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2-Propionyl-1-Pyrroline (Who's making popcorn again!?)

I have a love-hate relationship with microwave popcorn. It can be tasty from time to time. It can be absolutely nauseating, however, at 10am on a Wednesday when someone at work decided to make it for some reason, leaving the office smelling like a movie theater all day. Let's not even talk about the people who let it burn. Part of the reason for popcorn's ability to "carry" is 2-propionyl-1-pyrroline, which can be smelled at incredibly low concentrations. The compound has a reported odor threshold of 20 picograms per liter, which is 20 parts per quadrillion. Contrast t-butylmercaptan, which…

Polylactic acid (Compostable plastic?)

This weekend I came across Biota brand spring water, which is the normal expensive kind of spring water (the kind where they make a point of saying where in the earth it came from rather than obfuscating the "municipal source" text). It was pretty good - maybe even one of the better waters I've had. I'm not here to talk water, though. What's unique about this is the bottle. Most water bottles are PET, a polyester of terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol. These bottles are made of PLA, or polylactic acid. Esters are pretty labile, and will break down pretty easily into their components. The…

Dimethoxytrityl/DMT (Orange you glad you protected that alcohol?)

The dimethoxytrityl, or DMT, ligand, is one of my favorite protecting groups in organic chemistry. Oftentimes, you need to "mask" part of a molecule to keep it from reacting during a step in a synthesis. DMT does this without breaking a sweat and gives you pretty colors to look at to boot. Those phenyl rings form a pinwheel type arrangement (in 3-D, that is, they're twisted out of the plane of your screen). When bound to a molecule, DMT doesn't have much of a color. When it's removed with acid, though, you actually get a (rare, usually unstable and only transient) solution of dimethoxytrityl…

Quorn (Mold Meat)

I love this one. It's not exactly a molecule. If you've heard of it, you're nodding and smirking, if you haven't, you'll be surprised. Back in the 1960's, people set out trying to make new meat substitutes. Apparently, it was suspected that there would be a worldwide shortage of protein by the 80's. I like to think it's because we were a lot keener to do weird things just because back then. One bizzare product of this search was Quorn. Amazing how much the image on that page looks like chicken stir-fry, eh? It is quite hypnotic to click through the Quorn website, looking at the crypto-chicken…

NCVS on DGUs

W A Collier writes: How the NCVS miscounted DGUs Undersized sample, poor methodology, bias in the questions, unsound methods and procedures in eliminating bias, and unlike Kleck, they started with the conclusion (there are only a small number of gun defenses) as an objective to be proven (not the scientific method) whereas Kleck started with the question (How many DGUs are there) and let the numbers supply the answer, pro or con. You need to inform yourself better about the NCVS. The sample size is about 100 times that of Kleck's survey. The NCVS methodology has been refined over 25 years…

SITN Spring Lecture Series

If you don't live in/around Boston, feel free to move along. Otherwise: Dear SITN followers, For a number of years, Science in the News (SITN) has organized a free public lecture series in the Brigham Circle/Longwood Medical area. This spring, due to high demand, we are delighted to announce that we will be extending our lecture series into Cambridge! For our extended series we will be having the following exciting lectures: May 4 Black Holes and Cosmic Roles: Understanding the Center of the Galaxy May 18 The Mystery of Sleep: How Neuroscientists are Solving One of the Brains Most…

Ticks of the atomic clock

I rely on my phone to keep track of time - I tend to lose/break or cover watches in chalk, but my phone is pretty reliable. But how does it know the time, and how to people keep track of the passing seconds? Find out in this month's SITN Flash. Last month, the Flash was spintronics, but the latest is atomic clocks: While atomic clocks are technologically more complicated than the average timepiece, their operating principle is more or less the same - time is kept by precisely measuring the frequency of a signal. Frequency expresses how often a periodic signal repeats itself. In a grandfather…

An Open Letter to the Environmental Geologists of the Past

Dear Environmental Geologists, Engineers, and Technical Illustrators of 20 Years Ago: Please remember that the real audience for your work - the mind-numbingly detailed technical reports over which you have slaved many hours - is not the board of petty bureaucrats who commissioned your investigation. The real audience is someone like me: A data-entry and verification cog in a giant lawsuit that will one day, far in the future, bring your paperwork out of cryogenic storage. I mean, you were working on a project at a large industrial facility. Did you really expect your figures to snooze…

Happy Twinkletree, Joyous Monkey

If the sun came out, all the trees would be twinkling with ice. Seattle has the snow chaos. It's like one of those colds that never quite goes away, except that instead of snot, the city's nose is dripping slush and ice. My neighborhood is tucked in behind a couple of steep hills and apparently not top on the list for the city's 27 plows; bus service around here has been completely cancelled except for an occasional, limping #48. There's nothing to do but loll about, drinking mug after mug of hot cocoa and building snowpersons on the porch. I went out yesterday for the first time since the…

Pfizer drug can cause heart failure. Gee, ya think?

From the non-news that's news' department, Reuters reproted on a study that showed that ~15% of patients who took Sutent, a kidney and cancer drug, developed heart failure. Dr Melinda Telli presented information on 48 patients who took Sutent at an American Society of Clinical Oncology. You'd think this was new information the way it's being reported (WaPost, CNNMoney, ETC). Of course, if anyone had been reading the label of the drug, they'd find this under 'Precautions': In the two MRCC studies, twenty-five patients (15%) had decreases in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) to below…

I Don't See You, So You Can't See Me

Apparently, the Bush Administration has adopted a sophisticated new strategy for not dealing with global warming. From The New York Times: White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week. The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.'s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court…

This Is Me Banging My Head Against the Wall

First, the good news, though. Phil Plait (of the Bad Astronomy Blog) reports today at The Huffington Post that the House just passed HR 985, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act. As he notes, scientists have plenty of reasons to be happy about this: Scientists in government agencies (NASA, NOAA, FDA, etc), laboring for years under the heavy cloud of scientific suppression, can now feel safer if they want to call foul. And call foul they will, since there has been cripplingly obvious, sweeping, and routine suppression of scientific findings for the past few years. There's no need…

Bush Administration Interferes with Science... Again.

Yesterday's Washington Post reported that several environmental groups have obtained strong evidence that Bush Administration political appointee and deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks Julie MacDonald has actively censored scientific information and given elevated and inappropriate consideration to non-environmental concerns in order to prevent the adding of new species to the Endangered Species list. The Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the original organizations to make the revelation, has detailed information on the actions of MacDonald and…

2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: RNA Interference

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was announced this morning, with one half going to Andrew Fire and the other half to Craig Mello, both for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi). The discovery of RNAi added a new layer to our understanding of how cells regulate gene expression and protect themselves from unwanted invaders, and, even more significantly, equipped biomedical scientists with a powerful new tool for studying protein function. Using RNAi, scientists are now able to dissect the genome of an organism, knocking down mRNA (and hopefully protein) expression, gene by…

HuffPost Science Off to a Good Start

Yes, I am well aware of skeptics of The Huffington Post, especially in coverage of science, medicine and technology. Skepticism is a healthy process in science. So let's look at the facts. Below is a list of some of the first posts on the new Science section in The Huffington Post - and, in case you were not aware, writers at HuffPost are by invitation only. I invite you to explore this site! While some may disagree with the writer's interpretations or conclusions, they would be hard pressed to challenge their credentials. Bernie Bulkin: Can Science Save the Planet? Former Chief Scientist…

Why Winston Churchill Could Tweet, but Francis Bacon Couldn't

In honor of Twitter's 5th birthday today! Sentence Lengths of British Public Speakers 1598-1940 Notice a trend here? It appears that the "sound bite" was emerging more than 70 years ago. Since the average word has about 5 characters, Francis Bacon's sentence length needed at least 360 characters - too long for a Tweet. In contrast, Winston Churchill's average sentence can fit at about 120 characters - room to spare for Twitter's limit of 140. Adapted from R. J. Hoyle's article "Decline of Language As a Medium of Communication," The Journal of Irreproducible Results, pp. 134-135 (1983).…

Japan's 2011 Tsunami: How Far, How High Will It Go?

NOAA just released this graphic displaying their best estimates of how far and high high the tsunami waves will travel after Japan's devastating earthquake yesterday. How far, how high will it go? Tsunami Wave Height Model Shows Pacific-Wide Impact Model runs from the Center for Tsunami Research at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory show the expected wave heights of the tsunami as it travels across the Pacific basin. The largest wave heights are expected near the earthquake epicenter, off Japan. The wave will decrease in height as it travels across the deep Pacific but grow…

Is It Really So Difficult to be Civil?

By inspire*dream*create*, Rachel Souza's Flickr Photostream I realize that I am a new blogger for this site, and have enjoyed the challenge of sharing some of the latest scientific breakthroughs as they are happening. I have enjoyed reading some of my fellow bloggers, "Sciblings," learning about new discoveries from their perspectives. I have also noted a lack of civility in some articles on this site. To such bloggers, I would like to respectfully make a call to civility. I have noticed an unfortunate tendency for some of them to use terms such as "dumbass" and "stupid" in articles…

Avast! Carnival of the Blue #37

That's right, kids, it's that time of month again. Ocean time. This month's Carnival of the Blue is up at Blogfish. Awesome posts, and I always encourage, a great way to find new blogs to read. This month particularly, there are some really interesting and important posts to read concerning the oil spill. And speaking of oil spill, have you seen this awesome infographic? Here's the part with the link to my salty post this month: Jason Goldman at The Thoughtful Animal wonders if whales and dolphins should have "human rights," and also in the category of comparing us to ocean animals, Zen…

Reading for writers: who should science writers read to improve their own work?

Following some conversations with fellow writers over the weekend, I've been thinking critically about writing - both my own and that of others. When I first started writing about science, it naturally stemmed from reading the work of very good science writers, and true to form my first steps were wholesale imitations of these people. Lately though, I find myself reading far more fiction authors, who tend to have a  much richer style, elements of which I hope I can bring across in to non-fiction. There's a trend lately for narrative-led long form in the vein of breathless pop fiction novels,…

Gorgeous neon glass skeleton by Eric Franklin

Portland artist Eric Franklin spent over 1,000 hours sweating over hot glass and noble gasses to produce Embodiment, a glass skeleton filled with glowing krypton. Speaking about the process, Eric says: Every glass seal has to be perfect, and this piece contains hundreds. Everywhere one tube joins another, or a tube terminates, glass tubes were sealed together. They have to be perfect in order to preserve the luminosity of the krypton. If one rogue molecule gets inside the void of the glass tubing it can eventually contaminate the gas and it will no longer glow. There are times when the…

Nerdy Day Trips: plan your geeky adventure

Hats off to Ben Goldacre and his diligent team who've put together this crowd-sourced map of nerdy places to visit in the British Isles and beyond. I once tried to convince some civil servants to support a similar idea (marginally less nerdy, more family-orientated), so I'm thrilled to see this bloom. The database is still being populated, so be sure to add your nerdy day trip destinations. As you might expect, Industrial Revolution nostalgia and eccentric museums feature heavily, two things that Britain does very well. My own contribution: the hamlet of Venn, in Devon, which may or may…

Science and the European Elections: Holford Watch on the Greens' health policies

Holford Watch, the esteemed health blog praised by the Guardian, Telegraph, Private Eye and House of Commons amongst others, have released a long and detailed examination of the Green Party's health policies, from concerns over mercury fillings to dependence on the NHS: A number of aspects of the manifesto are strikingly flawed, to the point of being offensive. Many people rely on the NHS - and for a serious party to come up with a health policy this bad is frankly insulting.The manifesto insists (HE103) that Health services can create dependence on the part of users, which is itself…

British Transport Police fights terror with terror

The British Transport Police seem set to continue the fight against terror with their curious strategy of scaring the living shit out of everyone themselves. I guess if the BTP can whip the British public into a state of paranoid terror, then the terrorists won't have to, and we'll have won. Right? While we're at it, let's remove all those civil liberties like trial by jury and due process, so pesky terrorists can't take them from us. Rule Brittania! Here's the latest in a series of hysteria-inducing "anti-terror" posters that have come out of the UK in recent years. It appeared on…

Fraud is Okay

Check out this gem from the London Times: Fraud may also be good for science, according to Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Since most scientific duplicity involves researchers "idealising" results that they probably would eventually have achieved anyway, such fact-fiddling actually oils the wheels of discovery. He even questions whether it should be labelled fraud at all. Fuller does draw the line at drug studies, where people could be physically harmed if researchers fudged data. But everything else is fair game. Take the recent discovery of the heaviest…

The Eisen Brothers are Rockin' the Genome

And they're doing it open access style. Jonathan Eisen and Michael Eisen have each published papers in the PLoS journals using newly available genome sequence data. Jonathan is lead on author on the paper describing the genome sequence of the ciliate, Tetrahymena thermophila. He has blogged about the publication here and provides a wrap-up of a bunch of the coverage here. This single celled eukaryote is a model organism for cell biology, although not at the same level as Saccromyces cerevicea. Michael Eisen's lab is heavily involved in the Drosophila genomes project. He is the senior author…

Polar Bear Shrinkage

To be filed under: "Every dude who's gone swimming in a cold pool in the Hamptons could have told you that." Polar bear genitals are shrinking: The icecap may not be the only thing shrinking in the Arctic. The genitals of polar bears in east Greenland are apparently dwindling in size due to industrial pollutants. Scientists report this shrinkage could, in the worst case scenario, endanger polar bears there and elsewhere by spoiling their love lives and causing their numbers to peter out. Is it possible that the shrinkage could be due to the fact that they live in the arctic? You know, where…

Another Post for the Boozehounds

I've learned that writing about alcohol is great for the ol' site meter. Even the teetotalers got active in the comments. Despite the rampant sobriety that seems to be spreading amongst sciency types, I still believe that alcohol is the lubricant that greases the scientific process. But scientists -- being scientists -- aren't just interesting in drinking the alcohol; they also want to know where the critters that make it come from and how it gets produced. Of course, alcohol on its own isn't very enjoyable. That's why beer makers add things like hops to their brew, and wine makers try to…

Sex, Drugs, and Science

My advisor once told me that the best way to get your paper into a high profile journal like Science or Nature is to find the biggest of something, the smallest of something, or something that fucks funny. It turns out doing research on drugs doesn't get you in. No, not those drugs. These drugs. Researchers in Japan have identified a molecular marker that distinguishes strains of Cannabis sativa with high Δ-9-tetrahydrocannainolic acid (THCA) content from those without. For those of you not hip with the lingo, they have developed an easy test to tell the difference between the weed that gets…

Mutation != Bad

Via EurekAlert comes this news release on research into error checking during DNA polymerization. I'm not judging the science; I'm judging the reporting, which includes the following statement: Everyone knows mutations - genetic mistakes in DNA, the material of heredity - are bad: The more mutations in the cell's DNA, the higher the risk of cancer developing. In case the syntax in the title is unfamiliar to you, lemme spell it out for you: MUTATIONS ARE NOT NECESSARILY BAD. Sure, genetic mutations are responsible for diseases such as cancers, but they are also the raw material upon with all…

Now This is Intelligent Design

My apologies for the utter lack of posting over the past week. I've got stuff sitting around waiting to be written about, and I just haven't been writing. I'm not going to make excuses; I just haven't been managing my time well. While you wait for me to post again (soon, I promise), I give you this article on "intelligently designing" promiscuous enzymes to perform specific functions. Here's a quote from the write up: According to the theory of divergent molecular evolution, primordial enzymes and other proteins started out as "promiscuous" so that primitive organisms would be better able…

Is it just me, or is this just wrong?

I am a big fan of The Science Creative Quarterly. I especially like how they integrate science with humor -- sort of like the Onion, but focused on science. Now they are getting into science education. If you know nothing about phylogenetics and systematics, this introduction to phylogenetics from the SCQ will be quite informative. Of course, if you're reading evolgen, you probably know something about phylogenetics -- and if you don't, read it and evolgen will make more sense. The treatment of phylogenetics isn't wrong, it's just not quite right. Take, for example, their distinction…

Curious About Curiosity: The Next Mars Rover

Earlier this month, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California had its annual two-day open house. For a laboratory complex that has the same acreage as Disneyland, it was just as crowded as the House of Mouse on a busy summer day. What a refreshing sight it was to see so many people - couples, families, grandparents and grandchildren, groups of teenagers - coming to a scientific laboratory to learn about space and science! And how awesome to see hundreds of people in line for... not a roller coaster and not a parade, but a chance to see the next Mars Rover, Curiosity! And…

Genomic Phylostratigraphy

According to this press release Trends in Genetics (TIG) is "the most established monthly journal in Genetics". I have no idea what that means, but if I were asked to name the top journals in genetics, TIG wouldn't crack the top four. In fact, here is my top four: Nature Genetics PLoS Genetics Genetics Heredity Additionally, TIG is published by Elsevier, which means TIG sold guns to terrorists and rogue nations (but they don't anymore). Well, TIG is also publishing an article in November (according to the press release) that will "shed new and unexpected light on some of the long standing…

Junk in the Media

The recent Scientific American article on junk DNA (discussed here) has instigated a quite a furor in the bioblogosphere. Here is a collection of links: ERV linked with a tone of disgust. I restated my frustration with the term junk DNA. JR Minkel, the author of the Scientific American article, responded to my criticisms. Ryan Gregory replied to Minkel's SciAm blog post, introducing the term "junctional DNA" to replace junk DNA describe sequences with unknown function. Gregory also tells us how a genome is like an onion (let me count the ways), or something of the sort wonders why onions…

Shifting Cinema?

A.O. Scott had a nice piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine on The Screening of America. In spite of all the technological advances, he believes the cinema is far from finished: What will happen, in the age of iPod, DVR, VOD, YouTube and BitTorrent, to the experience of moviegoing, to say nothing of the art of cinema? The answer does not seem to be that people will stop going to the movies. Nothing has stopped us before -- certainly not the rise of television in the late 1940s or the spread of home video in the early '80s. While both of those developments appeared to threaten the…

Want to quit smoking? Have a stroke.

SMOKERS who suffer damage to a particular part of their brains appear to be able to quit their nicotine habit easily - a discovery that might open new avenues of addiction research. A study of smokers who had suffered brain damage of various kinds after a stroke showed that those with injuries to a part of the brain called the insula were in many cases able to quit smoking quickly and easily - saying they had lost the urge to smoke altogether. The insula receives information from the body and translates it into subjective feelings such as hunger, pain and craving, including craving for drugs…

Dogs visualize their owners face.

This is a pretty darn cool study :) To investigate, the researchers recruited 28 pooches and their owners. In each experimental session, the dog's owner or another familiar person positioned the dog about a meter away from a computer monitor hidden behind a screen. Then, the researchers played a recording of either the owner or a stranger saying the dog's name five times through speakers in the monitor. Finally, the researchers removed the screen to reveal a still image of either the owner's face or the face of a stranger. Video cameras recorded the dogs' reactions. When the owner's voice…

The history of condoms.

Ahh... condoms :) It seems like they've gotten much more protective .... and perhaps a little less - scratchy. 1000 BC Condom use can be traced back several thousand years. It is known that around 1000 BC the ancient Egyptians used a linen sheath for protection against disease. 100 - 200 AD The earliest evidence of condom use in Europe comes from scenes in cave paintings at Combarelles in France. There is also some evidence that some form of condom was used in imperial Rome. 1500's The syphilis epidemic that spread across Europe gave rise to the first published account of the condom.…

September 11, 2001: What we saw

Once again we come to another September 11. It's hard to believe that it's been nine years since that horrible day. On this day, I generally don't do any new posts. Also, traditionally I do two things. First, I post the following video. This video was shot by Bob and Bri, who in 2001 lived in a high rise a mere 500 yards from the North Tower. On this eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I think it's important to post this again. It is the most prolonged and continuous video of the attack that I have seen, and, as such, It is difficult to watch. That's why it's so important to…

Opening Orac's holiday mailbag...

Today is a holiday in the U.S., Memorial Day. This is a day when we remember our war dead, but the three day weekend that accompanies the last Monday in May is also viewed as the unofficial start of summer. Consequently, I decided to take it easy and simply post a bit of e-mail from a reader apparently with the 'nym trose313: You need a good dose of positive energy. Such negative rantings cannot be good. Plus, you are very one sided, which is never good. There is a lot of wonderful alternative treatments out there and when one hides behind such slanted information as you, I tend to wonder…

Crazy Floridians

For your amusement, a selection from the public comments on the fight over science standards in Florida. "How is anyone's life improved by believing in evolution?" "I will not allow you to teach my child this no matter what you put in your curriculum. I stand for Christ and his creation." "To teach only one theory is communistic." "This is unacceptable, unless Biblical Creationism is taught alongside evolution." "I strongly disagree with the term 'evolution' being used in kindergarten or any grade level. I would change the term 'evolution' to a more user friendly term such as 'adaptations…

A Christmas blogswarm

You all know about the Koufax awards, the best weblog awards around because they're non-commercial, non-weird, and sincerely try to reward the best of the progressive blogosphere (I don't just say that because I won one). One of the unfortunate side effects of being non-commercial, though, is that they're running on a shoestring, requiring a heavy investment in sweat and out-of-pocket expenses by Mary Beth and Eric Williams and Dwight Meredith every year, and they don't get rich off of this—it costs them money. It's time to help them out. Chris Clarke has organized a blogswarm to benefit…

Smallpox vaccine alternative identified

University of California, Irvine infectious disease researchers have shown the effectiveness of a potential alternative to the existing smallpox vaccine that can replace the current biodefense stockpile for this lethal virus. Philip Felgner and Huw Davies with the Department of Medicine found that the modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) produced the same antiviral response in human and animal studies as the current smallpox vaccine, Dryvax. The study is part of a national effort to develop a replacement for the Dryvax vaccine, which causes serious complications in some people. The results…

Egyptian Goose

Alopochen aegyptiacus ... note, this is Egyptian goose, not Egypt goose. But it is Canada goos goose, not Canadian goose. It might be called Egyptian goose because it looks like the old Egyptian paintings. Indeed, this goose is often depicted in ancient Egyptian art. Or maybe because it "walks like an Egyptian" (and by the way Egyptians don't walk that way, only in the old paintings). But it is probably called an Egyptian goose for the same reason that the African buffalo is properly (in a vernacular sense) known as the Cape buffalo. The Cape buffalo entered the Linnaen Legacy via the…

Bali: Word of a compromise

Despite the best efforts of the American and Chinese representatives, the Bali Climate conference may end up being something more than a huge waste of time. The U.S. and Europe headed toward a compromise solution Friday at the U.N. climate conference, breaking a deadlock over how ambitious the goal should be in negotiating future cutbacks in global warming gases, the German environment minister said. "I think the situation is good and the climate in the climate conference is good, and we will have success in the end," Sigmar Gabriel told reporters, declining to give details of the talks.…

MT is now Open Source. Yea!

I must say, that when I was asked to be a Scibling, one of the "cons" was switching from an open source platform that I was very familiar with (WordPress) to a non-Open Source platform (Movable Type). But when I looked into it, I found out that there was a plan to switch Movable Type to open source. Well, the day has arrived. As of [Dec 12th 2007] and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. ... Like many of us on the team, some of you have been waiting for this moment for years. For a…

Battle of the Browsers, ETO

The conflict between Microsoft and the Rest of the World, this time represented by the widely loved if somewhat cultish Opera Browser, is being played out int the EU. Opera Software ASA has filed a complaint with the European Commission asking regulators to force Microsoft to allow users a choice of Internet software to use with it's operating system. Oper also alleges that MS was stifling developing efforts in the area of interooperability by not following accepted web standards. Microsoft did not comment. Norway-based Opera said it was asking EU regulators to apply the principles of their…

For your Christmas List: Real Snake Oil

Well, OK, it's actually fake snake oil.... Wired Magazine (wired.com) gadgets section has its annual (I don't really know if it's annual, but it should be) issue of Snake Oil products. Such as The Orbo: When it comes to gadgets, perpetual motion machines are bullshit's bread and butter. Steorn, the Irish company behind Orbo, is only the latest in a long line of deluded, incompetent or fraudulent firms to claim the scalp of the laws of thermodynamics. File this one under deluded: enthusiastically setting up a public display, the inventors were humiliated when it failed to operate. But wait!…

Read Gawker? Gizmodo? Lifehacker? You've been pwnd.

Registered users of Gawker.com media sites have had their names, email addresses, reading histories, and passwords stolen. But that's OK, because just yesterday I heard you say that any information hackers steal from secret computer databases should be public. (Or did I hear you wrong?) The hacking appears to have been done by one of the same groups of "Hactivists" that is sucking up to Wikileaks and the largely directionless and infantile Internet anarchist community. [No, wait, probably not. Updated.] This is all unfolding rather quickly, and you can get updated at least through…