We want to make an OpenPCR machine capable of copying DNA. We plan to make open source designs and kits so anyone can do PCR at their desktop, garage, hackerspace, or community lab for $400 or less.

OpenPCR - open source biotech on your desktop — Kickstarter

Smokescreen demo: a Flash player in JavaScript. Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG. Open up the Chrome Web Inspector while the demo is running and you can see the SVG changing in real time. Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter. It’s stated intention is to allow Flash banner ads to execute on the iPad and iPhone, but there are plenty of other interesting applications (such as news site infographics). The company behind it have announced plans to open source it in the near future. My one concern is performance—the library is 175 KB and over 8,000 lines of JavaScript which might cause problems on low powered mobile devices.

Smokescreen demo: a Flash player in JavaScript

In intraday trading shortly after 2:30 p.m., Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.

New King of Technology - Apple Overtakes Microsoft - NYTimes.com

DENVER (CBS/KCNC) Denver police have released surveillance video of a brazen thief that ripped off the victim's finger while ripping off his brand new iPad.
"I saw just a bone, all the skin and tendons and everything were off," Bill Jordan told CBS affiliate KCNC.

...
Ironically, Jordan told KCNC that he moved his family to Colorado from New Jersey 15 years ago to get away from crime there. Now after the iPad theft, he said his life and the life of his family will never be the same.

Come to New Jersey... We won't steal your fingers!

Surveillance Video Shows iPad Thieves Who Ripped Off Man's Finger - Crimesider - CBS News

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Aliens exist and they live in our midst disguised as humans -- at least, that's what 20 percent of people polled in a global survey believe.

The Reuters Ipsos poll of 23,000 adults in 22 countries showed that more than 40 percent of people from India and China believe that aliens walk among us disguised as humans, while those least likely to believe in this are from Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands (8 percent each).

However, the majority of people polled, or 80 percent, don't believe aliens in our midst.

They walk among us: 1 in 5 believe in aliens? - Yahoo! News

A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. The team engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus to assemble the components needed to crack apart a molecule of water, yielding a fourfold boost in efficiency over similar processes.nullnullnull

MIT Researchers Harness Viruses to Turn Water Into Hydrogen Fuel | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

"I learned many things in the quiet of that room ... I learned that everything is or becomes its own opposite ... You know, we are all unconsciously holding our anus. In one LSD dream ... I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from earth like a spaceship." - Cary Grant

Destination Subconscious: Cary Grant and LSD - WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Nerriere's idea caught on quickly within the international community. I wasn't the only one following its trajectory. The Times journalist Ben Macintyre described how, waiting for a flight from Delhi, he had overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. "The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me. Only now," he concluded, "do I realise that they were speaking 'Globish', the newest and most widely spoken language in the world."

That, surely, is just a description of what used to be known as a lingua franca? Not according to Nerriere. For him, "Globish" was a specific linguistic tool, which he formulated in two (French language) handbooks: Decouvrez le Globish and Don't Speak English, Parlez Globish. In these self-published volumes, Nerriere began to develop a "Globish" vocabulary: the 1500 essential words for international communication, and the idiom-free turns of phrase in which they might be expressed by the world's two billion non-native English speakers.

Globish: the worldwide dialect of the third millennium | Robert McCrum | Books | guardian.co.uk

Every year, modern medical science creates devices that advance the fight against human illness, frailty and mortality, increasing both our quality and quantity of life. These are not those devices. Rather, these 10 items represent a range of medical quackery, ill-conceived inventions and just plain insanity from the past 80 years of healthcare. If you ever see any of them in your doctor's office, seek help elsewhere.

Birthing Centrifuge (1965)
This patent reasoned that one way to make childbirth easier on mothers was to spin them around in a circle while they lie on their backs, allowing the centrifugal force of the rotation to pull the baby out of the birth canal. Safety concerns aside, I have to think that the impracticality of building an adult-sized, self-propelled turntable proved too great to get this product beyond the design stage.

10 Crazy Medical Inventions That (Thankfully) Never Caught On - Medical Assistant Programs

The Cold War ended over two decades ago, and many people have never lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Still, a nuclear attack is a very real threat. Global politics are far from stable, and human nature has changed none in the last two decades. "The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums".[1] As long as nuclear weapons exist, there is always the danger they will be used.

Is nuclear war survivable? Only predictions exist, as some say yes, others say no. For some, especially those in large population centers, it may seem like an entirely futile endeavor.[2] If it is survived at all, it will be by those who are mentally and logistically prepared for such an event. What should you do? Where should you take shelter?null

Apparently duck and cover isn't good enough.

How to Survive a Nuclear Attack - wikiHow