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• More than one billion birds crash into buildings in the US every year. Mirrored office blocks are a particular hazard.
• Having breaking news alerts delivered to your mobile phone may seem cutting edge, but the Daily Express pioneered the service back in 1914, offering personal war updates via telegram for a shilling each.
• When people are in love, weird things happen. Men get more female hormones, and women get more male. Scientist Donatella Marazziti says it’s as if nature wants to eliminate what can be different in men and women, perhaps to help the mating process.
• A cruise ship can put more than 130,000 litres of sewage into the sea each day.
• Matt Groening’s father - the inspiration for Homer Simpson - has only complained once about his alter-ego’s actions. It was an episode in which Homer badgered Marge into walking some considerable distance on a hot day to fetch him something.

BBC News has these and other tantalizing factoids, some with additional details, in a list of “100 things we didn’t know this time last year.”

• Nalgene, forever! Or not. Over at Grist, Umbra makes a case against Nalgene bottles. (Although the column is actually a clarification of an earlier column, so if you’re new to the Nalgene question, you may want to do a little reading.)
• How about Orangene? A research team at Cornell has apparently discovered a way to make plastics from citrus fruit. (via BoingBoing)
• It’s all just numbers. Via Alas (and on the tails of the “Summers controversy” ), here’s a mighty interesting graphic, which shows the percentage of women on physics faculty by country:
  
  (I don’t know much about the context or source of this graphic, so it’s of limited usefulness. But assuming it’s not an outright falsehood–for whatever time period–it at least goes toward debunking some of the arguments being tossed around re: women’s cognitive predispositions, etc. etc. etc.)
• Sleep thin. A new study on sleep (yes, another one) seems to indicate that body mass index increases as sleep time decreases. In other words, the thinner sleep longer. As with virtually any sleep study, no one’s sure if there’s actually a cause-effect relationship. But hey, there might be!
• Things left behind.
  

  An estimated 11,300 laptop computers, 31,400 handheld computers and 200,000 mobile telephones were left in taxis around the world during the past six months, a survey found Monday.

  Taxi drivers in nine cities also said they had found a range of other items left by passengers, including a harp, 37 milk bottles, dentures and artificial limbs. One driver said he even found a baby in his taxi.

• No more secrets. Exxonsecrets.org is “the first chapter of a larger Greenpeace project provide a research database of information on the corporate funded anti-environmental movement.” An interactive flash-based tool with lots of information. (via MeFi)
• 35.
  

  Minimum number of countries with a greater capacity to produce nuclear weapons than Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion.

  (via Harper’s)

• Snow.

Due to the fact of being “on the road”, posting will undoubtedly be sporadic.

(More than it has been, that is.)

Also–and this is related –I’m gonna have to apologize for the deranged mumbo-jumbo in the post titles.

Sorry.

Well, apparently the alleged “crystal skulls of doom”¹ are no more than fakes.

Which is somewhat unfortunate, because it’s (they’re) actually kind of neat. (And which begs the question: are there genuine skulls of doom out there?)

(via Guardian Unlimited news blog: “The ancient and wholly rubbish prophecy of the crystal skull”)

Note:
¹ See The Unexplained, by Karl P.N. Shuker, and probably 20 or 30 other books as well.

Give up? Of course you do. Then check out Who Named It?, a would-be haven for medical eponyms. This biographical dictionary of sorts contains 7079 eponyms, and has plans to eventually describe a total of 15,000.

(FYI, the aforementioned syndrome is “autosomal recessive cone-rod dystrophy of the retina,” named for/by Carl-Henry Alström and Olof Olson)

(via h20boro lib blog)

Just FYI.

The Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2004

(via BoingBoing)

Fake bands and science songs: two databases you pretty much can’t do without. Let’s face it, they’re essential.

The former’s a comprehensive list of fake bands, musical groups which do not exist. The latter’s a list of actual songs about—you guessed it—science. And math, too. Though there probably aren’t as many songs about math. (If you’re feeling particularly, what’s the word, industrious? you can check out an internet radio station devoted to these math and science songs.)

(both via Research Buzz)

Touching on a topic near and dear to my heart¹, the Waterboro Public Library weblog has a few links of interest to those faced with the prospect of doing a science fair project.

Note:
¹ Or at least brain. And if I never say “near and dear to my heart” again, it will have been said one time too many. But: water over the bridge, I always say.

Via BBC:

…Alaska is not the only region in a slump. The permafrost melt is accelerating throughout the world’s cold regions, scientists reported at the recent Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.

In addition to northern Alaska, the permafrost zone includes most other Arctic land, such as northern Canada and much of Siberia, as well as the higher reaches of mountainous regions such as the Alps and Tibet. All report permafrost thaw.

In related news—sadly—Michael Crichton takes on the greatest threat the world’s ever seen; not dinosaurs, or microbes, or anything like that: this time it’s the environmentalists!

The environmentalists and their wicked agenda (apparently).

Michiko Kakutani (at the NYT) and Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters (at the weather site wunderground.com) both present good critical reviews of Crichton’s new State of Fear. Kakutani takes Crichton to task for the book as a whole, while Masters takes a closer look at the climate- and science-related aspects of the book.

(BBC News: “Earth’s permafrost starts to squelch,” by Molly Bentley [December 29, 2004]; NYT: “Beware! Tree-Huggers Plot Evil to Save World” by Michiko Kakutani [December 13, 2004]; Wunderground: “Review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear,” by Dr. Jeffrey M. Masters)

…get ‘em while they’re hot!

The Beatles meet The Beastie Boys, courtesy of dj BC.

It’s music.