Swimming with dolphins. Everyone yaps on about wanting to do that before they die. But swimming with tuna?

 "For some reason, when you tell people you're going swimming with tuna, they laugh in your face. It sounds inherently absurd, and I'm not entirely sure why. I think it's because we often encounter tuna in tins. Also – and I know this is a stupid thing to think, but it's hard not to think it – there's that smell. You expect tuna to smell like, well, to smell like tuna, even though they're still alive, still in one piece and, most importantly, they're underwater where you can't smell anything."
Charlie Brooker / The Guardian / continue reading

I'm Dead

I'm Dead, 2010 Taxidermy puppy with wooden sign and acrylic paint by David Shrigley.

'Flying Sperm'

It's called Argus One; the Pentagon's newest unmanned spy plane. But cheeky observers are already calling it the 'Flying Sperm'. It has the capacity to carry 30 pounds of high tech sensors and cameras and the ability to hover over remote locations between 10,000 and 20,000 feet, even in rough weather. The suspect design has been attributed to improved 'flight stability and aerodynamic control' as well as giving the aircraft a longer flight time.
 

The artist who creates amazing pictures using smoke

At first glance, these works look like standard charcoal-smudged paintings. That's close, but no cigar - because they have, in fact, been created by smoke. The amazing pictures were created by Rob Tarbell, who achieved the effect by burning everyday objects, such as photos and credit cards, and then capturing the smoke on paper attached to the ceiling.
 

18th Century mummified kitty falls out of ceiling as house is being renovated

Bringing old homes up to scratch is nothing out of the ordinary for property renovators Andrew and George Hartley, But this professional couple nearly jumped out their skin when greeted by their most recent form of preservation - as a mummified cat fell on them.
 

Go with the flow system

"New fundamental laws don't pop up every day in science. Yet that's exactly what Adrian Bejan claims to have discovered: a basic principle of nature, overlooked until now, that governs the evolution of everything from river basins to athletic performance and human culture. Bejan, a mechanical engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been writing about his so-called "constructal law" in the technical literature for over a decade. Design in Nature, co-written with journalist J. Peder Zane, is his attempt to bring his big idea to a general audience. Bejan's thesis is based on flow systems. In his eyes they cover almost everything: rivers (and trees, too) are flow systems for the water that courses through them; human commerce is a flow system for moving goods around the planet; universities and culture are flow systems for ideas. And his constructal law is simple: flows tend to get better - faster and longer - with time."
By Bob Holmes /continue reading

Human Nature and the Neurobiology of Conflict

Areas of inquiry once reserved for historians and social scientists are now studied by neuroscientists, and among the most fascinating is cultural conflict. Science alone won't provide the answers, but it can offer new insights into how social behavior reflects -- and perhaps even shapes -- basic human biology. An upcoming issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B features a collection of new studies on the biology of conflict.
  On the following pages, Wired looks at the findings.
 

The last swimming elephant

Swimming elephants like 60-year-old Rajan used to be a regular sight in the Andaman Islands, south of India, but this five ton Asian elephant is now the last of his kind.
 

How to choose what you share with Google

Google’s decision to unify 60 of its services under one privacy policy has set off renewed interest in how, exactly, Google account holders have their privacy settings configured. The data integration component of the company’s new policy governs mostly what your Google accounts share with each other, and can’t be configured service by service. But Google users have control over some of what they share with the company itself through their accounts. The search giant offers a couple of options on what information is associated with any given Google account.
 By Hayley Tsukayama /continue reading
 

If you love something, Set it free..

Planning to pop the marriage question on Valentine's Day?

A study in the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family may make you reconsider.
 While married couples enjoy some health advantages (likely because of shared health care plans), the study found that unmarried couples who live together are generally happier and have better self-esteem.

Cyanide & Happiness

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Why do we like some films and novels, but not others?

"Casablanca is one of the most loved films of all time. Why is this? Once again, it seems to have to do with right and wrong. The first part of the film depicts people's attempts to flee the Nazis in Europe during the Second World War, by making for Casablanca from where they can leave for Lisbon, from where passages are still available to America. Then the film is taken up with a moving love story between Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). In the film's single long flashback, we see them happy in Paris before it's over-run by the Nazis, having told each other they wouldn't ask about their previous lives. Ilsa fails to keep an appointment with Rick, to leave Paris with him by train, but now, in Casablanca, she appears with a husband, the freedom fighter, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henried). If Casablanca is a film you love, you will know that rather than resonate with the usual Hollywood fantasy that love conquers all, in which Rick and Ilsa would leave for Lisbon and go to live happily ever after in Illinois or Nebraska, Rick arranges for Ilsa to leave with her husband. He does the right thing. The reason we like the film is that it resonates with our belief, embedded in a deep and important fantasy which perhaps can motivate our lives, that doing the right thing is the right thing to do."
By Keith Oatley
 

Rotary Dial phones

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Stretching spider silk to its high-tech limits

The marvellous stuff that spiders and silkworms make has a big future in technologies from artificial corneas to brain implants, as Jessica Griggs finds out.
 

Waiter!!!

Just a Tiny Piglet

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Scotch

 A lady goes to the bar on a cruise ship and orders a Scotch with two drops of water.

As the bartender gives her the drink she says, 'I'm on this cruise to celebrate my 80th birthday and it's today..'

The bartender says, 'Well, since it's your birthday, I'll buy you a drink. In fact, this one is on me.'

As the woman finishes her drink, the woman to her right says, 'I would like to buy you a drink, too.'

The old woman says, 'Thank you. Bartender, I want a Scotch with two drops of water.'

'Coming up,' says the bartender.

As she finishes that drink, the man to her left says, 'I would like to buy you one, too.'

The old woman says, 'Thank you. Bartender, I want another Scotch with two drops of water.'

'Coming right up,' the bartender says.

As he gives her the drink, he says, 'Ma'am, I'm dying of curiosity.

Why the Scotch with only two drops of water?'

The old woman replies, 'Sonny, when you're my age, you've learned how to hold your liquor. Holding your water, however, is a whole other issue.'

EU

 BigFun.be

Unusual floral tributes left at graves in cemeteries

A Flickr user called London Looks has photographed unusual floral tributes left at graves in Lambeth Cemetery, South London, over a number of years. The items that people leave to remember their loved ones are sometimes revealing - popular tributes include alcohol, gambling and sports memorabilia.

 

Photographs of primates by Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers

They say that little separates us from the apes and these humorously human portraits by British wildlife photographers Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers show just how close we really are. The collection of photos of apes and monkeys in the wild shows that it's not just use humans who like to monkey around.
 

Wulffmorgenthaler

Wulffmorgenthaler.com

Google's Broken Promise

"In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services—Gmail, Search, YouTube and more—and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for. The change was announced in a blog post today, and will go into effect March 1. After that, if you are signed into your Google Account to use any service at all, the company can use that information on other services as well."
  via Gizmodo / more

The Best Human-Robot Buddy Movie Ever Made?

"One of the hits at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is Robot and Frank, an unusual story of a lonely old man named Frank who makes friends with a household robot—who becomes his accomplice to burglary. (Yesterday, io9 labeled it the “next great science-fiction indie.”) The film is set in the near future. Frank is losing his memory, the robot has perfect memory, and together, it turns out, they make a good team for crime. I know that sounds like it might be really terrible: a heist/sci-fi/buddy movie that’s about old age? But it somehow works, thanks to careful writing and a talented cast, including Frank Langella (as Frank), Susan Sarandon (as a librarian Frank has a crush on), and Liv Tyler as Frank’s daughter. (The robot is voiced by Peter Sarsgaard.) The film is more E.T. than 2001, charming and sentimental rather than terrifying. But it sneaks a few serious messages in as well. The movie asks whether being truly alive depends in some sense on having a working memory. And the film hits a nerve when it makes clear just how much easier it can be to love our machines than our family members, especially when the former are programmed to help us, and the latter, seemingly, programmed to irritate."
By Tim Wu
 

2pm in Scotland...

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8-Year-Old Girl Shreds Guitar

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How does air flow across a wing to generate lift?

Since a wing's top surface is curved, it covers a greater distance compared to the flatter bottom edge. A common explanation is that air moves faster over the top so that it reaches the end of the wing at the same time as the bottom flow, lowering the pressure on the top surface. But this pressure explanation is just a myth, explains Holger Babinsky, professor of aerodynamics at the University of Cambridge. In an attempt to debunk the misconception, he filmed pulses of smoke flowing around an aerofoil. He pauses the motion in the video to show that the transit times over the top and bottom are not equal. The lines of smoke from the top have already surpassed the bottom ones once they reach the wing's tip. Babinsky explains that, although lift is caused by a pressure change between the top and bottom surfaces, it's due to the change in the shape of the air flow, rather than its speed. "This is why a flat surface like a sail is able to cause lift," he says. "In this case, the distance on each side is the same but it is slightly curved when it's rigged, acting like an aerofoil."
  Physics in a Minute