Stevefaces (gallery)

• ‘Stomach share’ The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
• How stomach bacteria may affect weight gain
• New study to measure effect of hip hop music on native birds
• This Whale’s (After) Life
  Studies into how a single whale’s body can support an ecosystem for years familiar to those of hydrothermal vents.
• Boxcar Energy – Brilliant new strategies for storing power. No. 4: First you roll a train uphill …
• Airline to charge overweight passengers more
• The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet
• How to Build Your Own Syncing RSS Reader with Tiny Tiny RSS
• The Saddest Map In America
  Charts the “missed connections” of Craigslist
• With S3, The Walking Dead is a “different show”—the most interesting one yet
• 10 amazing scientific facts about lists
• Huey Lewis reverses roles in this clever American Psycho parody

History of Comics in 6 Panels with write up via Paul Lopes

• The first color 360-degree panorama from Curiosity
• The Internet May Have Upended Traditional Institutions, But It’s a Brittle Weapon
• The Internet Archive Now Offers Torrent Downloads
• New software that helps employers read your emotional state
• New Global Warming Culprit: Dams
• New salt-based battery a leap for green energy
• How rogue biohackers are revolutionising the human body
• The science of Staring
• A new prehistoric species of humans identified
• Conservative pundits are plain wrong: Barack Obama hasn’t lost Europe. That was his predecessor’s doing.
• How billionaire backers pick America’s candidates
• The Fog of War: How can we talk about the military if we can’t define what it is?
• The Elephant in the Map Room: The Israel/Palestine Border
• The 1916 Shark Attacks that were the inspiration for Jaws
• Wait… There’s a 30 minute longer cut of The Shining?

The Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition winners

• Great fun/dumb science video: How powerful is an MRI magnet?
• Scientists develop a spray on battery
• Has the Speediest Pulsar Been Found?
• Upcoming Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies That Aren’t Remakes, Sequels or Prequels
• Awesome personal account: Intolerable intolerance
• Crazy: Ex-Wall Street banker, may have swallowed poison pill during courtroom conviction for arson

Finally, along with this Phil Plait write up (bookmark him!) is this really cool video from NASA detailing the recent observations of a giant planet 63 light years from Earth orbiting only 4 million kilometers from its sun. So close is this, that its atmosphere is being boiled and blasted away, streaming a tail of gas ‘behind’ it.

Fuck do I love the crazy/cool things out there for us to keep discovering. Keep it up Universe.

Researchers at MIT are well on the way to developing a new alternate type of battery that in essence is a soft state liquid, making it easier to ‘refuel’ electronics, from electric cars to basically whatever the hell they’ll think of next.

The new battery relies on an innovative architecture called a semi-solid flow cell, in which solid particles are suspended in a carrier liquid and pumped through the system. In this design, the battery’s active components — the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes — are composed of particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. These two different suspensions are pumped through systems separated by a filter, such as a thin porous membrane.
The new design should make it possible to reduce the size and the cost of a complete battery system, including all of its structural support and connectors, to about half the current levels. That dramatic reduction could be the key to making electric vehicles fully competitive with conventional gas- or diesel-powered vehicles, the researchers say.

The concept of this is so brilliant and forward thinking, even just theoretical applications of use, not just to cars, already conjures up all sorts of different uses that’ll make our everyday lives more fluid and efficient. The future, I fucking love it. Read more on it here.