Johnald's Fantastical Daily Link Splurge

Two New Cloaking Devices Close In on True Invisibility Posted: 08 May 2009 09:41 AM PDT Cloaking devices, like the Star Trek technology that can make whole Romulan warships disappear, came a step closer to reality last week

Top 10 Greatest Mysteries in Science Posted: 08 May 2009 09:40 AM PDT None have been solved since.What Drives Evolution? You've heard it before: Natural selection is accepted by scientists as the main engine driving the array of organisms and their complex features. It is one of the most well tested theories in science.

10 things we didn't know this time last week Posted: 08 May 2009 08:27 AM PDT Snippets from the week's news, sliced, diced and processed for your convenience. 1. There is a real place called Hicksville. More details 2. Britain once sent an envoy with a quadruple-barrelled name to Moscow - Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurley Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax. More details 3. Sikhs do not have to wear motorcycle crash helmets. More details (the Guardian) 4. Napoleon wrote chick-lit. More details (the Guardian) 5. John Prescott's toilet seat broke twice. More details 6. Tom Hanks watches Loose Women. More details (Daily Mirror) 7. Youth hostelling was invented in Germany in 1912. More details 8. The use of the word "rat" as an insult in English goes back at least until the 16th Century. More details 9. Two main muscles are used for smiling - the zygomatic muscle turns the corner of the lips up and the orbicularis oculi crinkles the corners of the eyes. More details 10. Birds are actually really rather clever. More details Seen 10 things? Send us a picture to use next week. Thanks to Hamna Saeed, from Cardiff, for this picture of the lions in Longleat.

NASA faces no-go, needs plutonium for missions Posted: 08 May 2009 08:11 AM PDT NASA faces a bleak future since the end of the Cold War, as the space agency is running out of nuclear fuel - plutonium-238 - needed for its deep space exploration.

6 Star Trek techs that are almost here, 3 that are far off Posted: 08 May 2009 07:26 AM PDT Kirk and co. have plenty of stuff that we can only dream about today. When you start talking about traveling many times the speed of light, holographic simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, replicating food inside an everyday appliance, and beaming quintillions of atoms from one place to another… those are a ways off. Or are they?

Galaxies of the Perseus Cluster Posted: 08 May 2009 06:06 AM PDT This colorful telescopic skyscape is filled with galaxies that lie nearly 250 million light-years away, the galaxies of the Perseus cluster. Their extended and sometimes surprising shapes are seen beyond a veil of foreground stars in our own Milky Way. Ultimately consisting of over a thousand galaxies, the cluster is filled with yellowish elliptical and lenticular galaxies, like those scattered throughout this view of the cluster's central region. Notably, at the large galaxy at the left is the massive and bizarre-looking NGC 1275. A prodigious source of high-energy emission, active galaxy NGC 1275 dominates the Perseus cluster, accreting matter as entire galaxies fall into it and feed the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core. Of course, spiral galaxies also inhabit the Perseus cluster, including the small, face-on spiral NGC 1268, right of picture center. The bluish spot on the outskirts of NGC 1268 is supernova SN 2008fg. At the estimated distance of the Perseus galaxy cluster, this field spans about 1.5 million light-years.

Earth's Magnetic Field Hisses Due to Distant "Chorus" Posted: 08 May 2009 04:14 AM PDT Thousands of miles above Earth, a cosmic chorus is filling the heavens with a mysterious, low frequency "hiss." That's the conclusion of scientists studying data from a set of NASA probes designed to monitor substorms - dramatic exchanges of energy among charged particles that spark the auroras at Earth's poles.

Terrible and Shameless Australian Antivaxers on a Talk Show Posted: 08 May 2009 03:18 AM PDT (10 votes - 1 comment - 190 views) Length: 13:23 The parents of a child dying of whooping cough appears on an Australian TV show discussing vaccination and confronting a herd of deadly and biased antivaxers.

Trichotillomania - Chronic Hair Pulling Posted: 08 May 2009 02:45 AM PDT (10 votes - 3 comments - 150 views) [9:34] "Trichotillomania is an impulse control disorder or form of self-injury characterized by the repeated urge to pull out scalp hair, eyelashes, facial hair, nose hair, pubic hair, eyebrows or other body hair, sometimes resulting in noticeable bald patches. Trichotillomania is classified in the DSM-IV as an impulse control disorder, but there are still questions about how it should be classified." wiki

Chris Matthews Owns Another Republican on Evolution Posted: 08 May 2009 01:03 AM PDT (14 votes - 6 comments - 306 views)

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