How did a suicidal passenger get the door of a pressurized plane open? – “Earlier this month over northern Canada, a distressed passenger opened the door of a plane during flight and leaped to his death. In a column some time ago you claimed that an airplane’s doors cannot, in fact, be opened by a passenger. If that is true, how was he able to accomplish this?

Russia to build floating Arctic nuclear stations – “Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists….”

How to make a swine flu vaccine – (with video) “It involves scientists painstakingly injecting a small amount of virus into each egg which will then be incubated over the weekend. By Monday, they should have enough virus to begin the next stage…” See also:

Exclusive Video of Virgin Galactic’s Test Flight – “Wired.com got its mitts on the first official cockpit video and other footage from the recent test of Virgin Mothership Eve at the Scaled Composites skunkworks operation in sunny SoCal. Scaled Composites and Virgin tend to keep the test results hush-hush but say “several recent published articles have been sufficiently inaccurate and negative” to make them “set the record straight.””

Is China really going green? – “The speed with which China is now ramping up its commitment to alternative energies has caught even the most optimistic analysts by surprise, with new green edicts being issued from Beijing on an almost weekly basis…”

Launch dates – “Now get this: the Big Bang model is the best one we have to explain the origin of the Universe. But it does not tell us about how that moment occurred. Did the Universe get its start from a singular event, a quantum fluctuation in some larger metaverse? Are we the last in a series of past Big Bangs and recollapses (the last because we’re pretty sure the cosmic expansion will go on forever this time)? Are we here because two high-dimensional membranes collided?”

Dinosaurs ‘survived in a remote ‘lost world’ for half a million years before extinction’ – “New evidence suggests an “isolated community” escaped annihilation and lived on a rocky, desert plateau in North America…”

Electric Citroën C1 car is ready, but government grants are not – “The electric C1 costs £16,850, double the cost of the petrol version. With a £5,000 grant, the electric model would still be about £3,500 more expensive but the driver could save that much in a year in reduced running, parking and congestion charge costs…”

Book lifts cowl on ‘misogynist’ Opus Dei – ” Defector tells of threats and humiliation she suffered during 13 years in secret sect…”

Animals That Seem Identical May Be Completely Different Species – “Animals that seem identical may belong to completely different species. This is the conclusion of researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who have used DNA analyses to discover that one of our most common segmented worms is actually two types of worm…”

FaceResearch.org – “FaceResearch.org allows you to participate in short online psychology experiments looking at the traits people find attractive in faces and voices…”

Empowering Internet Users: Two Ideas to Reshape Broadband – “What if you owned your own internet connection?” See also: Google on How to Change the Internet: You Should Own Your Broadband Pipes

Ultrasonic 3D mouse:

Company warned officials of flu 18 days before alert was issued – “A Washington state biosurveillance firm raised the first warning about a possible outbreak of swine flu in Mexico more than two weeks before the World Health Organization offered its initial alert about a public health emergency of international concern…”

Anatomy of a crash – “When Ford’s engineers sat down to design a suite of safety features for the new Falcon range they began by breaking down the crash “event” into 1/1000ths of a second partitions to help them design a state-of-the-art safety system…”

Google Rents Goats To Replace Lawnmowers (I’m Not Kidding) – “picture-3In what absolutely reads like an April Fools joke, Google has a post on its blog today explaining how it has rented a herd of goats to replace the lawnmowers that normally cut the grass in the fields around its headquarters. This is Google’s “low-carbon” approach to maintaining its property…”

Finding 1 atom in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – “Physicists are used to dealing with rare events and very small quantities, but rarely do they tackle a challenge of the kind facing the Enriched Xenon Observatory, or EXO. To find what they’re looking for, not only will they try to find a rare event, but to be sure they will need to find a single barium atom in the 10 ton bath of liquid xenon–1028 atoms…”

Study: Cat Parasite Affects Human Culture – “A parasitic microbe commonly found in cats might have helped shape entire human cultures by manipulating the personalities of infected individuals, according to a new study…”

Greatest 101 questions of all time – “The ’101 greatest questions of all time’ have been answered in a BBC magazine. Here we present the first twenty…”

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