Evan Longoria is giving an interview to a reporter when a foul ball flies his way.  Because his Spider Sense tingles when a ball is in play, Longoria snatches it out of the air bare-handed.   In my title, I used 'grab' and then 'catch' but catch, in the second instance of course, means a gimmick or trick, so I was being clever.  

LED bulbs will finally be bright enough to replace 100-watt incandescent light bulbs but there is a problem - they will cost $50 each.  And won't be available until after the ban.  And they produce almost as much heat as incandescent bulbs, making them ridiculously inefficient.Advocates always believe in legislating perfectly healthy businesses out of existence because they contend 'the miracle of capitalism' will make the replacement they just subsidized and mandated through government fiat cheaper.   Well, why should they get cheaper when the government created a monopoly market?    If capitalism works, and $50 is a good price to pay for a light bulb, it doesn't need government bans on regular light bulbs.

Is going through one of the TSA porno-scanners (now at selected airports near you!) really safer than eating a banana?  Let's hope so.   If you object, you are going to get groped, even if your child is a pre-school girl.   But White House science adviser John Holdren recently received a letter signed by five physics and medical professors professors noting that the scanners actually don't work all that well and the ion chamber used to test the scanners can get overwhelmed by the levels of radiation the backscatter deposits and might not have provided accurate readings in testing.

The 2010 miniseries from the UK, Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World ships for Americans May 31st.

When the woman asks what this biologist would choose if he could have anything, product placement hilarity ensues:

Nothing is convenient to criticize like the food industry.   Environmental mullahs blame farmers for nitrogen and pesticides and greenhouse gases, though farming has actually "dematerialized" in the last 30 years and is producing the more food with only 60 percent of the land used in 1980.    Meanwhile, cultural fundamentalists decry the Utopian ideal every culture in history always sought to attain - cheap food.  So cheap people can eat a lot and choose to get fat.

Facebook has been caught engaging in a secret smear campaign against industry rival Google.  Smear campaigns happen all of the time, of course, but you aren't supposed to get caught or you look extra stupid.The Daily Beast wrote Wednesday night that Facebook hired P.R. firm Burson-Marsteller to “pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.”

Io's global "ocean" of molten rock beneath the surface feeds its prolific volcanism, a new study finds.Unlike Earth's magma, which tends to cluster in pockets around the edges of tectonic plates, Io's magma is found in a global reservoir at least 30 miles (48 kilometers) deep, the study suggests. This huge reserve of subsurface molten rock helps explain why Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, spewing out 100 times more lava than all of Earth's volcanoes combined.NASA's Galileo reveals magma 'ocean' beneath surface of Jupiter's moon - Kids Science Zone

Are managers at the Australian Synchrotronpanicking given the news that neither the federal government nor the Victoria state government has addressed in their just-released budget proposals how the facility will be funded beyond June 2012, when its original 5-year financial plan ends? At least publicly, those running the synchrotron are thinking not about how to save the young facility but how to grow it.   

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.