It seems Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner's legacy to the world is more than just a publishing empire. He also gave his name to a rabbit called Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, native to the marshes of the Lower Florida Keys.
Hefner earned the honour by donating money to support fieldwork on the rabbits, declared endangered in 1990. Yet today less than 300 remain.
What better way to celebrate the London Science Museum's centenary than with a chorus of "Happy Birthday", here sung in a particularly eerie way by three robots.
Two put together start singing randomly at one another. But soon start to repeat only the sections of their own song that are similar to those produced by their partner. Given enough time the two robots begin to properly duet. Although probably not as tunefully as those serenading the Science Museum in the video in after continue reading link.
Yesterday a coalition of environmental groups put out a joint press
release accusing a British company of "funding the imminent destruction of a critical
area of Indonesian rainforest". At the same time, The Independent newspaper had a detailed piece on how the oil boom is threatening the last orang-utans.
The report by
Greenpeace, Sumatran Orangutan Society and Wetlands
International said Jardine Matheson,
which is an "indirect shareholder" of Astra Agro Lestari (AAL) in Indonesia is planning to clear forests in Aceh province, northern Sumatra,
for palm oil plantation.
Next time you want something, direct your request to your target's right ear.
In experiments performed at disco, a team of Italian researchers and their female accomplice tried just that approach. Her mission: to bum a smoke:
"If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear," according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy.
"Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the
researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on
the left," reports Wired.com.
A rap video starring Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is now online, after a hint it might be coming in a New York Times interview published last week. The song is Rocket Experience, and it's quite entertaining. But the biggest treat is the spoof behind-the-scenes video with rap luminaries Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli.
The video, embedded below, reveals the space geek story behind the hip hop collaboration Black Star and an abiding rivalry between "Earth walkers" and "moon walkers".
"I have only two passions: space exploration and hip hop," Aldrin says.
Being charitable, you could call it a PR misstep. When a female porn performer tested positive for HIV earlier this month, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health went on the offensive, announcing that at least 22 adult film actors had tested positive since 2004 - 16 of which had not previously been publicized.
Adult film producers may deserve to be taken to task for getting actors to perform unprotected sex acts that are inherently unsafe. But when taking on a multi-billion dollar industry, it pays to get your facts straight - something that LA County health officials are learning the hard way.
Reporters were originally told that the figures were based on reports of occupation given by people who had tested HIV positive. But earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported that county director of public health Jonathan Fielding had admitted that he didn't know for sure whether all the individuals were porn performers.
Who hasn't found a long-lost roller skate or tennis racquet after reorganising a closet or garage?
With three days left in spring cleaning season, a US army lab that works on the world's deadliest pathogens has turned up uncatalogued vials of Ebola, anthrax, plague and other pathogens - 9220 of them to be precise.
The laboratory is the same one where anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins worked before he committed suicide last year. The US government suspects Ivins was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, and studies showed that the anthrax used in the attack was "directly related" to the batch stored at the lab.
The winner of the Golden Clone Giveaway - a competition to find the world's most "cloneworthy" dog - has been presented with his cloned puppies.
Trust, Valor, Prodigy, Solace and Deja Vu are clones of Trakr, a German shepherd that with his handler was one of the first to arrive and begin searching for survivors on September 12, 2001 at the site of the World Trade Center. Trakr located the last human survivor rescued from the rubble.
Take a jumpy media, throw in a statement hastily translated from Portuguese, and what have you got? A "new" and potentially deadly strain of H1N1 influenza in Brazil, according to a rash of news stories that appeared earlier today.
"It was not yet known whether the new strain was more aggressive than the current A(H1N1) virus which has been declared pandemic by the World Health Organization," reported Agence France Presse, setting the mood for a new round of pandemic panic.
But this "new" strain is nothing of the sort. In fact, the sequence of its gene for the haemagglutinin surface protein, deposited in the GenBank database, is the same as isolates from several other countries. "[It] has nothing surprising about it and is identical to others," Richard Webby of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, told New Scientist.
A traffic jam at Florida's launch pads is causing a back-up that literally stretches all the way to the moon.
On Wednesday, two NASA spacecraft – the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite – were supposed to blast off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on their respective missions to map out and crash into the moon. But now, their launch has been postponed until Thursday to give the space shuttle Endeavour a chance to lift off on a mission to bring an experiment platform to the International Space Station.
It's nine months since the Large Hadron Collider lurched into life, sent a beam of protons whizzing through its 27-kilometer-long tunnel for just over a week - and then broke down. Although the episode was a setback for the physics facility, it didn't stand in the way of the successful Large Hadron Rap, which appeared on virtually every news and science site at the time.
So when Michigan State University announced late last year that it would be building a new particle accelerator in East Lansing, Michigan, the physicists there asked Kate McAlpine, aka Alpinekat, to mark the occasion with a rap. Read on to watch the new Rare Isotope Rap.
Hanford in Washington State was a hive of activity during the 1940s as the US began to stockpile weapons-grade plutonium for its atomic bomb programme. Those efforts have left the area contaminated with radiation and earned it the title of "dirtiest place on Earth".
The clean-up operations that began there in 2004 are uncovering some real oddities. Earlier this year researchers found one of the first samples of purified plutonium ever prepared in a dirty glass bottle inside a battered old safe (see image, above).
Now comes news that thousands of wasp nests built at the site in 2003, and now being dug up, are "fairly highly contaminated" with radioactive isotopes of caesium and cobalt. The nests do not pose a threat to workers, apparently. Excavators are digging up the wasps' radioactive homes and will bury the nests in a landfill elsewhere on the site, possibly for future archaeologists to puzzle over.
Spaceflight is risky and can be gruelling, but videos like this one, via Pink Tentacle, highlight just how fun it can be. Here, astronaut Koichi Wakata, who has been on the space station since March and is due to return to Earth on the next shuttle mission, performs some tasks suggested by the public that take advantage of the station's microgravity environment. These include flying on a 'magic carpet' (fast-forward to 2:21) and 'swimming' (his weightlessness does somewhat detract from the impressiveness of the one-handed push-ups, however).
If you've ever hoped lunar astronauts might actually bust into Michael Jackson's moonwalk, your prayers have been answered.
Things have felt awfully serious at NASA in recent weeks, so the space agency's latest effort at outreach and education brings some welcome light relief.
NASA's "Space Your Face" application allows you to upload a portrait photo into an astronaut helmet, and then watch as your avatar throws down some moves to funky tunes on Mars or the moon.
As someone whose best dance move is something akin to the "hot potato", I felt I was able live my dream via my talented astronaut alter-ego.
Microscope images of insects never disappoint. But the one below is more compelling than usual.
It's stitched together from 136 different 800x images taken with a scanning electron microscope. As a result, you can explore the whole ant in tremendous detail. If you click the "full image" link below the viewer, you can view, make and share snapshots from the image. View the full image at GigaPan.org
Contrary to Hollywood notions, the 40-year-old virgin is not an awkward yet funny and endearing
electronics salesman played by Steve Carell.
He is a church-going teetotaller who has neither been to jail
nor served in the military, according to a new survey of more than 7000 people.
He also represents an estimated 1.1 million American men and 800,000 women aged
25 to 45 who have never had sex.
For most of us, the announcement that another billionaire space tourist is heading to the International Space Station amounts to little more than a passing blip on the news radar.
As a Canadian, my interest picked up when I found out that it is Guy Laliberté, founder and CEO of Cirque du Soleil, who is scheduled to fly to the station aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule this September. An avid poker player and colourful entertainer who got his start as a stilt-walker and fire-breather, Laliberté would seem to be the ideal astronaut. The news of his trip immediately conjures up images of the gravity-defying acrobatics that Cirque du Soleil is so well known for.
African farmers hope to stop "Genghis Khan" raiding their villages by enlisting the services of bees.
A notorious bull elephant named after the Mongolian warlord has been tracked by GPS leading crop raids in Kenya.
Since elephants are known to buzz off at the mere sound of bees, Lucy King of the University of Oxford designed a fence made of beehives to deter rampaging elephants. 'We designed the beehive fence as an affordable and practical way to create a barrier that the elephants would be afraid to cross,' she says.
The science writer Simon Singh is appealing against the widely criticised ruling by high court judge David Eady that his article about the British
Chiropractic Association (BCA) had effectively accused them of "deliberate and targeted" dishonesty.
Singh wrote in The Guardian newspaper that the BCA had been "happily" promoting "bogus"
treatments - and the BCS sued him for libel.
The charity Sense About Science has launched an appeal to support Singh and to keep libel laws out of science. It has already got a diverse range of star names on board, including Martins Rees and Amis, comedian Ricky Gervais, Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins.
For an analysis of the evidential basis of chiropractic, click here.
China has blocked its citizens from accessing Twitter, Hotmail and Flickr, two days ahead of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square.
Reuters quotes a Beijing-based technology commentator as saying "the whole Twitter community in China has been exploding with it". But it is not clear whether the blocks have been put in place to stop people exchanging information about the massacre of student-democracy activists by the army 20 years ago.
Blocking Twitter will stop China-based web users from accessing international tweets, but China has lots of home-grown microblogging sites, called "叨客 (dao ke)", meaning "chatter blog". Fifty 5 reviews some of them here and more are listed here. Have these microbloggers been prevented from talking about the massacre?