Photo credit: SOHO/ESA & NASA

The Sun erupts in flares (as seen through a SOHO ultraviolet telescope.)

Hat tip: Smithsonian Magazine

FCC Net Neutrality; The End of Unlimited Internet?

Hold Off On Network Neutrality

Do you like Twitter?

Have you ever wished that you could bypass the direct message, because you know that it would be a long back and forth?

Well...

Jajah, based in California, has come out with a beta of JAJAH@call, that allows you to call other Twitter users - all you need to know is their Twitter username.

"JAJAH gives short messages a voice. With the new JAJAH application, Twitter users can make free phone calls on their favorite microblogging service. Now in Beta, JAJAH@Call allows you to make a free two minute call (the verbal equivalent of a tweet) to other JAJAH@Call users. It’s free, it’s easy and works no matter how you use Twitter, whether it’s on your cellphone, via Seesmic, TweetDeck, or any other way."

Sweet... and free :-)

don't forget to take into account the impact of climate change ...

before and after pics of a would-be world dominator's arctic lair... :-/

For more info on the impact of climate change on the Evil Overlord™ real estate market, check out The Onion's article on this issue.


[The pic is from The Onion article]

If you check out the source code for this page, you will notice that the source code is not, well... compact.

Go look at it, I'll wait....

Ok. Seems like *someone* has a real love for the 8pt font, right? Seems pretty silly... until...

When you look at Google Earth from the point of view of the Fujinon headquarters, you can see Mount Fuji.

When you take a printout of the source code, and put it against the silhouette of the view, you can see that it mirrors the view.

Image credit

Awesome! Talk about 'attention to detail'!!


Hat tip: Geeks Are Sexy

The Rev. Darrell Best's firetruck, shown in a photo he provided, was converted on the Country Music Television show "Trick My Truck." (July 29)


Best said he wanted to give people without a church a chance for a special service. And for $2 per mile, plus a $200 fee, he'll drive the church anywhere.



Full story at the LA Times : A Wedding Chapel on Wheels

Update:


IM2 Comic Con posted recently a video with Iron Man 2, which I embedded... but it has been deleted. When I get another copy, I'll embed it here again.

Sorry; it's just the nature of the Internet, gang!  

While it will be a while before these cells will be useful in the treatment of infertility, don't become too complacent:

A colony of human embryonic stem cells is seen on a computer monitor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
Darren Hauck / Getty

<>The achievement, described in the journal Stem Cells and Development, comes just 11 years after the first human-embryonic-stem-cell line was created — an eyeblink in scientific terms — in the lab of James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin.

Although the development once again raises the specter of creating humans in a petri dish or custom-designing egg and sperm cells for reproduction, lead author Karim Nayernia says that was not his team's intention. Rather, the experiment was a proof of concept that stem cells can generate any cell in the body — not only the dozens of tissues that make up the human body but also those egg and sperm cells that may give rise to altogether new bodies. "Other cell types don't generate the next generation," says Nayernia, a professor of stem-cell biology at Newcastle University. "This makes a very big difference between our study and the study of other cell types from embryonic stem cells."<>


Hat tip to: Time Magazine
& Bloomberg Press

Funko has created a new series of USB flash drives that [successfully, I think] competes with the older Mimoco line of flash drives. They look at lot more like the actual characters, and the packaging says that this set is 'Series 1', so I'd say that there are more Star Wars characters in the pipeline :-)

They will be available in October for US$24.99

Hat tip