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Chef Skiff's world famous guacolmole

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:59:02 GMT

clipped by: egoldstein
clipper's remarks: I knew he was talented, but a master chef...my goodness, is there anything Skiff can't do??!!

Clip Source: blip.tv

[Video]

Tags: skiff, guacomole

Gestures of Pride and Shame Are Universal

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:34:37 GMT

clipped by: Beholder

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

Bursting your buttons with pride -- the puffing of the chest associated with success -- may be innate, researchers suggest this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

The key evidence in the new study is that congenitally blind athletes, who have never seen a soccer team celebrate after a goal or a defensive end after a sack, make almost the same nonverbal gestures after a win or loss as their sighted counterparts.

Plenty of scientific work has gone into testing the universality of certain gestures across human cultural groups. Paul Ekman's work at the University of San Francisco has found that certain simple facial expressions, e.g. mad or happy, can be understood from Papua New Guinea to Moscow.

No cultural differences were observed among competitors from different countries and, aside from the shaking of the fists after a loss, sighted and blind athletes displayed remarkably similar nonverbal behavior.

Tags: behavior, gestures, pride, shame

Insects in the morning dew --Awesome Pics

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:30:21 GMT

clipped by: coonhnd
clipper's remarks: Great macro pics!

Clip Source: www.funniez.net

Insects in the morning dew

Carnivorous insects often have to get their water from somewhere other than their prey, and often they'll go to plants for their water too, drinking from fruit maybe. Or they might sip from the morning dew or from raindrops or from edges of ponds or puddles.

Tags: insects, macro, pics, photography

Musim father burns Christian daughter alive

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:54:17 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: what can you say?

Clip Source: www.worldnetdaily.com

Muslim father burns Christian daughter alive

Man slices out girl's tongue, ignites her after 'heated debate on religion'

A Saudi Arabian Muslim father cut out his daughter's tongue and lit her on fire upon learning that she had become a Christian.

The child became curious about Jesus Christ after she read Christian material online, the Gulf News reported.

Her father read of her Internet conversation, detached her tongue and burned her to death "following a heated debate on religion," according to an International Christian Concern report.

The father is employed by the muwateen, or Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The muwateen are police tasked by the government with enforcing religious purity. The man has been taken into custody, and his identity has not been released.

Tags: religion, islam, christianity, another dead girl

Octopuses Don't Have Eight Legs

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:08:49 GMT

clipped by: mugofcoffee
clipper's remarks: interesting find, after all these years...

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Robin Millard, AFP

For new research suggests they are not really eight-legged denizens of the deep, as popularly assumed; instead they use their front limbs more like arms -- and can even tackle a Rubik's Cube.

Octopuses use their back two limbs largely for propulsion and use the front six for a variety of tasks, with the front two doing most of the exploratory work, said Alex Gerard, the curator of the Sea Life center in Brighton on the southern English coast.

Some 16 Sea Life center aquariums across Europe in Britain, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands studied their Giant Pacific, Common and Lesser Octopuses in coordinated tests.

"We've found that in all the tests, they do tend to favor particular limbs, which tends to give them a legs and arms sort of layout," Gerard told AFP Wednesday.

"Their front two tentacles will be used for a lot of exploratory work and then the ones immediately behind them will then be used also if further investigation is needed.

A home on the rocks

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:25:23 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Clingstone, an unusual, 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, survives through the love and hard work of family and friends.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Henry Wood, the owner, runs the house like a camp: all skilled workers welcome. The Jamestown Boatyard hauls the family's boats and floating dock and stores them each winter in return for a week's use of the house in the summer.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Mr. Wood, a 79-year-old Boston architect, bought the house with his ex-wife Joan in 1961 for $3,600. It had been empty for two decades.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Clingstone had been built by a distant cousin, J.S. Lovering Wharton. Mr. Wharton worked with an artist, William Trost Richards, to create a house of picture windows with 23 rooms on three stories radiating off a vast central hall.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

The total cost of the construction, which was completed in 1905, was $36,982.99.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

An early sketch of the house. Mr. Wood is as proud as any parent of his house, and keeps a fat scrapbook of photographs and newspaper clippings that document its best moments.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

A Robot Controlled by Self Organizing Biological Neural Net

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:08:56 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: "Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity" similar to what happens in a normal rat -- or human -- brain, he added.

But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months.

"Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways," explained Warwick.

To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot's sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.

Clip Source: www.engadget.com

It looks like a group of researchers from the University of Reading are making a solid run at the title of mad scientists of the year (in the best sense, of course), with them now boasting that they've developed a robot that's controlled by a "biological brain."

That's not quite the sci-fi sight you may be imagining, however (though it's close), with it instead made up of some 300,000 neurons taken from the neural cortex of a rat fetus, which are contained in multi electrode array that packs 60 electrodes to pick up the signals generated by the cells and, in turn, control the robot.

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit -- it communicates with its "body" via a Bluetooth radio link.

The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.

From the very start, the neurons get busy. "Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,"

Tags: robotics, neural inteface

Hot is protection

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:14:51 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

The Greater the Threat, the Hotter the Chili

Like many other plants, the chili has a strategy for survival: make its fruit, the pepper, so nutritionally desirable that birds and other creatures will eat it and disperse the seeds. But the same things that make a chili pepper attractive to animals also draw bacteria and funguses that can kill the seeds.

The researchers studied a species in Bolivia (where chilis are thought to have originated) that was earlier determined to be polymorphic

some plants produce hot peppers, while identical plants produce fruit that have no heat at all. The new research showed that in populations of the plant across Bolivia, the proportion of hot and not-hot plants varied.

“In some areas, all plants will be hot, and they’re superhot,” Dr. Tewksbury said. “But move south, and more and more nonpungent plants show up. In some populations, 90 percent have no heat at all.”

peppers in the more humid and wet north had more evidence of infection by a fungus

Tags: biology

What Kind Of Tree Would She Be?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:00:26 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

MERRICKVILLE, Ontario — Diana Beresford-Kroeger pointed to a towering wafer ash tree near her home.

She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.

And she grows more than 100 types of trees, including rare fir trees and Siberian cherry trees, and disease-resistant chestnuts, elms and butternut.

Ms. Beresford-Kroeger recently completed the book “Arboretum Borealis” about the boreal forest in Canada, which cuts across the northern half of the country. Canadian officials have recently announced plans to preserve 55 million acres — roughly half. “Trees are a living miracle,” Ms. Beresford-Kroeger said. “Leaves can take in carbon dioxide and create oxygen. And all creatures must have oxygen.”