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POPSAwesome Spider time waster - really cool press the space bar and drop insects for it. Total waste of time I know - but I just picture the insects as dropping all the idiots that caused the financial crisis -- go spider...go and chow down hte bad people.
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POPSI'd Rather Listen to Insects Buzz (continued) Listening to politicians, regardless of party, discuss economics makes me sick both to my head and to my stomach. And the only people who are not similarly affected, I fear, are persons whose knowledge of economics is sufficiently scant -- or whose ethics are sufficiently perverted -- to protect their senses from being insulted by what issues forth from the mouths of politicians speaking on economic topics. So as an economist, I am no more interested in having Sen. Obama (or Sen. McCain) come to GMU's campus to lecture us on "how to manage the economy" than I would be, say, to have O.J. Simpson come to GMU's campus to lecture us on how to manage one's marriage. Sincerely, Don Boudreaux Professor and Chairman Department of Economics George Mason University
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POPSFreakiest (Lab) Animals The last one is Humanzee: It reads "Ok, so this one doesn't actually exist." But could have... The one I find most intriguing is The spider/goats: A private biotechnology company in Canada has managed to breed goats whose milk contains spider silk, the same things the eight-legged insects use to make webs and considered one of the strongest fibers occurring in nature. The silk is compatible with the human body and can be used to repair tissues and create replacement ligaments. No word on whether the goats are able to climb buildings or rescue damsels-in-distress. About the smart mice: Scientists managed to implant a few of the little rodents with human brain cells amounting to about one percent of their total grey matter. The same group has plans to produce mice with one hundred percent human brain cells, which they have permission to do unless the mice start exhibiting human traits. What, like banding together to escape?
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POPS"Bees Can Count" continues: Also at the Australian National University, Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinivasan trained European honeybees to pass a particular number of colored stripes in a tunnel to get a food reward, which was placed by a stripe. When they removed the food, the bees still returned to the same stripe. Next, they mixed things up on the bees: they varied the spacing of the stripes, and even replaced stripes with unfamiliar markers. The insects consistently passed the same number of markers to approach the former reward site, demonstrating that they could count, up to four. The studies burnish the impressive list of honeybees' known cognitive abilities, all achieved with a brain the size of a sand grain. The studies were detailed in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition.
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POPSWhat is it called? an interesting site, knowledge based, fun, fascinating facts, quotes, countries, people...quite a bit to learn...
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POPSAnts Break up Traffic Jams Interesting concept - taking some cues from insects to solve our own problems. An idea well past its time, but can we implement it?
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POPSPervasive games The IPerG researchers’ experimental pervasive games range, for example, from Insectopia, a kind of treasure hunt in which participants roam around a city collecting virtual insects from Bluetooth devices, to Epidemic Menace, a whodunit in which players try to stop a scientist from spreading a virtual virus in a real-world setting.
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POPSGreat science books for little kids, from HarperChildrens This is an excellent series. Short, easy-to-read, beautifully illustrated books on simple science topics -- like bugs, seeds, storms, seasons, sleep, and teeth -- written in engaging language that children can both understand AND learn real scientific facts from. Two levels of difficulty: stage 1 is for pre-K to K-age children; stage 2 is for kids in primary grades.
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POPSScientists find the secret to swatting flies Handily, the research suggests an optimal method for successfully swatting a fly. "It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter,"
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POPSResearchers Can Swat Flies "It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position," Dickinson said. Instead, aim for the escape route. And who didn't need to know that??? I'm curious, does anyone think there was a "need" to research on why it's so hard to swat a fly ?
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