Pictures say it all

Source: Peter Petrie Egg Separator

Source: Wii Oddities: A Wiicade

Source: Carry Three Brewskis, Have a Seat, Too

Source: Seeing the forest for the tree

Source: Cat Genie Allows Cats to Poop Like Humans

Weapons tech

More stuff from the archive.

Source: Defence Tech Raytheon has developed a Laser Area Defence System (LAD) capable of detonating 60-millimetre mortars. Battle-grade lasers are not yet a reality, but at the rate of development they are not far off.

Source: Gizmodo Although not strictly a weapon, it may help relieve the urge to bring one in to work. Beat the bag and, when enough pressure has built up, and the rocket is released. Feel free to beat your rocket in front of your coworkers.

Source: Defense Tech The Phalanx CIWS system is an autonomous 20-mm gun capable of firing 4,500 rounds per second, referred to colloquially by the Navy as R2-D2 "attack droid".

Source: Gizmodo The DREAD gun electromagnetically launches steel bearings at a rate of 120,000 rounds per second minute at 8000 ft/sec. By comparison, an M16 shoots up to 900 rounds per second at 3200 ft/sec. It does all this with no muzzle flash (not powder being ignited) and no recoil.

Source: Gizmodo This "gun" is actually a custom-designed 400-mm camera called the Lieca Gun.

Is this the end of the scholarly journal?

Source: USA Today

I've quoted the article below:

Scientific advances sometimes come as lightning flashes of inspiration. But when scientists sit down to record and take credit for what they've found, they still use much the same method they have for decades – an article published in a scholarly journal.

But science's hidebound traditions are changing. The Internet has opened up new forms of publishing in which anyone in the world can find and read a scientific paper. And papers themselves are becoming more interactive, leading readers to the underlying data, videos, and discussions that augment their value. With blogs and e-books providing easy means of self-publishing, some observers are speculating that scholarly journals and their controversial system of peer reviews may not be needed at all.

"The traditional journal publishing medium we've grown used to really needs to evolve and change because that's not the way people are accessing information," says Mark Gerstein, a professor of biomedical informatics at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Dr. Gerstein cowrote an article, "The Death of the Scientific Paper," which appeared last year on The-Scientist.com, an online science magazine.

The rest of the article can be found at the Source at the start of this post. It cites two examples of "the next wave" in journal publications:

Two new scientific publications, both available only online, may signal what's ahead. The PLoS ONE (plosone.org), a journal begun by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) last month, aims to put as many new scientific articles as possible on the Internet to be read by anyone, free of charge. The Journal of Visualized Experiments, or JoVE (myjove.com), is a kind of YouTube for researchers. It operates on the theory that a short video showing how an experiment is done is better than thousands of words that attempt to describe it.

They suggest this might be a way to deal with one problem: Peer review.

In general, peer reviewers, themselves researchers pressed for time, don't try to re-create experiments and rarely ask to see the raw data that supports a paper's conclusions. While peer review is expected to separate the wheat from the chaff, it's "slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud," summed up one critic in BMJ, the British medical journal, in 1997.

Personally, I'm not ready to ring the death bell of the current model scientific publications.

The nature of Consciousness

Raising Consciousness: Part I
Raising Consciousness: Part II

Some seemingly unconscious patients have startlingly complex brain activity. What does that mean about their potential for recovery? And what can it tell us about the nature of consciousness?

A series of articles presented by Technology Review on the neurology of consciousness, and how its study could lead to a better understanding of, and potentially treatment for, coma and related medical conditions. I haven't had a chance to read them yet, but I'm putting them here in case others might find them interesting.