Diamonds Tell Tale Of Comet That Killed Off The Cavemen - Were Stone Age cultures set back in their development by a comet impact? Interesting stuff.
wissen - 4.12.2006 - 21.5.2007
Uffington White Horse - and there are horses too. A 3000-year-old image, and they still measure the size in feet.
Wilmington - why wander to the Andes, when gigantic ground "drawings" are so close at hand?
ISO working group proposes Unicode with "ß" as uppercase letter - funny, never thought about it, a big ß is sometimes necessary. Never knew that there was even a big form of it ...
Escaping the data panopticon: Prof says computers must learn to "forget" - very true. Especially in times of Web 2.0 applications, data collectors, automatic archives, and mass publication of the most private content.
Evolved Virtual Creatures - fascinating. Virtual creatures optimized through genetic algorithms.
Earth 2.0: ESO researchers discover the most Earth-like exoplanet to date - 0-40 degrees temperature and possibly water-covered. People, start waving vigorously, if this is transmitted at the speed of light, the aliens will see it in 20 years.
The universe is a string-net liquid - about Herbertsmithite and noodle soups. Fascinating.
NPR : Giant Bats Snatch Birds from Night Sky - Killer bat attack.
History of the tilde - everything you never wanted to know about the tilde and therefore never thought to ask.
HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web - will naturally be ignored by all the XML proponents again. But it remains a fact: the future of the web will be dominated by HTML for a long time, not by XHTML. And no, delivering broken XHTML with incorrect headers is not a solution, but a problem ...
Just How Smart Are Ravens? - about the intelligence of ravens.
A Sign, a Flipped Structure, and a Scientific Flameout of Epic Proportions - ouch. Just a sign ...
Skeptico: Pretty soon… - read it!
EURion constellation - how copiers recognize banknotes.
Cargo Cult Science - Feynman. Classic.
Build Me A Tapeworm - everything you never wanted to know about tapeworms.
Scientist finds new ocean in inner earth - wow. Sounds almost like Jules Verne. When will they probably send the first robot probe down? Sure, a long way to go, but it would be exciting and certainly insightful for considerations about potential life on other planets and moons.
The Pi-Search Page - search for numbers in Pi up to 200 million digits. Has been around for 10 years, this time waster.
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide - Color laser printer technology and code decoded. What they embed in an image to enable tracking of prints (you didn't know they do that? Well...)
We need to remove this access barrier before it gets put up. (Incandescent lighting ban in California.) - a point that was new to me, but ultimately makes sense. Fluorescent tubes (including the new energy-saving lamps) flicker. This can cause seizures, irritation, and problems in some people. Here, the affected person is an autistic individual, for whom massive irritation and migraines are the result.
Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before - fascinating!
Yes - in 10 years we may have no bananas - it is a freakish, doped-up, mutant clone which hasn't had sex for thousands of years.
'Hobbit' human 'is a new species' - Pendulum swinging the other way this time. Well, there will probably be a lot of discussion, but my money is on "own species" and not on "sick individuals of known species".
Exotic deep-sea shark caught in the net - interesting, this is a living fossil that I didn't know about yet.
Pando (tree) - Aspens form colonies through offshoots. Actually logical, many plants do this, only I was not aware of this in trees so far. The collection of aspens under the name Pango is currently considered the largest living organism (and the oldest living organism with over 80,000 years), although it is suspected that there are larger and older colonies.
identicon - small graphics, generated from recurring identification data. For example, IP addresses. Makes optical recognition of recurring identities much easier, especially with very similar identifications (e.g., something like this would be great for GPG fingerprints or SL UUIDs).
History since 1945 - brilliantly summarized by Spreeblick.
Tupper's Self-Referential Formula - ok, someone definitely had way too much time.
Take The AQ Test - Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults.
The Jaquet-Droz androids, three extraordinary automatons - historical robots from the 18th century. Yes, spring mechanisms. Something like this can still fascinate me.
Look around you - I have to check it out. Sesame Street for adults and then in the style of Douglas Adams? Sounds like Nirvana.
Momofuku Ando - the inventor of instant noodles.
GWUP - Welcome to the Skeptics! I didn't know about this one - even though the association has been around since 87.
Pushtunwali, Honour among them - sounds like it's from another time. And then they wonder why they can't get peace in Afghanistan - how can they, under these conditions?
Man with no pulse considered a medical breakthrough - interesting alternative to the classic heart simulation: a continuous pump.
Flowing Water on Mars - Klemptner called.
You can find it everywhere - Polonium doesn't necessarily have to come from Russia. Interesting - it's in antistatic filter systems. Well, airbags do contain explosives too. Funny enough, no politician has yet demanded the abolition of airbags ...
Richard Dawkins - in an email interview with readers.