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Check out this cool video of Octopus Attaching a Shark. There’s an unreasonable amount of start/stop buffering in the video which makes me feel like it’s 1998 again, but the video itself is really interesting.

Look out Canada. We’re coming for your oil shales next.

This picture of Oil Depletion in Saudi Arabia shows how close we are to running out of oil in one of the world’s (at one time) largest wells. There are still a few other sources in Saudi Arabia, and they mention something about the vertical scale being exaggerated, but still….Wow.

We’re just about out of that sweet, sweet grease that powers our economy. Thank goodness we still have plenty of coal we can strip mine out of the North Eastern United States (and the aforementioned Canadians who must be harboring weapons of mass destruction somewhere).

I’d never heard of porphyrins until just a minute ago, and now I think they’re the coolest freaking things ever. Cool…Cool…Cool…Cool!:

Shelnutt says the nanodevice could efficiently use the entire visible and ultraviolet parts of the solar spectrum absorbed by the tubes to produce hydrogen, one of the Holy Grails of chemistry.

These nanotube devices could be suspended in a solution and used for photocatalytic solar hydrogen production.

Boy, would I love to believe that We will be able to live to 1,000.

I’m generally very optimistic about the potential of science to make the future better. So, I would naturally love to believe that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is already in their 60s. I just can’t quite get there though. That seems a little too optimistic even for me. At 35, I half think that I might be able to make it, but even there, I feel like I’m in a race against decay. I hope that Aubrey de Grey is right though. Come on SENS project. Bring me my immortality. I want my Science Fiction future, and I want it now.

I find it really surprising, but it turns out you can swim in syrup just as fast as you can swim in water. Now I really want to go jump into a pool of syrup, or maybe just dive into a big plate of pancakes. Mmmmm… Pancakes.

Interesting story that discusses Basic Choices and Constraints on Long-Term Energy Supplies.

I thought I had a fairly decent, laymen’s gross understanding of String Theory. Boy, was I ever wrong. I’m just ever so confused after reading The Myth of the Beginning of Time, a Scientific American article from a few months ago.

I don’t even understand what problem they’re trying to solve. It seems reasonably obvious to me that a universe that grew out of a single occurrence would have homogeneous properties associated with it. I don’t understand why certain areas of the universe would need to be able to communicate with other areas to tell them how to behave.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t know the underlying maths, or maybe the model (or my understanding of the model) is too crude.

Anyway, it’s an interesting read if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.

Whoa! Who knew that a cornstarch video (WMV File) could be so cool? via

From the observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon department comes this article suggesting that penguins that have been tagged for research tracking breed half as well as their untagged compatriots. That sucks. Our efforts to learn and maybe even help some endangered species have even further jeopardized their chances for survival.

Also, at this point I’d like to ask the alien greys who abducted and implanted me to remove the implants please. I know that it doesn’t create additional resistance when I’m swimming or foraging for food. So, it’s probably unlikely that it’s impacting mate selection. Still, just in case you know. Plus, the voices are getting so loud. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to ignore them.

Scientific American has an article, The First Nanochips that details some of the challenges and solutions that develop as the semi-conductor industry races to build ever smaller/faster microprocessors.

There are some seriously smart people who are building things that are incredibly small.