On:

Scientists long scoffed at Star Trek style teleportation, but now they’ve changed their tune. While they don’t think they’ll be able to instantly move people from place to place, Swiss scientist Nicolas Gisin has been able to make small amounts of matter disappear down a telephone line in one laboratory and reappear in another, 180 feet away. “It is amazing, the way information from one photon suddenly appears in another photon,” says physicist Raymond Laflamme.

Albert Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.”
read more

On:

To find your approximate date of death, measure your telomeres. These are the pieces of DNA that protect the ends of our chromosomes and control how fast our cells age, and scientists think shortened telomeres cause early death. Some cloned mammals, such as Dolly the sheep, have shorter telomeres than other animals of the same age, leading scientists to think they’ll have shorter lives. This is one reason why it’s not yet safe to produce human clones. And men: keep shaving?scientists don’t know why, but shaving less than once a day increases your risk of stroke by 70%.
read more

On:

William Burroughs, perhaps the world’s most famous drug addict, once confided to Whitley Strieber that an addict is always chasing the thrill he got from his first hit. The more they take a drug, the less pleasure they get, which is what makes them so frantic to get more. This is because cocaine actually damages the brain cells that cause pleasure.

Dr. Karley Little studied postmortem brain samples of 35 people who “had cocaine in their system when they died,” although it was not the direct cause of death. What the brain samples showed is that those who took cocaine had problems with the amount of dopamine their brains produced and how it was released by the brain.
read more

On:

For the third time in a year, a mysterious chunk of yellow ice has landed in the yard of a house in Davenport, Iowa. Ernest McDonald says that more than one person has blamed this on “pee bombs” that fall when airplane toilets are flushed during cold weather. As the theory goes, the cold upper-level air causes the waste to freeze and drop to the ground, rather than dispersing into the atmosphere. However, it’s doubtful that airplane toilets are emptied in the air. Most likely, they are pumped out once the plane is on the ground, the same way that all chemical toilets are cleaned. At unknowncountry, we’ve discovered these ice blocks are a sign of global warming.
read more