BBC NEWS | UK | 'We will be able to live to 1,000': "Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000. Here, he explains why."

Hottest Sauces in the World - Scoville Unit - The Hottest Sauce in the World

freegames - MegaGames

Space Time Travel - Relativity Visualized

Games that ROCK! - Fun Games from thatvideogamesite.com

WUP

Seed: The Future of Fusion: "On May 24, the US, EU, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan and India signed on to help build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, in the south of France. ITER is the largest fusion research project to date and one of the biggest international scientific collaborations ever. Its budget is 10 billion euros over 20 years, more than three times that of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The reactor is scheduled to be functional by 2016."

Can you hear me now? Scientists find previously unknown receptors on adult stem cells: "Scientists at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation have discovered that marrow stem cells -- undifferentiated cells that eventually give rise to the blood cells that fight infection -- possess receptors that recognize bacteria and viruses. When activated, these receptors kick the stem cells and immature blood cells into action, enlisting them to help fight whatever pathogen is attacking the body."

Stem Cells Help Repair Rats' Paralysis - Forbes.com: "Scientists have used stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralyzed rats walk. "

news @ nature.com - Hawking rewrites history... backwards - To understand the Universe we must start from the here and now.: "How did the Universe begin? Many scientists would regard this as one of the most profound questions of all. But to Stephen Hawking, who has perhaps come closer than anyone to answering it, the question doesn't in fact even exist"

First Molecular Proof That Some Aspects of Aging Are Out of Our Control: "a study led by Buck Institute faculty member Jan Vijg, PhD, provides the first direct evidence that the molecular machinery of our cells providing function to our tissues and organs spins irreversibly out of control as we age"

Hydrogen Atom Scale Model: "The page is scaled so that the smallest thing on it, the electron, is one pixel. That makes the proton, this big ball right next to us, a thousand pixels across, and the distance between them is... yep, fifty million pixels (not a hundred million, because we're only showing the radius of the atom. ie: from the middle to the edge). If your monitor displays 72 pixels to the inch, then that works out to eleven miles - making this possibly the biggest page you've ever seen."

Polymathematics: No, I'm Sorry, It Does.: ".9 repeating equals one. In other words, .9999999... is the same number as 1." (Also read the comments at the bottom!)

SS64.com: "Command line reference for Oracle, Windows, Linux and OS X"

Philadelphia Inquirer | 06/18/2006 | Vitamin C: Cancer cure?: "The government nutrition researcher has published new evidence that suggests vitamin C can work like chemotherapy - only better."

Two-Stroke Motion: "This new illusion won second place at the recent international 'Illusion of the Year' competition at the annual European Conference on Visual Perception, A Coruna, Spain."

Fabrice Grinda: Musings of an Entrepreneur » The Psychology of Happiness: "9 ways to systematically improve happiness"

» Day 3: Stein: "In 5-10 years, most of the software you use will be free" | Ed Burnette's Dev Connection | ZDNet.com: "Over time there's a pressure to move licenses on software down this stack. From commercial, to source available (restricted) to copyleft to non-copyleft. One of the reasons is that as you go down the stack there's more freedom. Developers want to take these more free licenses, extend, and provide more functionality to users."

Backs to the Future: "New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all the world's studied cultures -- so that the past is ahead of them and the future behind."

Space Telescope Science Institute: Black Holes: Gravity's Relentless Pull home page: "Black holes are places where ordinary gravity has become so extreme that it overwhelms all other forces in the Universe. Once inside, nothing can escape a black hole's gravity — not even light."

The dean of debunking - Sunday Times - Times Online: "In challenging string theory, Peter Woit is taking on the self-interest of the entire scientific establishment"

BPS Research Digest: Rare counting ability induced by temporarily switching off brain region: "Twelve healthy participants were given several chances to estimate, from 50 to 150, how many blobs appeared on a computer screen. The blobs appeared for just 1.5 seconds, and the number of blobs changed on each attempt. Remarkably, the performance of ten of the subjects improved drastically after Snyder’s team applied 15 minutes of low frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to their left anterior temporal lobe, a brain region that’s been implicated in autistic people with rare counting and calcluating abilities."

Food for Thought: Chocolate as Sunscreen, Science News Online, June 10, 2006: "Chocolate, these scientists note, is just the latest in a range of antioxidant-rich foods holding the potential to shield skin from sun damage. For nearly a decade, Stahl's group has conducted studies with cooked tomato products showing that their ingestion, too, can limit UV-induced skin reddening."

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Genes Governing Embryonic Stem Cell "Immortality" Discovered: "Embryonic stem cells differ from other cells in the body. They can divide seemingly endlessly; they do not perform a specialized function; and, ultimately, they can become any other type of cell. How they do this remains a mystery, but new research has uncovered some of the genes that allow these cells to renew themselves."

The Silver Bullet: "There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. Contrary to conventional wisdom, unreliability is not an essential characteristic of complex software programs. In this article, I will propose a silver bullet solution to the software reliability and productivity crisis. The solution will require a radical change"

YouTube - Star Trek vs. Star Wars

BBC NEWS | Health | Eating pizza 'cuts cancer risk': "Researchers claim eating pizza regularly reduced the risk of developing oesophageal cancer by 59%.

The risk of developing colon cancer also fell by 26% and mouth cancer by 34%, they claimed.

The secret could be lycopene, an antioxidant chemical in tomatoes, which is thought to offer some protection against cancer, and which gives the fruit its traditional red colour."

LiveScience.com - How Life Began: New Research Suggests Simple Approach: "This origin of life based on small molecules is sometimes called 'metabolism first' (to contrast it with the 'genes first' RNA world). To answer critics who say that small-molecule chemistry is not organized enough to produce life, Shapiro introduces the concept of an energetically favorable 'driver reaction' that would act as a constant engine to run the various cycles."

Variable physical laws: "Should they deviate from their actual values the universe would have looked different and neither man nor other living organisms would have existed. But imagine that the fundamental constants – and thereby also the fundamental laws – are not at all constant but have gradually changed over time. "

Frequently Asked Questions in Cosmology

Big Bang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The horizon problem results from the premise that information cannot travel faster than light, and hence two regions of space which are separated by a greater distance than the speed of light multiplied by the age of the universe cannot be in causal contact. The observed isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is problematic in this regard, because the horizon size at that time corresponds to a size that is about 2 degrees on the sky. If the universe has had the same expansion history since the Planck epoch, there is no mechanism to cause these regions to have the same temperature."

Big Bang Cosmology Primer: "After some period of time following the big bang, gravity condensed clumps of matter together. The clumps were gravitationally pulled towards other clumps and eventually formed galaxies. It is extremely difficult to model how this clumping may have occurred, but most models agree that it occurred faster than it should have. A possible explanation is that right after the big bang the Universe began a period of exaggerated outward expansion, with particles flying outward faster than the current speed of light. This explanation is known as inflation theory, and has widespread advocacy within the astrophysics community because it reconciles theory with observation. It should be noted, however, that inflation theory is not directly verifiable."

Quark Stars Could Produce Biggest Bang: "Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoon full of their material would weigh billions of tons. This density creates intense pressure at the core of the star - so much pressure that in some cases quarks could be squeezed out of their usually tight groupings and become free."

New Scientist News - Trials for drug that leaves HIV defenceless: "Recent experiments in collaboration with Michael Sakalian and his colleagues at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City have shown that PA-457 works in a different way. It attacks HIV by disrupting formation of a conical shield, called the capsid protein, which stores and protects the RNA heart of the HIV particles as they bud out from infected cells."

BBC NEWS | Health | Chinese remedy 'treats diabetes': "A gardenia fruit extract used in Chinese medicine for centuries to treat adult onset diabetes is effective, scientists have found."

Superbugs from Hell - Evolution Re-Visited: "New evidence suggests that the evolution of life on Earth not in shallow pools on the surface, but in the torrid depths of the planetary crust. And the planet in question might not even be the Earth..."

3d logic: "Fascinating Logical Flash game by Alexei Matveev from Minsk. Try it to test your IQ level!"

evolt.org - Browser Archive

BUILDYOURMEMORY.COM / A mnemonics and memory improvement resource: "Many people claim that they possess a poor memory. Indeed you may even be one of those people yourself. Well whether you are or not, the simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the population have perfectly good memories. The problem is that they just don’t know how to use them properly"

Nuclear Power Education - Executive Summary: "Energy Requirements and Issues, The Science of Nuclear Power, The Benefits of Nuclear Power, The Challenges of Nuclear Power, Alternatives to NuclearPower"

Periodic Table - Flash Version: "Click the button for html and pdf files that provide background information and further data on the Periodic Table of Elements."

Kitchen Myths: "We've all heard of urban legends, those plausible sounding but false stories that circulate so widely on email and news groups, such as the old lady who microwaved her cat or the Nieman-Marcus $250 cookie recipe. There are several web sites devoted to researching and exposing these fake stories. The same sort of thing happens in the world of food and cooking, although on a much smaller scale. This page is my answer."

The Office supplies trebuchet: "Bored at work? Build your own 3' trebuchet out of paperclips and throw balls of blu-tac up to an amazing 4 feet. WOW!!"

Manage Apache Download Speed And Traffic Limits With mod_cband | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials: "The current version can set virtualhosts' and users' bandwidth quotas, maximal download speed, requests-per-second speed and the maximal number of simultanous IP connections."

Where Is Consciousness? I've Lost It!: "Is the Brain Really Necessary?"

Traveling Forever - How to Protect Yourself From Big Brother: "Regardless of the government you live under, your actions on the internet are being tracked. Your every search recorded and kept in a database for future use/abuse. US citizens have had their web traffic monitored by the NSA and AT&T, and their every search history subpeaned by a Federal Judge. As we move towards a more wired and connected society, the potentials for abuse grow exponentially. Imagine a future where your past searches label you as a threat to your government. Or where your browsing history is known by everyone. It's possible now."

ridiculous_fish » Blog Archive » The Treacherous Optimization: "I’m going to beat grep by thirty percent!"