• Timewaster: Typewar.  Think you know fonts?  Try this game, which you’ll either find completely boring or riveting.
• Best aggregated reference word site: Wordnik.  My favorite reference site right now.  All about words.
• Maps of Disaster: Informative, curious, unnerving.  View map (or maps) of the world, with icons of disaster superimposed.  For added effect, project image onto your office wall.  You’ve got things under control. (This is: a service of the Hungarian Emergency and Disaster Information Service)
• Best specialty science-writing blog: Tetrapod Zoology.  Fascinating, curious, informative, and detailed without alienating those not totally familiar with the science at hand.  Aside: I want this book.
• Best easily digestible good news story: “Feeling grumpy is ‘good for you’” (via BoingBoing).  Bonus: “File photo” used for BBC article appears to have been taken from One Foot in the Grave.

Of course, movies have known for years that this was possible–it’s just taken reality a while to catch up.  Yes, science can see images in your brain, although for now it’s seemingly mostly proof-of-concept, and fairly limited.  (No full color perfect simulacra of your dreams, yet.)

“Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.”

(Via Pinktentacle via Monocrom; also, the complete journal article is available online in PDF format: Neuron: “Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders” by Miyawaki et al. [11 Dec 2008])

Two tidbits from NewScientist:

1. Robots have made their first independent scientific discovery (i.e., made its own hypotheses based on data it was given, and then tested those hypotheses);
2. The internet might soon (or already) be self-aware.

Particularly when it includes things like this.

(via BoingBoing)

“I actually hate cotton candy,” Bellan said. “It’s disgusting. I won’t eat it.”

But on the other hand, the stuff’s apparently got potential as far as the growing human tissue goes.  (And, no, it’s not exactly new.  Not super-new, anyway.)

(via Monochrom)

Nothing I see or read does anything but convince me that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is even more awesome than I’d suspected.

p.s. although what is the square root of a pork chop?

(via monochrom)

Quote:

“One might be able to envision potential applications ranging from medical interventions to use in video gaming or the creation of artificial memories along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in ‘Total Recall.’ Imagine taking a vacation without actually going anywhere?

“Obviously, we need to conduct further research and development…”

(via io9, via EurekAlert: “Ultrasound shown to exert remote control of brain circuits” [29 Oct 2008])

After reading an article on 10 extinct beasts that might conceivably be reintroduced as living, breathing animals on planet earth, is it wrong that the thing I most fiercely crave is to watch a sci-fi movie where the phrase “it might be possible to boot up the moa genome in an ostrich egg” is used?

NewScientist examines 10 extinct species, and looks at the conveniences and difficulties of bringing back each one.

(For the impatient, the beasts are: sabre-toothed tiger, neanderthal, short-faced bear, tasmanian tiger, glyptodon, woolly rhinoceros, dodo, giant ground sloth, moa, Irish elk, giant beaver, and gorilla — which isn’t extinct, yet.)

(NewScientist, via Monochrom)