Cool Links

A group of former Scienceblogs.com folks have created Scientificblogging.org - an aggregator for science blogs.
Science Accelerator is a gateway to science, including R&D results, project descriptions, accomplishments, and more, via resources from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), U.S. Department of Energy. Science Accelerator was developed and is made available from OSTI as a free public service. Get the Science Accelerator widget at Widgetbox! Not seeing a widget?
From Brain Windows

Ephus is a modular Matlab-based electrophysiology program that can control and record many channels of tools and data simultaneously.  

ScanImage is another Matlab-related software program that is used for optical imaging and stimulation of neurons in vitro and in vivo.  

Neuroptikon is a sophisticated network visualization tool. It can build Van Essen-like diagrams of any circuit you like ...
Star Wars Uncut, the fan-made remake of Star Wars done by hundreds of nerds in 15-second increments is finished, and it is ... well, what you might expect.
Almost a quarter century after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Ukraine, its fallout is still a hot topic in some German regions, where thousands of boars shot by hunters still turn up with excessive levels of radioactivity. In fact, the numbers are higher than ever before.
Scitable is part of of Nature Publishing Group, which is the publisher of Nature, Scientific American and about 70 other magazines.   Vikram Savkar, Scitable's SVP of publishing, says 
"Scitable is an online learning space for science and what that means is that it has a library of very high quality content that we have created." He continued, "It's not crowd-sourced Wiki(pedia) content. It's content that editorially we've commissioned and reviewed and vetted in all the life sciences."
Think Google is a search company?  Not according to shareholders and that means to the CEO; Google is instead a web advertising company.   If you have ever tried to make any money using Google Adsense you know they are making money on advertising because you certainly are not but someone is paying.
If you haven't seen the movie "Chinatown" or know anything about how water in places with not enough water actually gets there, this article will help, courtesy of Hugh Holub, a water attorney in Arizona.
Join 10,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors on Sept 25, 2010 for (click logo below for signup) ...


The third annual massive community festival at San Jose Reid Hillview Airport, brings together accessible activities, STEM science/tech/engineering/math, exotic animals, exotic cars, robots, great food, live entertainment, tons of community services, fire trucks, police cars, radio controlled helicopters, you name it, they’re doing it! The whole point is to get under-served kids exposed to STEM in a fun and entertaining hands-on way.
All you cynics out there can rest easy that this is not a cynical attempt to cash in on that white-board job-quitting bit of fakery.
 
Did we call that white board chick as a hoax first?  I bet we did - next generation search engines might be worth a crap if they could tell us that.  And it would be great if we could show up first in Google for something like, oh, "Science 2.0", instead of train wreck, mindless spewing like the 'Science 2.0' Wikipedia entry or Scientific American Web 2.0 mumbo jumbo.  What?  Why don't I link to them?  Because that is why Google lists them first.  Duh.

But I digress.
Harken back to the dark days of 2003, when vampire sagas were not yet all the rage.  NPR has the details on vampire public relations blitzes in the last part of this decade.

To: VampsPR
Fr: Fritz
Re: PR issues

PR Team,

The Lost Skeleton Returns is available on Amazon.com today (you just saw the link) so if you go for awesome science humor, that's pure heaven.   If you go for mediocre science humor, you can always just watch "The Big Bang Theory" instead.
How long will it take for a book on Hauser to appear in print?
The plot usually goes like this: A laboratory publishes its research findings in a journal—possibly even a breakthrough in its field.  Someone notices some irregularities in the data. Maybe the person works in the lab and becomes a whistle-blower.
Dissecting science scandals
Want a belt or shoes made out of human skin but don't want to deal with all of the tiresome Nazi comparisons?   [Hu]manLeather, a UK company, is taking all of the flak for you.

Apparently, people bequeath them their skin (I guess it will get weird if it turns out people who donate their bodies for organs end up as wallets but the company will not disclose its sources) and they use it to make stuff.  Like clothing, you know, that covers your skin.
Human leather has been used by anatomists, tannists and medical scholars over the ages to bequeath life to their work and writings. It had been lost in modern times as a working material, partly due to social and religious taboos.
John Timmer of Ars Technica weighs in on the Pepsigate stuff - maybe a little late, but Scienceblogs people like the attention so it's all good.   Other large networks (us, Discover, NN) get a few words but this is basically a way for him to discuss it and then advertise the people who formed the new Scientopia blog.  
Thousands lined up in Japan Sunday to see a capsule from the Hayabusa space probe which was hoped to have brought asteroid dust from Itokawa back to Earth.

Would Americans line up the same way?  You betcha.  If NASA would only do something meaningful.  Instead, we get more articles about how the bloated pig Webb telescope is years behind schedule and wildly over budget with no end in sight.
Largest thermometer that does no thermometing, largest shopping cart and even the largest ... particle collider.   Though at least we hope that last one will do something meaningful.

It's all here in the 15 most useless huge things.
Cecilia van der Merwe, South African engineer and brains behind my World Cup Physics of the Vuvuzela article, was on "Let's Talk Geek" and gave us a mention - so in return you have to devote 2 hours of your time to watching the whole thing.

Just kidding, though you will miss a band called Demon Hunter performing mega hits from their album title "Storm the Gates of Hell" if you don't watch it all.

Want to bet those guys play D&D?
Idle computers are the astronomers' playground: Three citizen scientists--an American couple and a German--have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries. 

Link: Science Codex