from the White House, Dan Sheehy is surrounded by audio ghosts: the clickety-clack of typewriters, the tumble of glass bottles inside a soda machine, a 1960s-era telephone ring. Here, sonic blasts from the past are entombed in a hodgepodge of vinyl records, compact discs and reel-to-reel tapes. “We are a museum of sound,” said Sheehy, whose job is to preserve America’s acoustic heritage for an...
Posted by xtop at 01:35 AM | Comments (0)
 


September 22, 2004

 

biological ball

Fire ants have developed a unique method to keep from drowning. At first hint of rising water, worker ants gather the entire colony into a ball - sometimes as big as a basketball. As the water overtakes the mound, the ball rides the flood like a living raft, rolling in the water so all the members can take turns breathing. When they strike a solid object, be it a swimming dog...
Posted by xtop at 01:36 AM | Comments (0)
 


September 15, 2004

 

brain changing

Hypnosis is more than just a party trick, it measurably changes how the brain works, says a UK researcher. Hypnosis significantly affects the activity in a part of the brain responsible for detecting and responding to errors, says John Gruzelier, a psychologist at Imperial College in London. Using functional brain imaging, he also found that hypnosis affects an area that controls higher level executive functions. “This explains why, under hypnosis, people can...
Posted by xtop at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
 


August 03, 2004

 

back and to the left channel

requires NYT registration Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have begun work on a digital scanning apparatus that they believe will be able to reproduce sound from the only known audio recording of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. The recording was made through an open microphone on a police motorcycle during Kennedy's motorcade into Dealey Plaza, where the president was shot to death....
Posted by xtop at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
 


July 29, 2004

 

russian woodpecker

The Soviets fired the first shot in 1976. Miami Springs amateur operator Andy Clark (W4IYT, now SK) remembers it. Clark was operating a commercial aeronautical communications station, one which keeps contact with long-distance airliner flights by shortwave radio. Suddenly, powerful interference came on the air, disrupting communications. "I named that damn thing the woodpecker," Clark said, when he asked the New York headquarters of his communications firm if they, too, were experiencing...
Posted by xtop at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
 


July 25, 2004

 

time can be turned back

From Pravda, so in addition to being written in bad english, it makes no sense at all and is a horrible pack of lies, but i'm a sucker for this kinda nonsense: Neither TV nor radio companies reported the astonishing fact; Gennady Belimov says the Russian president was not informed of the experiment. However, he tells that already under Stalin there was a Research Institute of the Parallel World. Results of experiments...
Posted by xtop at 01:11 AM | Comments (0)
 


July 02, 2004

 

faketography

Seven guests assembled the evening I was involved, a typical number for a group to witness a demonstration according to Dr. Eisenbud. Each guest was asked to bring at least five rolls of 3000 speed Polaroid film. Dozens of exposures were made in the two cameras brought by Dr. Eisenbud. Serios would hold what he called a gismo (a black paper tube about one inch in diameter and one and one...
Posted by xtop at 02:15 AM | Comments (0)
 


June 28, 2004

 

in the nick of time

According to a prospective study on the dangers of smoking that date back half a century, cigarette smokers die an average of 10 years sooner than nonsmokers. At least half, and possibly up to two-thirds, of people who smoke from youth are eventually killed by their habit, a quarter of them while in middle age (ages 35 to 69). "There are risks in life, but you don't have many things that kill...
Posted by xtop at 04:00 PM | Comments (3)
 


June 22, 2004

 

the rock enigma

Bill Brooks, a longtime family friend, says he has witnessed the rock's growth. "When I first saw it, it was sitting in the corner of the yard," said Brooks. "It was a little rock, and over the years it's gotten bigger and bigger. I'm scared of that rock." Price said fear often was the reaction when she showed the rock and then told the story behind it. "When people see it, they...
Posted by xtop at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
 


April 18, 2004

 

yoda lives

A DWARF mouse named Yoda has celebrated his fourth birthday, making him the oldest of his kind and far beyond 100 in human years, the University of Michigan Medical School says. Yoda owes his longevity to genetic modifications that affected his pituitary and thyroid glands and reduced insulin production - and which left him a third smaller than an average mouse and very sensitive to cold....
Posted by xtop at 01:29 PM | Comments (10)
 


April 05, 2004

   


March 24, 2004

 

monsters from the deep

Scientists from Australia and New Zealand have identified more than 100 new species of fish in the waters that divide the two countries. One of the most curious discoveries made by the scientists concerned the mating habits of the deep sea angler fish. Dr Norman described the female as being the size of a tennis ball, with "big savage teeth, little nasty pin eyes ... and a rod lure off the top...
Posted by xtop at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)
 


March 21, 2004

 

time shift go

The Florida International University physics professor plans to take time to task at 10 a.m. Wednesday, when he presents an experiment that involves using acceleration to speed up a digital clock by four seconds. Dolz's experiment — which takes six hours to finish — will become part of Playing With Time, the current exhibit at the Miami Museum of Science. Dolz, who has been a lecturing theoretical physicist for nine years, really...
Posted by xtop at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)
 


March 19, 2004

 

darpa's wild kingdom

In an August 2003 article, Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Pillar noted that DARPA has put forth some of the "most boneheaded ideas ever to spring from the government" -- including a "mechanical elephant" that never made it into the jungles of Vietnam and telepathy research that never quite afforded the U.S. the ability to engage in psychic spying. As former DARPA Director Charles Herzfeld noted in 1975, "When we fail, we...
Posted by xtop at 01:39 AM | Comments (0)
 


February 20, 2004

 

the ibogaine cure

"Patrick was one of the worst opiate addicts, worst heroin addicts that I have ever enountered in my life," says Dr. Mash. His arms still bear the scars of years of heroin addiction, and he knows only too well what happened when the flow of drugs into those arms was interrupted. "When you're going through withdrawal, you're sweating, you're shaking, you're freezing, you're hot, it feels like your spine is being smashed...
Posted by xtop at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
 


January 09, 2004

 

100 percent sloughing

By all accounts, Sarah Yeargain, shouldn't be alive. But she is and some are calling it a medical miracle. Three weeks ago, the skin on Yeargain's body began sloughing off. Dr. Daniel Lozano, from the UCSD Regional Burn Center, said, "She lost skin in her entire body. It's rather dramatic to really see this coming off in sheets." Even the membrane covering her internal organs -- her eyes, mouth, and throat --...
Posted by xtop at 01:32 AM
 


December 31, 2003

   


December 15, 2003

 

recent spam senders

Dynamite V. Epidemics Keystrokes F. Roughhouse Warlocks L. Balustrade Refile B. Deregulated Pei M. Loft Colosseum P. Clears Nasser D. Saturates Examiners K. Generously...
Posted by xtop at 10:36 PM | Comments (1)
 


November 10, 2003

 

Wiretap

Wiretap is a small, free, simple program that can record all audio feeds coming through your Mac. Lets you tinker with sound quality and compression and is easy enough for the average cretin. I've been looking for something like this for years now, a frustrating effort as Mac is continually subject to the vagaries of the lopsided nature of programs and platforms. While I still search in vain for a decent song-stealing...
Posted by xtop at 09:12 PM
 


November 01, 2003

 

the time travel fund

Q: How does this work? A: Current scientific theory states that Time Travel may be possible, however the technology is a long way off, perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Now, assume it does become possible in say, 500 years. As with any technology, Time Travel will get less expensive as time goes on. Just as the price of a VCR has dropped to less than $70 from the several hundred...
Posted by xtop at 12:50 PM | Comments (2)
 


October 28, 2003

 

language removal services

"Given the fleshy character of speech (or what is erroneously called 'spoken language') — the myriad whistling of air through secret pockets of flesh; the suck and hum of life below the workings of social whim and commentary — it seems possible, necessary even, to emancipate slave from master, to set free pleasure and desire from senseless quotidian resolve. For speech is pleasure and language its yoke, and one cannot speak of...
Posted by xtop at 05:17 PM
 


October 01, 2003

 

the toolmaking behavior of new caledonian crows

In the experiments, a captive female crow, confronted with a task that required a curved tool (retrieving a food-containing bucket from a vertical pipe), spontaneously bent a piece of straight wire into a hooked shape -- and then repeated the behavior in nine out of ten subsequent trials. Though these crows are known to employ tools in the wild using natural materials, this bird had no prior training with the use of...
Posted by xtop at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)
 


July 12, 2003

 

the story of captain midnight

Now HBO was airing the Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton espionage movie, The Falcon and the Snowman. It was at 12:32 a.m. Sunday, April 27, that John R. MacDougall pushed the transmit button on his console and turned into Captain Midnight. "That's when I hit it," he says. "It was almost like an out-of-body experience. It was like I was there but I wasn't really there."...
Posted by xtop at 01:11 AM
 


May 14, 2003

 

language extinction

Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 "living" languages in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even rarer – 46 are known to have just one native speaker. "There are 357 languages with under 50 speakers. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones," Professor Sutherland said. By applying the same principles used to...
Posted by xtop at 11:29 PM
 


April 19, 2003

 

heroin headboard

"This method of mixing the heroin with other chemicals is called starching," Queens District Attorney Richard Brown explained yesterday. "It is done so as to disguise the heroin, and then the heroin is reprocessed back into its full strength ... In this case, it's the first time that I've seen it where the heroin is actually molded into furniture."...
Posted by xtop at 04:41 PM | Comments (1)
 


April 13, 2003

 

SARS scambo

"This spreading scourge of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome stretching from Asia to North America has all the earmarks of a novel social experiment in population manipulation aimed to culture the mass mind for the arrival of 'the Big One'-a biological agent that will facilitate decimation of approximately a third to half of the world's population, in keeping with current official population reduction objectives. "Naturally you would be disinclined to believe the above...
Posted by xtop at 10:12 PM | Comments (1)
 


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