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Who wrote the plays of William Shakespeare?
by Ben Bowlin | March 22, 2011
In the video below, renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro takes a crack at debunking one of literature’s most famous conspiracy theories. The idea that William Shakespeare didn’t actually write any of his plays supposedly dates back to the 17th century, and over the decades scholars (and a fair share of crackpots) have attributed the most [...]
On New Year’s Eve, sanitation workers at the Cherry Island landfill in Wilmington, Delaware made a gruesome discovery as they unloaded trash from their route in Newark. Somewhere along their usual circuit, they’d picked up a human body. The mystery deepened when the corpse was identified as that of Washington insider John P. Wheeler III. [...]
It only took the Catholic Church close to four centuries to apologize over the whole Galileo fiasco, but today’s Vatican seems to have some fairly progressive ideas regarding our place in the cosmos. Vatican astronomers Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father Gabriel Funes continue to stir up discussion with talk of planetary exploration ethics and the possible existence of alien life.
It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does happen it is spectacular. A video goes up on YouTube and it takes off like a rocket with tens of millions of views. It happened to Susan Boyle: Susan Boyle, the overnight sensation It happened with the wedding video: How to have a fun wedding It [...]
First Full Face Transplant in the United States
by Charles W. Bryant | March 22, 2011
We did a podcast some time ago about face transplants. Medical science is pretty remarkable these days and I think the episode really highlighted some of the breakthroughs in facial reconstruction, or in this case, full transplant. At the time, there had only been one such operation performed – for a French woman who lost her face due to a very unfortunate incident with her dog. It was pretty disturbing to say the least and we heard from a lot of you who had a hard time getting through the episode.
PlayBook Gets a Launch Date, BlackBerry Says Game On
by Jonathan Strickland | March 22, 2011
Today is the first official day of the CTIA 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida. CTIA is the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry. The day has already started off with a bang as RIM announced the official launch date for the anticipated BlackBerry tablet called the PlayBook. The device hits store shelves on April 19 and you can preorder a device today.
The description calls it “56 Amazing Ping Pong ‘Beer Pong’ Trick Shots” and it certainly is that: But if you have been around the Internet for awhile you know that there is more than one person like this in the world, and they often seem to live in fabulous houses: Turns out there are dozens [...]
Salt Grain-Sized Cameras Can Travel Inside Body – “A new camera is as small as a coarse grain of salt — the tiniest of its kind. This microcamera could go far: traveling deep into the human body to reveal hidden nooks and crannies. And it could be used in cars to keep drivers safe….” Internet [...]
In honor of Wired’s “I See Rock People: Mimetoliths of the World” gallery, I decided to see grass people today — specifically, the grass man below, who appears to be shoulder-deep in lawn. Doesn’t he look like he’s coming up for air after taking a dip in the ground?
Leaf-cutter Ants and the Future of Space Agriculture
by Robert Lamb | March 21, 2011
An ancient race has come to dominate a single agricultural crop, one in which they’ve invested everything to sustain their massive population. They’re one vicious blight away from starvation, but at this point there’s no returning to the source. Their precious crop is a million years extinct in the natural world and there’s no going home. It sounds like an ideal plight for a futuristic generation ship, adrift among the stars with a belly full of space crops, but this is of course the story of the leaf-cutter ant.
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