Iran is now one of the few countries with a space programme, capable of launching satellites into space. Of course, the US is now worried that they have developed it specifically to rain down EMP weapons on them.

So I have this bee in my bonnet about wikipedia being used for anything at all. Why? Because it’s not peer reviewed: it’s user reviewed, with users with the most reviews having the most powers – even if they make nonsense edits on things they know nothing about. Then there’s the political infighting and the Read more about Encyclopedia[…]

This guy says he doesn’t believe in global warning and he should know his stuff. He was the boss of Hansen, the guy who crusades the man made global warming theory. Especially upsetting is that data sets were changed in a non-documented fashion, so we don’t know why or how the data was changed.

This is the first time they’ve managed to teleport qubits between ions. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there!

TNO is the Netherland’s premier research institution and these guys should know what they’re saying. They make the point that pirates turn out to be the biggest paying consumers too. It’s time for people to change their business model, instead of scapegoating their best customers!

Ah yes, invisible cloaks! I keep covering this, in the hope the technology will finally mature at some point. There’s loads of technologies to choose from Now, the metamaterias gang has produced a cloak measuring 10 x 50 cm It bends waveforms in a large range of frequencies and is very low loss. They’ve developed Read more about Invisibility-Cloak Breakthrough[…]

Allergan has gone and invented a drug called Latisse that will make your eyelashes and more prominent.

So people who tend to exhibit risky behaviours do so to increase the rate of dopamine firing in their brain. It’s a pysiological thing, to enjoy bungee jumping, drugs, sex, motorbikes, etc.

Nanoparticles Make Surface Too Slippery For Bacteria To stick to

Even when submerged, the nanotech spikes balance water as balls on their tips, ensuring the material itself never gets wet.

A bunch of Mexican scientists found that the makeup of tequilla is perfect for making diamond film from. The results were amazing, same as with the ethanol and water compound, we obtained almost spherical shaped diamonds of nanometric size. There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary Read more about Scientists Turn Tequila into Diamonds[…]

Some people have a natural resistance to HIV due to a genetic mutation. Dr. Hütter transplanted a HIV infected patient’s bone marrow with some from an immune person and the HIV virus, surprisingly, dissappeared. Now they’re looking into whether it’s a fluke or not.

You spit in a tube, post it to 23andMe and get a result on your predisposition for more than 90 traits and conditions ranging from baldness to blindness. So you can select your next partner with even more care than ever before and be scared shitless of having a child for ever more.

Who knew? If you peel away Scotch tape, you emit X-Rays. Well, the Russians found out about 50 years ago. It turns out that unpeeling 3 cm / second emits enough X-Rays to take a picture of a finger!

In addition to gas, liquid and solid we now also have “quasi-three- dimensional electron crystal”, which is sort of 3D, but not quite. Strange stuff, and the boffins are looking at it to see what they can do with it, but as they discovered it in a resistor, there’s a good chance this will be Read more about New state of matter found[…]

This contains a whole load of free whitepapers, case studies and best practices relevant to IT

The images made by National Geographic are incredible and show baby sharks eating their siblings in the womb as well as cats, dogs, lions, bees, wolves, penguins, etc as they grow in incredible detail

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. It’s huge and has loads of physics / mathematical / computer science papers in it. arXiv.org e-Print archive

For free!

This is a great introduction to the night sky, and teaches you to find Orion, Jupiter, Polaris, Casseopia and Betelguese quickly and easily. Worth running through.

It’s a great article about them, but this is something I’ve been looking for for ages: it describes the huge gatherings these sharks have as they migrate towards the poles: 500 large! I’ve seen footage of them passing over in endless ranks… this is something I need to do before I die!

After 3 failed launces, fourth time was lucky – the three stage rocket made it to low earth orbit, making it the first privately funded spacecraft to do this, trumping Spaceship One, which, allthough manned, only stays in space for very short periods of time.

Well done China, not many countries have had spacewalking astronauts!

20 Watts of power was transmitted wirelessley between 2 points 98 miles apart. The resultant power at the end station was only 1000th of what was sent, but this shows the feasability of the concept. The ultimate plan is to have satellites transmit the power to stations on earth.

We have had in rapid succession a transparent water repellent coating and Golden Shellback which water and dustproofs. Now we have a British process to make any item ‘100% waterproof’ through ion masking. They can’t yet do electronics though they’re working on it.