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Whoa, this bird is way too lucky. Looks like it suffers a concussion followed by drowning?

Watch out! High traffic flow of dolphins coming through.
View this funny Dolphin Birdie video clip.

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The new beer is said to taste cleaner and smoother.

A brewery in Greenland is producing beer using water melted from the ice cap of the vast Arctic island. The brewers claim that the water is at least 2,000 years old and free of minerals and pollutants.

The first 66,000 litres of the new dark and pale ales are on their way to the Danish market.

The beer from Greenland - a semi-autonomous Danish territory - has 5.5% alcohol and costs 37 kroner (£3.4; five euros) per half-litre bottle.

It is the first ever Inuit microbrewery - located in Narsaq, a hamlet 625km (390 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.

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It is claimed that the Greenland beer, officially launched in Copenhagen on Monday, has a softer, cleaner taste than other beers, because of the ice cap water.

The gigantic island of Greenland measures 2.2 million square km (844,000 square miles) - 85% of it covered with ice that is up to 4,000 metres (11,000 feet) thick.

Source: bbc.co.uk

Cleaner? Maybe… Water is clean, but once you put the crops in the water during brewing process, you introduce contaminants (eg, minerals & metals) into the water. No? So, is it really cleaner?

Not all minerals are bad. For example, fluoride in tap water helps fight dental caries.

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Cyril Takayama—the famous Japanese Street Magician boils a bottle of water directly inside the cup noodle with his bare hands. Unbelievable! You can actually see steam coming out of the cup’s lid. Very impressive. Gotta watch? Where does he hide the heat source???
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Pluto with its largest moon, Charon, is now a dwarf planet

Pluto is named after an underworld god, and that thing however you want to call it has been a topic of intense debate. I wonder if it has anything to do with its name? Who’s gonna determine an underworld god’s fate? Life after death?

A fierce backlash has begun against the decision by astronomers to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

On Thursday, experts approved a definition of a planet that demoted Pluto to a lesser category of object.

But the lead scientist on Nasa’s robotic mission to Pluto has lambasted the ruling, calling it “embarrassing”.

And the chair of the committee set up to oversee agreement on a definition implied that the vote had effectively been “hijacked”.

The vote took place at the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) 10-day General Assembly in Prague. The IAU has been the official naming body for astronomy since 1919.

Only 424 astronomers who remained in Prague for the last day of the meeting took part.

Ok 424 astronomers showed up in the voting, but how many were supposed to be there initially??? Did people give up their votes and why?

Dr Alan Stern, who leads the US space agency’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and did not vote in Prague, told BBC News: “It’s an awful definition; it’s sloppy science and it would never pass peer review - for two reasons.

“Firstly, it is impossible and contrived to put a dividing line between dwarf planets and planets. It’s as if we declared people not people for some arbitrary reason, like ‘they tend to live in groups’.

“Secondly, the actual definition is even worse, because it’s inconsistent.”

One of the three criteria for planethood states that a planet must have “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit”. The largest objects in the Solar System will either aggregate material in their path or fling it out of the way with a gravitational swipe.

Pluto was disqualified because its highly elliptical orbit overlaps with that of Neptune.

But Dr Stern pointed out that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have also not fully cleared their orbital zones. Earth orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids. Jupiter, meanwhile, is accompanied by 100,000 Trojan asteroids on its orbital path.

This is like an action-reaction dilemma, some readers pointed out. If Pluto is disqualified, Neptune should be disqualified as well, no? Who is bumping into who, anyway??? Relative perspectives.

E-voting

Professor Gingerich, who had to return home to the US and therefore could not vote himself, said he would like to see electronic ballots introduced in future.

Alan Stern agreed: “I was not allowed to vote because I was not in a room in Prague on Thursday 24th. Of 10,000 astronomers, 4% were in that room - you can’t even claim consensus.

Read more on: bbc.co.uk

Ok, so…only 4% of astronomers in that room on August 24, 2006. Now people are considering electronic vote, so that everyone will have a chance to say.

Well, why not just wait until the satellite probe reaches Pluto in year 2015 and then decide again? Definitions are man-made. They can be challenged and changed at any time as our knowledge grow further.

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The following is not an ordinary photograph created by regular digital camera. It’s a picture produced by living genetically-engineered E. coli bacteria—an alive 100-megapixel camera.

University of Texas at Austin Molecular Biology Department: A bacteria-produced photo of an enlarged E. coli bacterium—a “self portrait.”

PC Magazine:
It’s been a rough few years for film. First digital photography took all of its glory—and now even lowly bacteria can capture a Kodak moment. Using a genetically modified form of E coli—the bacteria that can wreak havoc at cookouts—researchers at the University of California San Francisco have developed a biological light sensor. The images it creates take hours to form and are monochrome only, but bacteria’s minute size allows for super-high resolution, about 100 megapixels per square inch—ten times what you can get today.

Holy macro. This “BioFilm” can potentially generate a resolution of 100MP per square inch!!! With this magnification, will the photo become ugly??? Imagine you can see things on your face that cannot be seen with your naked eyes. Micro deep valleys (aka wrinkles), maybe? More biofilm pictures here.

University of Texas at Austin:
Students Aaron Chevalier, Jeff Tabor and Laura Lavery beam with pride when passing around their new pictures. But the photos they’re showing off aren’t from a backpacking trip around Europe or a hiking expedition in the Rockies. They’re passing around some of the first-ever bacterial photographs—living pictures they created on biological film made of E. coli bacteria.

The ghostlike photos—images of people, words and buildings—were made when the students exposed Petri dishes holding billions of genetically engineered E. coli to patterns of light. A new biological circuit in the E. coli gives them the ability to sense light and make black pigment. Each bacterium acts like a pixel on a computer screen, turning black when growing in the dark part of a projection and staying clear in the light.

The University of Texas at Austin students made the bacterial photographs for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, which encourages students to build simple biological machines.

There’s no winner of the iGEM contest, but the team was rewarded when their research was published in the Nov. 26 issue of Nature, in an issue focused on the field of synthetic biology.

Read more on: utexas.edu

Already people have come up with ideas to apply this BioFilm technology in our daily living. Here is one at UCSF: Targeting Tumors with Bacteria to Create Tumor Imaging.

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