Now this is SCIENCE!

From Belgium - a little experiment. The sheer scale of it is impressive.

An Astrophysicist on fountain pens

That would be Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, our favorite.
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I still write most of my speeches with a [fountain] pen ... There's a certain peace and lucidity that comes with a pen - grace is probably the best word.

Remember ... the man's a scientist.

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News about Cats!

News from the WaPo: It seems we never domesticated them. They domesticated themselves - sort of. They simply moved in about 12,000 years ago when humans began to store agricultural products, which of course attracted rats, mice and other rodents. Looked good to the feral cats and they settled in. And never left.

So your nagging feeling that little Fluffy and Tigger were just using you - is absolutely correct. They are essentially ferals that have made the compromise of being cute so they can live off our largess, intended or not. Most often they do this by carefully training us to do those little chores they would do for themselves if they only had opposable thumbs.

Like opening tuna cans.

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Herodotus was right!!!!

I've been waiting for this news since I was twelve years old (just ask my little sister)!

Late breaking news from The Week:

Italians in Tuscany originally came from Turkey, genetic evidence shows. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans, who dominated much of the Mediterranean before the Roman era, came from Lydia, now called Turkey. Modern scholars, though, have long scoffed at that claim, saying the ancestors of today's Tuscans evolved locally. But two new Italian studies support the Turkish connection. Both Tuscan men's DNA sequences and Tuscan women's mitochondria resemble their counterparts in parts of modern Turkey far more closely than in other parts of Italy. In Herodotus' fifth century B. C. account, a famine in the 13th century B. C. forced the Lydian king to send half his people west to seek a new life.

Isn't modern science wonderful.

Next week, the Melungians.

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Giant steps for Humankind

All these accidental discoveries come from Wired magazine.

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the world's first acid hit in 1943, when he touched a smidge of lysergic acid diethylamide, a chemical he had researched for inducing childbirth. He later tried a bigger dose and made another discovery: the bad trip.

Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu in 1928 when he noticed that a blue-green mold had infected one of his petri-dishes - and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it. All hail sloppy lab work! [I especially like this one]

Microwave emitters (or magnetrons) powered Allied radar in WWII. The leap from detecting Nazis to nuking nachos came in 1946, after a magetron melted a candy bar in Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer's pocket.

In the early 1940s, General Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil. V-J Day didn't come any sooner, but comic strip image-stretching practically became a national pastime [since the resulting goo was named Silly Putty - I can still remember getting the first little plastic egg of the stuff and putting it to good use]

Chef Geoge Crum's concocted the perfect sandwich complement in 1853 when - to spite a customer who complained that his fries were too thick - he sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp. Needless to say, the diner couldn't eat just one [it was the first potato chip].

AND MY ALL TIME FAVORITE ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY!!

Medieval wine merchants used to boil the H2O out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea. Before long, some intrepid soul - our money's on a sailor - decided to bypass the reconstruction stage, and brandy was born. Pass the Courvoisier! [which, by remarkable coincidence, is exactly what I am sipping on at this very moment].

So what are you guys cooking up in your kitchens, workshops, ateliers, etc. ?