From Foxnews.com:

But seriously, a new analysis of 100 commercial beers shows the hoppy beverage is a significant source of dietary silicon, a key ingredient for bone health.

Full article here >>.

And speaking of drinking too much beer before attempting coitus, here’s the classic Dead Kennedy’s song “Too Drunk to Fuck”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Putting cannabis in place of more harmful drugs may help in winning the fight against substance abuse, say researchers.

Amanda Reiman, University of California, Berkeley, USA, carried out the study at Berkeley Patient’s Group, and found that 40 per cent of the 350 cannabis users quizzed resorted to the drug to control their alcohol cravings.

Amanda said: “Substituting cannabis for alcohol has been described as a radical alcohol treatment protocol. This approach could be used to address heavy alcohol use in the British Isles – people might substitute cannabis, a potentially safer drug than alcohol with less negative side-effects, if it were socially acceptable and available”….

Read the rest of the article here >>.

There’s probably a joke to be made somewhere about the study being done at Berkeley, but I’m not going to go there.

Putting cannabis in place of more harmful drugs may help in winning the fight against substance abuse, say

Answer to booze problems may lie in cannabis (Getty Images)

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researchers.

The study found that more than two-thirds of female short-nosed fruit bats (Cynopterus sphinx) performed fellatio on their sexual partners, and that they were rewarded with longer bouts of intercourse as a result.

Previously, the only animals known to carry out oral sex – apart from humans – were bonobo chimpanzees.

Go home perverts. This is science. Interesting stuff for sure, beyond the obvious bat blow job snickering. Its easy to see how this trait would have evolved, with the fellating females having a clear reproductive advantage. It would not surprise me if this is now found in other species, if people think to look for it. Might it have some implications on the practice in humans? Possibly, but its worth noting that the fruit bats are combining fellatio with intercourse at the same time. Even if this were physically possible, the second, more important observation, is that it prolongs intercourse. Personally, I don’t quite see this happening for humans.

Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister has just released his new book “Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male” in which he makes the case that compared to our tribal ancestors, we modern men are, well, a giant bunch of wimps.

“No ifs, no buts — the worst man, period…As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.” – excerpt from prologue to Manthropology.

As one can imagine the argument goes something like this; since the industrial revolution we’ve gotten fat and lazy and dependant on technology and convenience. Nothing really new about that – deriding and belittling contemporary masculinity has become something of a sport for both conservatives and radical feminists alike these days .

Surprisingly though, McAllister isn’t just taking shots at beer swilling couch potatoes or “effeminate” metro-sexuals.  He goes as far as claiming even our modern Olympic athletes would be bowled over again and again in sports involving running, jumping, and throwing shit around.

One example from the article,

An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last year’s Beijing Olympics.

In an interview in the English university town of Cambridge where he was temporarily resident, McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.

Fair enough, but let’s see how well they can collect action figures or play Guitar Hero.

Read the full story here >>.

The U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the invention of a ‘blob-like’ robot which is able to inflate and deflate it’s body through a process called ‘jamming’, in which the robot’s synthetic (silicone) skin is changed back and forth from solid to semi-fluid states.

The so-called “chembot” will be used to  assist in military and search and rescue operations where it would be called upon to  slip through small cracks, holes, and crevices in that very special way that only animate blobs can do.

You gotta love it when you can give any ol’ piece of creepy technology a cutesy wutsey pokeman-esque  nickname and swear up and down that it’s only practical value is for saving innocent lives.

Yeah riiiiight.

This Article from 9News Australia can be found here >>.

Mexican archaeologist Guillermo Bernal agrees, saying that both new agers yearning for global enlightenment and rapture minded dooms-dayers are guilty of superimposing Western mythologies on top of Mayan ones, “perhaps because Western myths are “exhausted.”"

(Read the full story here>>)

Background: The end of the Mayan “long count” is predicted to occur on December 21, 2012 in correspondence with a “galactic alignment” that occurs once every 26,000 years or so. Some believe the turning of these cycles to have an influence on human events.

So. will cosmic rays of sunshine enlighten and raise up humanity’s spirit to a new level of wonder and miracle? Or will they bring only the awe-inspiring flash of solar radiation as it burns flesh and scorches the earth’s surface in an instant?

Stay tuned for more 2012 hype and related merchandise folks, you can count on it. ‘Cause as Ninja-Man always says “armageddon is a racket”.

In the meantime, enjoy this short clip of  Woody Harrelson playing a weird beard conspiracy dude in the upcoming disaster movie to end all disaster movies,  “2012″ from Sony Pictures.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rachel Sussman takes photographs of the oldest living things in the world. Her blog is essentially a travel journal, and worth a read.

Apparently, there is a bar in this tree:

Mice Levitated in Lab | LiveScience

Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments.

…

Repeated levitation tests showed the mice, even when not sedated, could quickly acclimate to levitation inside the cage. After three or four hours, the mice acted normally, including eating and drinking. The strong magnetic fields did not seem to have any negative impacts on the mice in the short term, and past studies have shown that rats did not suffer from adverse effects after 10 weeks of strong, non-levitating magnetic fields.