The signs of climate change were all over the Arctic this year - warmer air, less sea ice, melting glaciers - which probably means this weather-making region will not return to its former, colder state, scientists from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported on Thursday."It's a bit of a paradox where you have overall global warming and warming in the atmosphere (that) actually can create some more of these winter storms," said Jim Overland, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. "Global warming is not just warming everywhere. ... It creates these complexities."
Gene Simmons of KISS fame is all about the money - most aging rockers don't have the pretense they had when they were young ("it's not about the money, man, it's about the MUSIC") and make no secret of the fact they want to get paid.So when Gene Simmons stated he didn't think the RIAA was aggressive enough prosecuting grandmothers if their grandkids downloaded a Justin Bieber song ("Make sure your brand is protected. Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars.") and Anonymous at 4Chan (all million of them) tried to rattle his chain, he wasn't impressed.
It's good to be a big company. Middle America is about to get clobbered with higher taxes to pay for a health care reform that won't reform anything but Google's clever income shifting helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.
Unburdened by social engineering, some females prefer males who act like males so growing up with lots of sisters makes a male less sexy - for rats, anyway. A new study published in Psychological Science, says that the sex ratio of a male rat's family when he's growing up influences both his own sexual behavior and how female rats respond to him.When males who were raised with a lot of sisters were presented with receptive female rats, they spent less time mounting them than did male rats that were raised in male-biased litters or in balanced families.
Like 'green' technology? Currently 97% of the world's 17 rare earths originate from China and they are necessary for catalytic converters that reduce emissions in cars, for computer monitors, pharmaceuticals and many other things that require these specialty metals.
Is nothing secret any more? Not with Google Maps prowling the planet.The top secret location of Batman's Batcave has been revealed and it's not under Wayne Manor - it's at an Air Force base in Okinawa.Why is it there? The 44th Fighter Squadron is known as "the Vampire Bats", according to an Air Force spokesman. Suuuuuuure, that's the truth.
Unlike the American Revolution, the French one turned out to be a bloody mess and led to Napoleon sacking all of Europe. Because the French hated the British, they then instituted a French clock with 100,000 seconds per day (ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds), a French calendar (three décades of 10 days per month - which meant each day of rest was after 9 working days, you can imagine how the French workers loved that) and even a new measurement system, the meter, which like most things French they calculated incorrectly but still caught on, even in Britain.
Not understanding what capitalism means when he isn't giving himself illegal stock options or basking in the glow of an upward stock price, Steve Jobs took the opportunity to explain low iPad sales by ... blaming Google.He also went after Samsung and Dell, deflecting talk of Apple's 6% stock drop. "The current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA, dead on arrival Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small."
When a professor at Sweden's Umea University had his computer stolen, he was devastated by the loss of his data more than anything. But a week after the theft, he got a package in the mail: A USB drive.Tip of the Science Sombrero to Gawker
Stupid hair getting in the way of your functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) experiments? Good news! Researchers from Texas speaking at the Optical Society's (OSA) 94th annual meeting in New York have created a "brush optrode" with fiber tips designed to thread through hair to enhance scalp contact.fNIRS is an optical technique that measures oxygen levels in the brain to chart neurological activity. The big advantage over something like an EEG is portability and cost, which means beter imaging of changes in cortical plasticity as a function of impairment severity, like in children with cerebral palsy.
