May beer have helped lead to the rise of civilization? It's a possibility, some archaeologists say.Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains into beer. That has been their take for more than 50 years, and now one archaeologist says the evidence is getting stronger.
We spent the Cold War in perpetual fear that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would start an intentional nuclear conflict. The truth is, we came far closer to blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons than we ever came to WWIII.
If you paid attention to video that appears to show a missile launch off the coast of California, you can imagine what conspiratorial types are making of the military's silence. The silence is because from plenty of angles it looks like an airplane contrail.
In a finding likened in terms of scale to the discovery of a new continent on Earth, astronomers have stumbled on a previously unseen structure here in the Milky Way - 50,000 light years in size.At more than 100 degrees across, the structure spans more than half of the sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus and may be millions of years old. No one had noticed before because of the so-called diffuse emission -- a fog of gamma rays that appears all over the sky. The emissions are caused by particles moving near the speed of light interacting with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way.
Sometimes I read sentences like "It occurs to me that I ought to thank Mark Hyman, "pioneer of functional medicine," and creator of "Ultrawellness," particularly since he started blogging for that wretched hive of scum and quackery (WHSQ), The Huffington Post" on Scienceblogs.com and think, 'gosh, it must be fun to never about science on a science site and get away with it' but then I realize we would lose most of our audience; no one can outdo Scienceblogs for progressive politics, atheism and culture wars and people who like that stuff are already reading them so I guess we'll
Vice-President Joe Biden is having a meeting with a government transparency official today but the meeting is closed. I hope Joe Biden does not hate irony.The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is run by Earl Devaney and its purpose is to monitor the use of taxpayer stimulus money and ensure that the taxpayers know all about where it is being used and...oh, forget it, if you don't get why it's funny that the meeting is closed by now, you never will.
When times are good, green technologies can make projections stating that they will develop a prototype and the miracle of capitalism will make it popular and cheap and people will basically turn a blind eye to the suspect math but when things are tough, there needs to be an actual business plan.
A hacker says he can control Microsoft's Kinect, the just-released motion-tracking game device for the Xbox 360, with a Windows PC. The feat, by a member of the Natural User Interface Group, comes just days after Adafruit Industries offered a $2,000 reward to the first person who published open-source drivers for the Kinect. Microsoft can't be too thrilled, since they spent years working on making it secure - and if it happened so soon after a paltry reward it may mean an Xbox 360 isn't needed to use it at all.
Sure, Google is a multi-billion company that got there selling ads - and its contextual engine is smart but at heart it's still based on keywords and content. So when it goofs, it goofs to funny effect:Here's one and then the link below is to the full 10.All 10
It may not be healthy, but Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, was making a point; namely, that when it comes to weight loss, despite what people selling things want you to believe, all that matter is calories. Eat fewer than you burn and you are guaranteed to lose weight.So to prove it he ate a diet of Twinkies, powdered donuts, Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos every 3 hours - and no regular meals at all. After 10 weeks he had lost 27 lbs.
