Found this at reddit:

A non-toxic spray invisible to the human eye that protects almost any surface against dirt and bacteria, whether it is hospital equipment and medical bandages or ancient stone monuments and expensive fabrics.

See the article at the link. Sounds like a good idea. In a related vein, I can't wait until there is a spray that I can spray on my teeth and never have to worry about a cavity ever again.

Here's a bonus in the cute overload category.

Posted by mesutim on the Reddit forums, kitteh likes to sleep while standing up!!

Edit: We suspect Kitteh was muslim

I can't remember if this has made it to IG yet, the video (at the link) is priceless, a fun and accessible Chemistry lesson... but in this posting we've chosen a singular profound screenshot that should serve as a lesson to all of us.

Found this over at Boingboing: A 19-yr-old university student died from loud bass music coming out of the speakers at a techno party. It is known as SADS (Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome), which is a heart disorder that kills 12 young people a week.

The cells of the female ovary were transformed into cells normally found in male testes by turning off a gene during the development of the mouse embryo.

You absolutely HAVE to check out the images at the link. Beyond cool.

I got a kick out of this.

Gotta love how they ended this one.

You know when you call someone's voicemail you get their message and then you get this really long scripted message that says "To leave a voice message, press 1, to blah blah blah, to repeat these instructions, press 7, to hear these instructions in morse code, press *8, for mandarin, press 1133"

Yea, as everybody knows, these f***ing instructions are just there to run up everyone's airtime. On some carriers you can disable these however! Do the world a favor and disable these REALLLLY annoying instructions on your cellphone. Click the link above for instructions on how to disable these for your carrier.

Also of interest, a Verizon employee blows the whistle on how Verizon intentionally put a huge non-programmable "web" button in your way so you will inevitably incur a $2 data surcharge every month.

While we're bitching about how horrible a lot of cell phone carriers are, it's important to note that Tmobile is perhaps the least awful of the cell phone carriers, at least according to reddit.

Lifehacker has an even better write-up including the revelation that "one star pound" will skip the instructions when calling other people's phones. Basically you don't need all 3 but different carriers have different skip instructions so doing all three will cover most if not all of them.

• Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
• Before you judge someone, try and walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you judge them, you're a mile away and have their shoes.
• Give a man a fire he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
• Give a man a fish, and he knows where to go for fish. Teach that man to fish, and you've just destroyed your entire market base.
• I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.
• The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
• If we hit that bullseye the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate. - Futurama
• t's true that no man is an island. But if you tie a bunch of dead guys together, they make a pretty good raft.
• Abstinence makes the church grow fondlers.
• It's not rocket surgery
• They say people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Alright. How about: Nobody should throw stones. It's just crappy behaviour. My policy is 'no stone throwing regardless of housing situation. -Demetri Martin
• The means justify the ends (deeeeeeeeep)
• If at first you don't succeed, Redefine Success.
• He's not the brightest knife in the drawer
• A dick in the bush is worth two in the hand.
• If I gave a shit, you'd be the first person I'd give it to
• Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet-engines
• Whatever doesn't kill you just postpones the inevitable
• Let's hit two birds and get stoned.
• Only users lose drugs
• He treats objects like women
• home is where the hurt is
• Two wrongs don't make a right, however two Wrights make an airplane.

I don't remember if this has been posted here already, but damn if it isn't awesome enough to post again:

This week's Cannabis-is-good-for-you roundup includes a study suggesting cannabis is A-ok for pregnant women fighting morning sickness (previous study says cannibanoids create brain cells in mice and in the fetuses of pregnant mice) and a less well documented group of people claim that a cannabis isopropyl solution can actually turn 2-week cold soars into 3 day cold soars.

Of course, the more wonderful Satan makes cannabis, the stronger we need to make anti-pot laws to keep people from temptation.

Update: Completely unrelated to this discussion is today's reuters report that the Dutch have among the lowest Cannabis usage rates in Europe.

I know you'll recognize all of the songs like I did.

Someone posed this question to reddit. The answers are hillarious. Here's some of my fav's:

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I'll share my story. In my math class my senior year of high school, for the final we were allowed to bring in an 8.5x11" sheet of paper (standard printer-paper size) with notes on it. Only, my teacher accidentally wrote 8.5x11' on the white-board.
Being the asshole I am, I had to expose her mistake. Instead of studying for the final, I spent the weekend before the exam making a huge 8.5x11 foot long foldable poster-board, and I filled it with random math facts and puns.
The day of the final, I walked in with the huge board, unfolded it to make it even huger, and stood it up in front of my desk (it was so tall it nearly scraped the ceiling). My teacher had a WTF expression on her face, and I pointed out her mistake on the board. She didn't find it as funny as I did, and told me that I didn't get to use a sheet on the final. I regret nothing.

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In 10th grade or so I had this little key chain that would make farm animal noises when you pressed a certain button.

Anyway, the cow button was by far the greatest because it would give off a 3 second long MOOOOOO! So me being a very mature and responsible kid, deceided it would be best to bring this to class, let it get silent and then let the Cow free. At first I didn't think anything of it, just a quick MOOO and that would be it, but it turned into so much more.

The teacher was writing on the board when I let the first one go and he just paused, staring at the board. After an awkward moment of silence a little laughter broke out. Without turning around the teacher continued writing and talking so I let another one go.

Again, he just paused and looked down at the floor as more laughter broke out. Now some people in the class were looking around trying to figure out where and who this sound was coming from because nobody would expect it from me.

Then he continued writing and talking. I though 3 would be too much, but said what the hell and let a 3rd one go. He turned around placed his hands on the desk, palms down and stared at every single person one at a time, while they were hysterical laughing.

"I am going to walk out of this classroom and when I come back in, I want whatever is making that noise sitting on my desk" and he walked out.

After about 5 minutes he walked back in and stood at the front of his desk, looked around and said "Well?". There was complete silence...so I hit the chicken button instead.

The class went hysterical and he went, well, he went apeshit. He went on a rage against the classroom for 5 minutes pointing out everyones issues, ripping his tie off, cursing about how he tries to get through to a bunch of adolesent punks and wanna be prom queens. How he gave a a life in the Navy to make a difference. Then sgain, there was silence and everyone just stared.

So I hit the button once more

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edit: here's my own contribution =c)
In a chemistry class, the first day the teacher turned on the tap water, filled a beaker, and promptly lit it on fire! The catch was there was a small amount of lighter fluid in the beaker before she put the water in which rose to the top. She spun it as some sort of lesson on observation or some crap.

Several years later I repeated the trick in a college speech class where I took a snapple bottle I had adulterated and had put the wrapper back on, and lit the "freshly opened" snapple bottle on fire in class and made up some long-winded crap about how snapple was poison and the snapple lady was an ex-con. She gave me a poor grade for slandering snapple. I regret nothing.

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edit: wow some of these are so goddamned funny I about died... like this one:
There was a kid at my school called Sean who once got into a screaming match with a teacher in History class. It continued to the point where the teacher knocked a chair over and stormed out. Now, at this time our history classroom was at the top of a 3 story building and right after she left this kid went over to the window, opened it and then picked up a chair and headed out the door. He went all the way down to the ground outside, put the chair on it's side underneath the window and then laid face down with his arms and legs sprawled out at crazy angles. At the time we thought he was in so much trouble that we weren't even laughing. So the teacher came back yelling, only to find the whole class crowded around the window in complete silence, with this kid lying face down on the ground 3 stories below. If you've ever seen someone go from normal to complete nervous breakdown in 10 seconds you will not forget it. That kid is now part of legend.

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via NPR: Want to know how crickets choose mates? Well, listen closely next time you're outside on a night when they're singing. Very closely. It's the males that are doing that chirping; they're trying to attract females.

But it took biologist Laurel Symes of Dartmouth College years of listening — and recording — to figure out that different species of cricket have different calls. She slowed down the recordings and discovered that what sounds like a continuous call to us actually has pulses — or rhythm.

Listen to the recordings at the link.

From the Washington Post:

"ARCATA, Calif. -- Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.

Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.

Almost all of the marijuana consumed in the multibillion-dollar U.S. market once came from Mexico or Colombia. Now as much as half is produced domestically, often by small-scale operators who painstakingly tend greenhouses and indoor gardens to produce the more potent, and expensive, product that consumers now demand, according to authorities and marijuana dealers on both sides of the border"

Glowing nonstop in the Brazilian rain forest, the newfound mushroom Mycena luxaeterna (pictured both in daylight, top, and in the dark) is indeed a source of eternal light, as its Latin nameinspired by verses from Mozart's "Requiem"implies.

The tiny mushroom is one of 7 new species of glow-in-the-dark fungi found around the world, bringing the total known to 71, according to a study that appeared October 5 in the journal Mycologia.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2009) — Using an RNA-powered nanomotor, University of Cincinnati (UC) biomedical engineering researchers have successfully developed an artificial pore able to transmit nanoscale material through a membrane.

In a study led by UC biomedical engineering professor Peixuan Guo, PhD, members of the UC team inserted the modified core of a nanomotor, a microscopic biological machine, into a lipid membrane. The resulting channel enabled them to move both single- and double-stranded DNA through the membrane.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2009) — A fossil of a bird-like dinosaur with four wings has been discovered in northeastern China. The specimen bridges a critical gap in the transition from dinosaurs to birds, and reveals new insights into the origin evolution of feathers.

In what surely is one of the greatest artistic expressions of all time, Kseniya Simonova wins the top prize on "Ukraine's Got Talent". Kseniya draws with sand on a lit table. Her sand animation describes in captivating emotion the Nazi invasion of Ukraine during World War 2, in which Ukraine lost 1/4 of its population. I've never seen anything like it. This has to be one of the most beautiful and powerful things I've ever seen.

edit:
For proper context here's Tom Delay in what can only be described as "trolling for manmeat" on a similar American TV program:

Funnnnnny

Quite honestly those of us who have been in the same state of mind can't exactly judge this guy. Safeway should NOT have left those watermellons outside overnight.

In case you missed it, there have been a slow but steady release of cyborg ghost-in-the-shell-esq technological advances. We've seen pacemakers that now report data on your heart to the internet, magnets being implanted under one's skin so that the person can feel electromagnetic fields, "glass eyes" for people who are missing an eye that are actually digital cameras, and now, a "hearing aid" that anchors to the bone and allows direct input through a standard audio jack. That's right, now you can plug your ipod right into your skull.

From the article:
"Older-style hearing aids amplify all sounds, making it almost impossible for wearers to hear conversations in noisy environments. They also interfere with frequencies used by mobile and fixed phones and often emit high-pitched whistling sounds. But the newer processors, costing about $6000 each, shut out background noise, giving users up to 25 per cent better hearing, and can be attached directly to MP3 music players or wireless headsets for talking on the phone, Cochlear's territory manager, Katrina Martin, said." Wikipedia has more on these things including more pics that look more or less like a random electronic jack has been implanted in someone's skull.

Infogasm special tech bonus. I give you google image results for "sharks with lasers".

Reddit, one of the largest "blogs" on the Internet with millions of users, has a vibrant sub community of Portland style Oregonians. I recently asked them for suggestions on fun date things to do around Portland, and they came up with a lot of great indoor and outdoor suggestions, with or without your significant other. Some fav's are posted here below, more at the link:
pinksockeye suggests:
* The Rose Garden (by the Japanese Garden) is nice at around dusk when the sky is clear (FREE).
* Laurelhurst is a swell place to see a cheap movie, they also serve beer and pizza and such. ($3/person)
* Last Thursday on Alberta street is a good place to people watch, support local artists and there's food, it's the last Thursday of every month. (FREE)
* First Thursday is like a gallery hop in the Pearl, they serve wine, same as above, first Thurs of every month. (FREE)
* Kayaking on the Willamette, pricey but most likely worth it.
* Saturday (& Sunday) market on the waterfront is another good place to people watch and find obscure shit for sale (you can also get a Rogue Double Dead Guy here for $5 a pop). (FREE)
* Portland Art Museum is phenomenal, there are always temporary exhibits. The History Museum is also quite rad if you're into that nerdy stuff. ($12/ticket)
* Barbur World Food carries foodstuffs from all over the world, I like to find crazy recipes, shop here for items and cook for my beloved. They also have fresh-from-the-oven pita @ $.50.
* The Multnomah Falls (out HWY 30) hike is stunning, even when it's muddy.(FREE)
* Glowing Greens is mini-golf at it's finest: blacklight pirate themed... ($?7/person/game)
* Pix has super yummy dessert, and they're all situated in areas of town that can be perused for pleasure before or after. ($5-10/person)
* The tram, while a political disaster, offers the best view of the city. ($4/ticket)
* Disc Golf! is like a mellow adventure. Commune with nature/hike/throw a frisbee all at once. Bring beer (and pot) if you wish. I like Dabney and Pier Park. (Some places charge $3 to park, up front cost for discs... but if your eyes are open you will pick up strays that other people have lost).

Have fun! Portland <3
[Photo by Nathan Moon of Moonrok photography]

Like the X-men's Wolverine extending his claws, the Spanish ribbed newt slashes through itself with its sharp rib bones to create defensive spines, according to a new study.

Scientists were already aware that the amphibian species responds to threats by thrusting out its rib bones, which then get coated with toxic skin secretions. But little was known about how the odd adaptation worked. It had been thought that the newt simply contracted its body, forcing the ends of the ribs out through special openings in the skin.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2009) — A study published in the July 17 issue of the journal Science details how sandfish -- small lizards with smooth scales -- move rapidly underground through desert sand. In this first thorough examination of subsurface sandfish locomotion, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that the animals place their limbs against their sides and create a wave motion with their bodies to propel themselves through granular media.

Do you have a picture that you are not sure what is in it? Submit it to this website, named idthis, and people try to identify it for you! Yesterday I took a picture of a huge spider in my backyard, and I submitted a picture of it, and got a correct response within a day. Here is my pic: http://idthis.org/id/C/

Watch this chimp have it's mind blown by magic tricks. There appears to be some insights into human psychology here as the chimp initially shows amazement at the tricks and that amazement quickly becomes affection and reverence for the magicians... kisses on the cheek and hugs when the tricks are just too much for the chimp to comprehend. Check it out.

Check out these sea worms that have 8 glowing orbs they can detach. When they drop them the orbs begin to glow as they fall, presumably to distract predators.

Click link and upvote if you can