It's special effects on a budget and, if you like gaping holes through your stomach, it looks fantastic.Evan Booth shows us all how it is done.   A portable DVD player attached to his stomach actually displays a live video image from a camera mounted on his back - so it shows what's behind him, giving the illusion of a gaping hole through his chest.

Britney Spears is not the first star to juggle the weight of fame and a gift for technical matters. Austrian born film star Hedy Lamarr, famous in the 1930s and '40s, was also a gifted electrical engineer. Lamarr was frequently quoted as saying, " Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid ." She may have played that role on the silver screen, but when it came to real life, Hedy proved that brainpower was everything.

Hollywood's going to need more military costumes for villains.   James Cameron, the-man-who-hates-Marines(1), has agreed to shelve other projects and film Avatar 2 and 3 (has filming sequels simultaneously ever worked?   Does anyone regard that second "Pirates of the Caribbean" as a good film?  How about "Back to the Future 2"?   You see what I mean) for release in 2014 and 2015 - supposedly because Fox made a donation to an environmental charity.

Democrats are looking to a pair of comedians, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert,  to do what President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and dozens of other Democrat leaders haven’t done yet this election season: Get someone other than Republicans excited about voting. Stewart and Colbert expect tens of thousands of fans to join them three days from now at the “Rally to Restore Sanity”, the progressive alternative to the various conservative "Tea Party" rallies held this year. 

Forget corn and sugar and petroleum for plastics, scientists have developed a Styrofoam out of clay and milk proteins.Like a lot of great research, it began with an accidental discovery in the lab.  A student freeze-dried clay and got something intriguing enough that they started mixing the clay with a variety of materials.When they added a cow's milk protein called casein, they ended up with a super-light, fluffy, and foam-like material. With further experimentation, they hit on a recipe that worked wel.

A group of researchers are teaching Waldrapps,  the northern bald ibis, to learn a migration route by teaching them to follow a microlight.It's part of a wider conservation plan to save this critically endangered bird - because the birds are usually taught migration paths by their parents, impossible because the birds are raised in captivity, an artificial way to teach them is necessary.   

As is often the case when anti-science hysteria turns evidence issues into political and cultural wars, the opportunities for rational discussion get lost.  Lord Sainsbury says it is time for a new debate on GM foods as he thinks they will help feed the world population estimated to reach 9 billion people by 2050.

A cool link for today for the title alone, but discovery of an oceanic cousin of the Mimivirus — the Cafeteria roenbergensis virus — which has the second-largest viral genome ever found in a single-celled host, is cool in its own right.GenomeWeb.com

Can't get enough romance, even on an airplane?   Air New Zealand is for you.   They are about to offer what MSNBC calls "Cuddle Class" on Auckland-LA Flights starting next April - it's ostensibly for families so don't get crazy and let out the little Maori tribesman in you.

China loves intellectual property rights when it is used by China against other countries but only then - if you've ever worked for a company that sells products in China, you know that you have zero recourse when someone starts selling your intellectual property for a dollar outside your office, but China says they take rights seriously.If so, oops, The People's Daily, official mouthpiece for the Communist Party of China, let this one slip through in its review of the iPad -