Australia’s Department of Agriculture has announced that its researchers have made a breakthrough that will send shockwaves across beach resorts and tiki-themed restaurants around the world. Through careful breeding they’ve managed to produce a sweet pineapple that also tastes like coconut, reducing future Pina Colada recipes to just two ingredients.
The next step, of course, is to make the pineapple-coconut sufficiently naturally alcoholic on its own. Because SCIENCE!
Via AoSHQ.
…Well. That probably wasn’t what San Diego physicist Dmitri Krioukov said when he decided to fight the Man and his traffic tickets, but it should have been.
What? Of course Krioukov won his court case. He did SCIENCE to it, after all. Krioukov went all linear and angular motion on this one, because that’s how Dmitri rolls.
Moe Lane
PS: Via Hot Air. Check out the bragging in the comments section.
…with a bottle of wine to hand and the sunset just beginning:
Too much sunlight is bad for the skin, but not enough may be a risk factor for stroke, according to a study presented here at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference.
Of the more than 16,000 black and white patients followed, those who lived in areas that had shorter exposure to sunlight had a 56% increased risk of stroke, Leslie McClure, PhD, from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Ala., and colleagues found.
This is SCIENCE. You may not argue with it. Red wine and sunsets; SCIENCE demands that you do this.
It also recommends a nice antipasto.
They listed as one of the Kinect‘s innovations that it “restores sight to the blind!”
Ha! Good lampooning of corporate advertising, there; yeah, those people over at marketing are always coming up with the most extravagant clai OH JEEBUS THEY WEREN’T JOKING.
Yes, that was kludged together, and it’s a vibro-tactile/audio system rather than a true visual one. Still.
OK, I don’t really watch football anymore, but this is hysterical:
Kind of redundant – at that level, the amount of force is adequately described as “pretty goram hard” – but hysterical.
For when a simple ‘Dude’ just won’t do.
USC scientists figure out how to turn t-shirts into body armor
Researchers at the University of South Carolina have figured out how to combine the carbon component of cotton with boron to create a cotton t-shirt with the toughness of body armor.
One long step closer to the battlesuit that I’m going to need if I ever plan to go out there and FIGHT CRIME!
…pretend that you didn’t read that, OK? One way, or the other.
Remember that previous post on SCIENCE!?
Well, here you go. See how this:
At a collective Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft booth at the 2009 BIO in Atlanta, the researchers are presenting a computer model of the overall system, along with the three fundamental sub-modules. The first module prepares the tissue samples and isolates the two cell types; the second proliferates them. The finished skin models are built up and cultivated in the third, and then packed by a robot.
The researchers still have a lot of meticulous work ahead before the machine will be finished. The difference between success and failure often depends on details, such as the quality of the skin pieces, processing times of enzymes, and liquid viscosities. Furthermore, the cell cultures must be monitored throughout the entire manufacturing process in order to provide optimal process control and to allow timely detection of any contamination with fungi or bacteria. The skin factory is expected to be finished in two years. “Our goal is a monthly production of 5,000 skin models with perfect quality, and a unit price under 34 euros. These are levels that are attractive for industry,” Saxler continues.
Thanks to advances in biotechnology, German researchers can now rapidly mass produce swatches of real human skin. At 34 Euros per unit, this manufactured skin is so cheap you might soon find it for sale next to bandages in the pharmacy.
Not that the io9/Gizmodo article is really inaccurate; merely that it nearly caused an entirely different – and overly enthusiastic – article to be written. Way of the world and the Internet, I guess.
Moe Lane
I got emailed this by a colleague, and from what I hear… yeah, pretty much.
It also apparently happens a lot with engineering, too.
See also here.
