12 Jan 2006
Desktop Cold Fusion Reconsidered

They'll get this, someday. And when they do, hydrocarbon fuels will suddenly become irrelevant.

Nature.com reports on Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is once again claiming to have achieved ultrasound-induced fusion in deuterium-enriched acetone. Other experts are sceptical, but Taleyarkhan is keen to have other scientists check his results.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Armpit odour can exude women's fertility

Imagine the research that went into this:
"So what do you do at work today, honey?"
"Oh, not much, just sniffed a bunch of women's armpits and let the boss measure my state of sexual arousal..."

Research published in the recent issue of Ethology has discovered that men are able to potentially use smell as a mechanism to establish when their current or prospective sexual partners are at their most fertile.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

00:00 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

Personal bankruptcies hit record last year

Well of course they did , since the new law essentially makes it impossible to clear the slate. If I'm not mistaken, bankruptcy is the only civil proceeding mentioned in the Constitution - our Founding Fathers had lived under the British system of debtor's prison and the workhouse, and found it incompatible with a free society. And while the new law certainly isn't that draconian, it certainly represents a sea-change in legal thinking.

I won't go too far in defending the old bankruptcy code: it was probably too "liberal" (in the literal sense). But the new is decidedly too severe, and that seems to be the way we do things here. The bullseye is in the center of the target for a reason, and it always seems to be the most difficult spot to hit.

The number of consumer bankruptcy filings surged to a record high in 2005 amid changes to bankruptcy law, according to a survey released Wednesday.

(link) [CNN.com]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link