Stonyfield Farm wants to be environmentally conscious -and they want to sell expensive organic yogurt but not saddle customers with a lot of liberal guilt about a container.They may have done it with Stonyfield Frozen Yogurt Pearls, which is being tested in a few Whole Foods stores. The organic vanilla or chocolate frozen yogurt is encased in an edible skin flavored like peach or banana or coconut or strawberry.Co-founder Gary Hirshberg says the edible, protective skin is bound via molecular interactions between its two key ingredients, organic fruit and natural ions, whatever that means. Grapes figured this out without a lot of gibberish and there has never been anything 'organic' about them, they have been genetically modified for millenia.

In the mid-1800s an American plant lice made its way to Europe. It wasn't Native Americans returning the disease favor but the sap-sucking aphids still did a number on France, killing the rebounding post-French Revolution, post-Napoleon economy.The obnoxious little grape phylloxera were the result of mad science experiments - but since it was old-timey, random experimentation a lot of environmental activists would regard it as far superior to precise, controlled modification. 40 percent of the ruined vineyards later, and the damage was done.This inforgraphic,presented by: Mocavo - Genealogy Search, has the details.

There are a lot of conferences out there. If you are in science, or even science media, you have gotten emails soliciting papers. The benefit for them is you pay a big registration fee, the presumed benefit for the contributor is you get to say you did a paper at a conference.Likely inspired by the Sokal affair, where a hippie physicist got tired of hippie, anti-science nonsense in philosophy and created a paper stuffed full of postmodernist gibberish that was immediately accepted by because it was by a physicist and lauded the weakness of physics compared to philosophy, a group at MIT knew they could get all kinds of papers accepted at science conferences the same way.

Duct tape, or duck tape if you are old school (1), can fix anything, according to the public. Well, according to men in the public who are often too lazy to do it right.But it has to have limits and engineers love to find out where things go from linear to nonlinear.So if you give engineers the same amount of duct/duck tape, who could make their friends stick to the wall the longest?  The answer, found a Lockheed team, is about 15 minutes. Team "Ron Made Us Do It" won. Naturally, they suspended a systems engineer, because 15 minutes of wasted time there makes little difference (I kid, I kid).

At a young age, I gave up on trying to master the latest high-fives, hand signs and generally trying to be cool. I couldn't do the math.But math geeks can, and Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings is apparently the coolest. He can show you how all of the various high fives relate to math.Just one sample, since I put germaphobes in the title:The Asymptote. This representation of one of the coolest behaviors a function can have is also good for germaphobes afraid of physical contact.And he has 13 more!

In the early part of the 13th (XIII) century, Europe was still using Roman numerals. You can imagine what that did to advance math education.Fibonacci is famous for the number sequence that bears his name today (I am not certain, but I believe the first program I wrote in Fortran on a Univac 1100/60 was for Fibonacci squares) but the Plus magazine team says he would be surprised by that; rather being famous for the famous sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... he might expect to be remembered for helping to popularize a modern number system in a Latin-speaking world.

How would you do homework at night if you don't have electricity? As much as one fifth of the world may not have regular access to electricity but 16-year-old Ann Makosinski of Victoria, Canada may have helped solve part of the problem; she created a flashlight that is powered solely from hand heat.

Perl or Python? It used to be that you could learn as much about a computer programmer asking that question about scripting languages preferences as I could learn by asking a racing fan if they liked Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson.Not any more. Perl, which was regarded as really good for 'non-programmers' has lost a lot of ground, while Python is still popular.  Python, which had once been kind of an also-ran, except for cutting-edge female programmers (no, I am not kidding - women embraced Python well before men), stole the show.

When I was a young guy, there were predictions of doom based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Weirdly, it is still discussed in media reports every single day, even though it doesn't tell us anything at all about peoples' lives.Do most Americans feel like the economy is doing well, even though the DJIA has gone up a lot? The president certainly claims the economy is better now than when he came into office, even though outside government, unemployment is still really high, and if we factor in the full-time jobs that are now part-time and people no longer on unemployment because they have been on it too long, things look really bad.

Do you know the difference between throughput and speed?If you don't, you certainly would not after reading TechCrunch (the deal “may be legally outside of the traditional net neutrality rules”) or NPR or plenty of other places, who are rushing to use jargon like peering, capacity and transit all wrong.Oh, and cost. It isn't going to cost you more, notes Dan Rayburn at Streaming Media. Bandwidth exchanges, confusing speed and throughput, they get a lot wrong. But Rayburn gets it right, so that's where you should go.