This is gorgeous. However, your statement about the corpus callosum (sp) is wrong. The corpus callosum provides the bulk of the interconnection between the two hemispheres. Doubtless some of the signals that cross it are inhibitory, but inhibition is not its main purpose.

Agreed; the only place you'd be worried about an infection is if you were in wilderness multiple days from civilisation.

I can't imagine they'd be bad. People eat all other types of bear. This is just a bear that doesn't move around much and eats nothing but grass. It's like a veal bear.

Your brain changes structurally as you mature and age. When you put new memories into your head, there are physical changes that go along with it.

"IKEA Says Fålksma Couches Are 'Essentially Stable'"

salt_bagel gives: * (1 star): Works well for locking, but nonstop bad techno music cuts into battery life.

I think this point may have been made elsewhere in the Gawker empire, but the only problem with Maryland's unis was they should have reversed the patterns between the helmets and the shoulders. Otherwise, they were money.

The Sheep Herder's Guide: What's the Best Ram For My System?

I always wanted the exact opposite: a watch with only a second hand. A lot of people in medical fields leave work at a different time every day (whenever all the work is done), but need the second hand to check heart rates.

I just find it impressive that they're able to recognize these things as tools at all. I mean, I know they have a lot of telltale characteristics that they look for, but who was the first person to figure it out?

I don't think getting the flight off the ground is the goal here, although I have occasionally been on a flight where slow passenger loading is the last thing holding it up.

Two hours in KOH at 180 degrees C ought to kill damn near anything in you. It would probably denature a good deal of the proteins in your body, if not lyse them altogether.

Sorry, but the retina does a great deal of spatial encoding and signal compression before the signal is ever sent to the brain. The brain does its share of image recognition and interpretation, but the signal sent from the retina is far from being raw image data.

I think the 10,000 Year Clock is also really interesting. [longnow.org]

The second has always been defined as a function of the physical properties of something in real life. As technology and physics have improved, scientists have just found more and more constant things to base it on.

The Aleutian islands a few hundred miles to the south are one of the most volcanic and seismically active areas in the world. The Bering strait is somewhat removed from the this dangerous area, but I'd still be worried.

The problem is not resolution, it's retinal processing. A huge amount of visual processing occurs right within the eye, before the signal ever goes off to the optic nerve. The retina is a computer in and of itself. It not only senses color, intensity, and location, but it also processes that information to identify…

Although vision is a pretty complicated sense, and retinal processing is nothing short of a miracle, I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't need to produce a level of fidelity equal to the retina.

They've made a lot of huge leaps forward in robotic fingers that can feel and modulate their grip strength. They now have robot hands that can pick up sheets of paper, hold Dixie cups without crushing them, and so forth. Not as dextrous as the real thing, but much improved with light touch.

It needs to be pointed out that this will release some stink into the general area of the crock. If you make a huge batch, put it somewhere where it won't drive everybody out of your house.