I’ve already mentioned the nonsensical paper “published” in (surprise, surprise) arXiv in which the authors claim that the origin of life occurred long before the origin of the Earth based on the application of Moore’s Law to DNA.

I won’t go into all the reasons that this is silly — for that, you can see critiques by PZ Myers and Massimo Pigliucci. Suffice it to say that the data, the analysis, and the interpretation are all problematic.

A team from the School of Family and Consumer Sciences at Eastern Illinois University have discovered a reliable method of persuading people to eat up to 50% less pistachio nuts – just leave them in their shells.

Some readers may well feel themselves in the dark when it comes to the usage of the interjection ‘oh’ in English and its translation in Catalan. Thus they could find a 2007 article published in the Catalan Journal of Linguistics, (Vol. 6, pp 117-136) of help.

‘The translation of oh in a corpus of dubbed sitcoms‘ is authored by  Dr. Anna Matamala, who is a Professora titular d’universitat, at the Departament de Traducció i d’Interpretació of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

“The stereotype of women’s limited parking skills is deeply anchored in modern culture.” But has rarely been scientifically investigated, prompting Claudia Wolf, M.Sc. and Sebastian Ocklenburg M.Sc. and colleagues at the Fakultät für Psychologie, Institut für Kognitive Neurowissenschaft, Abteilung Biopsychologie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, to perform an experimental study.

“The modern drive towards mobility and wireless devices is motivating intensive research in energy harvesting technologies.” say two research fellows at Cranfield University in the UK, who are  currently examining the question – ‘Why not harvest energy from people’s knees?’

Before continuing, please bear in mind that :

“The opinions or assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as official or as reflecting the views of the US Department of the Army, the US Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy or naval services at large.”

There are currently a number of research teams worldwide working towards the implementation of bionic heads and faces which can attempt to express human emotions, however “… most of them can not express continuous changing expressions effectively, and they just express limited pre-existing emotional state.” explain the developers of a new Chinese Bionic Head.

“Previous studies of slithering have rested on the assumption that snakes slither by pushing laterally against rocks and branches.” explain a joint research team from the Applied Mathematics Laboratory, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, of New York University and the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biology, at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The well-known moral dilemma about sacrificing a few to save many has now been answered by extraction of empirical data from conceivable parallel worlds via obvious-operators instantiated in neural networks that were tuned by evolutionary algorithms into weak quantum measurement of counterfactuals. The scientists came up with an intriguing variation of the traditional setup:

There are three gondolas suspended from cables over an abyss, all attached to one main beam which will break soon if not at least one gondola’s cable is cut.

The gondolas are prepared as follows: