Month: January 2007

• “Isolated tribes in the Amazon are now using satellites, computers, and even Google Earth to guard against threats from logging, agriculture, drug wars, and oil operations.” [link | via]
• “It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their ‘immortality’. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.” [link | via]
• “Somark Innovations announced this week that it successfully tested biocompatible RFID ink, which can be read through animal hairs. The passive RFID technology could be used to identify and track cows to reduce financial losses from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease) scares. Somark, which formed in 2005, is located at the Center for Emerging Technologies in St. Louis. The company is raising Series A equity financing and plans to license the technology to secondary markets, which could include laboratory animals, dogs, cats, prime cuts of meat, and military personnel.” [link | via]
• “British scientists are on the verge of producing a revolutionary flu vaccine that works against all major types of the disease.” [link | via]

A 2,500-year-old mirror worth £500,000 was dropped and smashed on a Chinese TV show.

A model was showing the ancient mirror to the audience when it slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.

…in the ’40s, Clark Kent always took a very leisurely approach to disaster intervention. Electric wires will be hissing and snapping, fire engulfing farmhouses, dams cracking, giant robots on the march, and Clark will just wander through the carnage like a doughy zombie. Finally at some arbitrary juncture, about seven minutes into the short, he’ll mutter his catchphrase-“This looks like a job…for Superman!” and duck into an alley to actually change into his crimefighting uniform for a brief action sequence.