A: Bad, bad stuff.

This new(ish) article in Discover explains what happens to your neural architecture when your brain gets beat up repeatedly.

Just like the title says, really.

Stephen Hawking, writing for the Daily Mail¹, describes how to build a time machine.

1. A piece that seems excerpted from his new TV series [↑]

Albert Einstein, the genius physicist whose theories changed our ideas of how the universe works, died 55 years ago, on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse. Armed with his camera and a case of scotch — to open doors and loosen tongues — Morse compiled a quietly intense record of an icon’s passing.

Some pretty stirring stuff.

What happens when you add water, a silicone surface and a laser? Gravity-defying water, apparently:

[P]rofessor Chunlei Guo and his assistant Anatoliy Vorobyev demonstrate that by carving intricate patterns in silicon with extremely short, high-powered laser bursts, they can get liquid to climb to the top of a silicon chip like it was being sucked through a straw.

The folks at Popular Science have partnered with Google to make every single issue in the magazine’s 137-year catalogue available online. In full, scanned glory. For free.

It’s a good day.

See also: Drift Station Bravo.

Discover blogger Sean Caroll, wielding an adapted passage from his book, dispels some popular myths about time travel:

Since time is kind of like space (the four dimensions go hand in hand), a working time machine would zoom off like a rocket rather than disappearing in a puff of smoke.

Read more.

The January issue of Wired included an extremely interesting story on the benefits of replacing uranium nuclear reactors with thorium nuclear reactors. Among other things, thorium doesn’t create dangerous waste, doesn’t produce plutonium and is both infinitely efficient and very common.

The article mentions a blog—Energy From Thorium, run by aerospace engineer Kirk Sorensen—that’s worth a look if the above appeals to you in the slightest.

Right or wrong, the Norwegian Sky Spiral appears to have brought renewed scrutiny to the Department of Defense’s disturbing, ionosphere-boiling HAARP Project. The accompanying gallery of pictures.

Soviet Russia had one too. It’s since been abandoned. Here’s some pictures of that.