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The Rev. Donnie Russell of West Virginia found a 2.1-centimeter-long egg last month on his farm. It weighs just 3.46 grams, just over a one-tenth of an ounce, and is about the size of a penny.

The chicken that he believes laid the egg is normal sized and the state Department of Agriculture has certified the egg's size.  The Guinness Book Of World Records currently lists the smallest recorded chicken egg as 2.7 centimeters.



World's Smallest Chicken Egg Hard To Beat
A US-Albanian underwater expedition believes they have found a 1st century B.C. Roman shipwreck off the southwestern Albanian coast, close to the Sazan Island off the Karaburun Peninsula and the Vlora city, 87 miles southwest of the capital, Tirana.

They speculate  the 'well-preserved' 30-yard tall ship and some 300 Lambolie 2-type amphora were in the wine transport business. 

Unfortunately, the amphora were empty.  If wine gets better with age, it would have to be pretty terrific after 2,000-plus years.  


At the University of Cincinnati, it is said McMicken Hall’s stone lions, Mick and Mack, roar when a virgin walks by.  The urban legend is well-known enough to be documented on the Urban Legend Reference Page of Snopes.com. 

Has anyone actually ever heard this roaring thing happen?  Nope, which means young men who really want dates now know where to matriculate.

If you can't stand the thought of living in Ohio - residents of Pittsburgh, we mean you - there are similar virgin-sensing lions at the universities of Missouri and Michigan.

Northport Middle Schooler Aidan Dwyer has accomplished more in his life than most people three times his age. He sails, he golfs...and he is a patented innovator of solar panel arrangements.

Dwyer applied the Fibonacci sequence to solar panel arrays in a months-long backyard experiment. He found that small solar panels arranged according to the Fibonacci sequence found in tree branches produced 20 percent more energy than flat panel arrays, and prolonged the collection window by up to two and a half hours.

'Young Naturalist' Granted A Patent In Solar EnergyBy Leah Bush, Patch.com
Last week, Science Exchange launched a website allowing scientists to outsource their research to 'providers' — other researchers and institutions that have the facilities and equipment to meet requesting scientists' needs.

Zoë Corbyn at Nature asked the company's co-founder, researcher-turned-entrepreneur Elizabeth Iorns, how the website works, and what an online marketplace for experiments could mean for the future of research...
more than 65 years, and it is finally on the verge of creating a true electronic brain.

Big Blue is announcing today that it, along with four universities and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have created the basic design of an experimental computer chip that emulates the way the brain processes information.

IBM’s so-called cognitive computing chips could one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize — all tasks that humans can currently do much better than computers can.


Researchers in Singapore have re-engineered a harmless strain of bacteria to fight another common, drug-resistant microbe that spreads in hospitals and is deadly to patients with weak immune systems.

To fight the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium, the scientists used a strain of the E.coli bacteria that is normally present in the human gut.

They inserted into E.coli foreign DNA fragments that empowered it to sense the offending pathogen and quickly produce and release a deadly toxin.
Kudos to The Mac Observer's John Martellaro for dusting off his geometry and calculating the diameter of the circle that would circumscribe the Pentagon's five 921-foot sides. Answer: 1,566 feet.

But he went astray when he eyeballed the floor plans for Apple's (AAPL) proposed new headquarters -- made public last week by the Cupertino city council -- to estimate the diameter the main office building. He came up with 1,615 feet "plus or minus a few feet." That's the diameter he used to draw the image below that shows the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense slipping neatly inside Steve Jobs' "spaceship" with room to spare.
I can't stand cotton candy but my kids love it - naturally that means a science experiment is in the making but it turns out University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Food Engineering Richard Hartel has already done the hard work.

So celebrate the end of Summer by by turning outrageously hot sugar into sticky threads.  All you need is a cotton candy machine and a 375 degree heating element, so I guess it's not that easy to do, but it is still fun.



Source: BytesizeScience
A marble statue of Hercules from the second century has been uncovered during excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority at Horvat Tarbenet.

Horvat Tarbenet is located in the Jezreel Valley, three kilometers northeast of Kefar Barukh, and four kilometers northwest of Afula. Tarbenet was a Jewish settlement in the third century AD, which is mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud (Megilla 4, 5).

According to Dr. Walid Atrash of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “This is a rare discovery. The statue, which probably stood in a niche, was part of the decoration of a bathhouse pool that was exposed during the course of the excavations. It is c. 0.5 m tall, is made of smoothed white marble and is of exceptional artistic quality."
Sales people and business-side executes tend to believe as a matter of faith that if people can get something for free, they won’t pay for it. But all they need to do is look at their own behavior to see how that isn’t true: when they go to a restaurant in a distant town that they’ll never visit again, they still leave a 20% tip. 

The fact is that no one subscribes to the WSJ or the FT because of their exclusivity. As a result, the smart thing for both papers to do is to maximize their paying readership by maximizing their overall readership. Instead, both have taken a scared and defensive approach to digital subscriptions, fearing that if their readers can get their content for free, then they won’t pay.
Not all of Adolph Hitler's family were homicidal megalomaniacs - his sister Paula was quite nice.

British spies at one point hatched a plan to feminize Hitler a little by doping up his food with estrogen. Professor Brian Ford of Cardiff University discovered that, and other ingenious plans in old unclassified documents, and outlines them in Secret Weapons: Technology, Science And The Race To Win World War II.
By now you'll be familiar with publication bias: the phenomenon where studies with boring, negative results are less likely to get written up or published. You can estimate this using a tool such as, say, a funnel plot. The principle is simple: expensive landmark studies are harder to brush under the carpet, but small ones can disappear more easily. So split your studies into "big ones" and "small ones": if the small studies, averaged out together, give a more positive result than the big studies, then maybe some small negative studies have gone missing in action.
Fingerprints? We don't need no stinking fingerprints.

Police have used dentures to nab Milton Cesar de Jesus for a purse snatching in Severini, Brazil.  A hobo found them after the robbery and turned them over to cops, along with a description of the assailant so police picked up de Jesus based on that.  de Jesus denied the crime but the cops put the dentures in his partially toothed mouth and they were a perfect fit.  

A risky move but it worked.  As Johnny Cochran famously said, "if the gloves don't fit, you must acquit."   Don't you miss the 1990s, when rhyming tort was still cool?
They've won the final battle but stand a chance of losing the peace if they're not careful.   Harry Potter and his friends did their part but, like Sam Adams after the American Revolution was over, need to step aside now and let foreign policy experts take over.
If you've read Science 2.0 for any length of time, you've seen Bayes' Theorem - mostly in sports.  We use it to predict who will win the baseball playoffs, for example.  

Bayes’s theorem, named after 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, has become an invaluable tool for scientists. 
As I said in our earlier piece outlining how perhaps SETI had outlived its usefulness given modern knowledge, the success metric was that a civilization more than 400 years away - because we know there are none closer - would have to have sent low-tech radio signals to a planet that lacked the technology to receive radio signals when they sent them. The aliens basically would have needed to know the future, which means they didn't need radio waves.
Tired of protein folding, bored with looking for big objects in space?   Now you can go tiny.   As in a fundamental particle.

The Large Hadron Collider team wants to tap into the collective computing power of the public with a project LHC@home 2.0, an updated version of a 2004 effort to enlist the public's computers to simulate beams of protons.

The Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is a 100m-euro network designed to handle the flood of data created by the LHC and distribute it to scientists worldwide.  The LHC@home project will complement this network by splitting up the gargantuan task of simulating the collisions, feeding those computer simulations back to the scientists for comparison.
A team of Italian archaeologists believe they have discovered the tomb of Philip, one of Jesus' 12 apostles, at the ancient Asia Minor city of Hierapolis in the Aegean province of Denizli, known today as Pamukkale in Turkey, and are planning to excavate the unopened grave soon.

The discovery of the grave of the New Testament saint, who it is said came to Hierapolis nearly 2,000 years ago to spread the Gospel and was crucified upside down by the Romans, will attract immense attention around the world, said excavator Francesco D'Andria, director of the Institute of Archaeological Heritage, Monuments and Sites at Italy's National Research Council in Lecce.
If you have a million dollars to spend, you want something distinct - the 700 horsepower, twin-turbocharged 12-cylinder carbon-titanium Huayra supercar by Pagani is certainly that.  Take that, you Bugatti Veyron and Lamborghini Reventon commoners!

But don't get out your checkbook just yet, the U.S. is blocking its sale because it doesn't have child-safe airbags.