Wednesday linkpharm, “It’s science!” edition:
- The Lucifer Project — exploring the feasibility of…well, blowing up Saturn, basically. (Or, rather, turning it or other local planets into a second sun.) It’s an interesting idea, and I thought so too when I first read Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 years ago, but you have to worry a little about anyone who thinks it’s actually an ongoing NASA project and that the Freemasons are involved. [via]
- Like, who can even pronounce “okadaic acid”? — oh, those fabulous Hilton sisters. [via]
- The games that dolphins play [via]
- Top 10 Creatures of Cryptozoology — that’s the study of animals that are rumored< to exist [via]
- The mathematics of…surprise! [via]
- Adventures in Synthetic Biology, the comic strip [via]
- How honeybees can fly[via]
- And they can recognize human faces, too [via]
- Recorded dog laughter calms dogs [via]
- Clothing that changes color to match your outfit [via]
- Strange new object found at edge of Solar System — Yeah, another one. Astronomers are calling this one ‘Buffy’. Astronomers are such geeks. (Then again, so am I.) [via]
- Monkey sex, ladies? [via]
- Decoding Mona Lisa‘s smile — I don’t know. That just seems to be sort of missing the whole point. [via]
- Best correction ever?
A story Nov. 15 about mathematical references on “The Simpsons” TV show mistakenly said that 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 1,922 to the 12th power. Actually, 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,258,614, 589,176,288, 669, 958, 142, 428, 526,657, while 1,922 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,259,314,801,410, 819, 278,649, 643,651,567,616.
Quite possibly. [via]
- Pretty soon we won’t have to write books or make movies, computers will do it for us:
- Put Your Title to the Test — The Holy Bible, apparently, only has a 41.4% chance of being a bestseller title [via]
- Program aims to spot tomorrow’s blockbuster [via]
- Apparently, Pokemon doesn’t cause cancer after all. [via]
- Space ‘spiders’ could build solar satellites [via]
- Holodeck technology for crickets [via]
- Josef Stalin tried to breed half-human, half-ape supersoldiers — But then again, y’know, who hasn’t? [via]