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POPSDisneyfied Vaginas Questioned by Cranky British Researchers It's distracting to have imperfections while naked with a man, ... Being a human being with idiosyncratic features can feel weird after taking in the cultural obsession with cookie-cutter beauty, and if you're cursed with a partner willing to vocalize his disappointment with your human body, it can be even worse. But it's a shame that most of us absorb this nonsense. ... if you can clear your head of all this perfectionist, conformist pressure, appreciating people's little differences can be more fun and certainly more sexy ... In fact, I often look at the sea of airbrushing and plastic surgery and Brazilian waxing, and I see a profound prudery at the bottom of it, a fear of truly embracing sexuality. The airbrushed plastic perfection promoted by Playboy and Maxim magazine are to sex as EPCOT Center is to world travel: experience simulation for those too cowardly to truly dive in, but too egotistical to admit their cowardice.
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POPSThe coat of arms of Switzerland is protected by American law? WTF? Perhaps someone with more legal background than I could lend their experience to me and answer WHY the Swiss coat of Arms is protected under US Law? And carries with its misuse the same Punishment. It just doesn't make any sense and either I'm tried and somehow keep missing it or its a pain to find. Just curious is all, I like mysteries but this is beginning to bug me after a few days or so (on & off) Over to you guys. (I Hope)
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POPSCool Websites and Tools [October 11] BreathingEarth – Real-time simulation tool that shows stats like CO2 emissions, birth and death rates, and CO2 emitted per person. The stats are given both for each country and worldwide. All the data comes from reputable sources like CIA World Factbook and United Nations Statistics Division. Read more: BreathingEarth – CO2 Emissions, Birth & Death Rates by Country
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POPSCan Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb? 
positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present day, their power " another variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model " sagged significantly. Amid the thousands of rows on the spreadsheet, there’s one called Forecast. It consists of a single number that represents the most likely consensus of all the players. It begins at 160 " bomb-making territory " but by next year settles at 118, where it doesn’t move much. “That’s the outcome,” Bueno de Mesquita said confidently, tapping the screen. What does 118 mean? It means that Iran won’t make a nuclear bomb. By early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this computer model is right, all the dire portents we’ve seen in recent months . . .
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POPSBy imagining many possible worlds fiction can chang our Minds "For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for bookyou. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction—is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies. But is the idea of fiction being good for you merely wishful thinking?'
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POPSRenewable Energy Made by Mixing Salt and Fresh Water full at source: Scientists have already designed several techniques in an attempt to harvest this energy, and have successfully generated power of about 1 kW for a fresh water flow of 1 liter per second. But these techniques are usually based on membranes through which the water flows, and problems such as high membrane cost and short lifetime are currently preventing the large-scale utilization of these techniques. Now, Doriano Brogioli of the University of Milan Bicocca in Monza, Italy, has taken a different approach to extracting energy from salinity difference. As Brogioli explains in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, the method is based on electric double-layer (EDL) capacitor technology.
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POPS"Milky Way may have a huge hidden neighbour" more (at source): Right now, says Chakrabarti, the galaxy is roughly 300,000 light years away from us - about twice as far away as the LMC. But the simulations suggest it follows a highly elongated elliptical path, and about 300 million years ago it swept through our own galaxy just 16,000 light years from the galactic centre - closer in than Earth - disturbing the Milky Way's outskirts as it went. "Overall, it is a very plausible scenario," says Abraham Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not part of the study. "Of course, the fact that we don't see such a massive satellite is an issue."
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POPSWelcome to Celestia Investigate links - related sites - screenshot - etc. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
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POPSSPACE PHOTOS THIS WEEK Previous infrared images of the same galaxy taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope showed only a blur (left). Herschel will be able to reveal some of the coldest and most distant objects in the universe, as it is the first space telescope able to see the longer, lower-energy wavelengths of light known as far-infrared to submillimeter wavelengths.
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POPSCrop Circles Do Not Predict Solar Storm on July 7th… "Apparently, we now have an infallible space weather prediction method. Sunspot 1024 could generate a CME directed toward Earth, therefore fulfilling the prediction that we are going to get hit by a CME in two days. Amazing right? Obviously Salla is referring to the work of a solar physicist, with a new hi-tech computer simulation, or with access to cutting-edge observational data. Wow, it looks like we have found the Holy Grail of sunspot characterization methods!" (Guess again)
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POPSVirtual twins could bring the end of animal research How far are we from building useful and practical virtual twins? There are many sophisticated models of individual organs and systems, such as network models of the metabolic, immune, nervous and circulatory systems; computational fluid dynamics models of blood flow; structural models of the heart and other muscl
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