NUMBER 61

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.

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.

Research to take to heart. While slacking off may be pushing it, neuroscience suggests that, perversely, workahaulics can maximize their output over time by working somewhat less often.

Via The Morning News

See also: 30 Minutes a Day.

If the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (read: the universe) could be represented by a finite amount of water—and it can; as far as we know, the universe is finite—would drinking all of it at once be a danger to science?

Via New Scientist, the downside of knowing everything all at once.

Lost productivity during the recession has caused a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions roughly equivalent to the reduction that would result from shutting the planet down for three days.

NPR’s David Kestenbaum wonders whether it has left behind an ecological record—tree rings, ice gas-bubbles, etc—that could someday be ‘read’ by alien visitors.

Originally published in Seed Magazine in 2006: Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers sit down for a lengthy discussion about deceit, self-deception and denial.

Here’s the transcript. Have at it, nerds!

The Large Hadron Collider finally worked.

Granted, it was only a low-power calibration run—pure bush league stuff. Stay tuned for the real, reality-ending stuff.

On a semi-related note, here’s your required viewing for the weekend: The Quiet Earth.

Yes, there will be an exam.

Blue means go, yellow means stop: controlling animal brains with genes from light-sensitive algae.

I know.

Hot news: a captive dolphin in Mississippi masters the market economy.

The end is (probably) near.

The Large Hadron Collider is stalled again. This time, one of its cooling units was mysteriously jammed up by a baguette sent from the future.

Also, Bill Bryson visited the LHC and wrote an article about it for The Times .

Last: In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson.

If you ever meet a crow, keep this in mind: it’s got quite a memory for faces—apparently to the extent that it could pick you out of a crowd, follow you home and remember you for years.

While your mind is reeling, read this article. And then watch this video of a crow solving a puzzle that would leave a chimp scratching its head.

Thanks, Sam

Ever find yourself wondering how likely it is that you’ll be flattened by frozen, falling toilet waste from an airplane? Me too!

Try not to freak out, but a 10-meter-wide asteroid exploded somewhere high over Indonesia earlier this month with about three times the force of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Here’s a newscast with some amateur footage of the resulting dust trail—which, admittedly, doesn’t look half as hellish as I’ve been led to expect that it should.

[T]he issue this time around, at the end of the twentieth century, is not the evolution of the species, which can seem a remote business, but the nature of our own precious inner selves.

Tom Wolfe, in 1996, on the troubling implications of modern neuroscience. It’s a little dated by now, but it dovetails nicely with yesterday’s post.

What is a mind—a soul or a brain? As David Brooks wrote last month, that’s the trendiest question in modern science.

But when you think about it, the issue broke free of academic science a long time ago. For sure, it’s undermined the popular distinction between clinical depression and plain old despair. And it’s given rise to a new, annoying trend in literature: the neuronovel.