As we’ve said before, the war against drugs is a very silly war, and when we fight it, we often encourage the very things we’re trying to prevent.
The idea behind tough policing of illegal drugs is to drive dealers out of the market, thus making supplies scarce and driving up the price (this is basic economics). But it turns out that their actions LOWER the price of drugs, encouraging more people to use them.
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…Freeze your sperm! – Now that the Tour de France is on, scientists want to remind would-be professional cyclists (and the rest of us?) that they should consider freezing their sperm before spending too much time on that bike.
When men who had been training on bicycles for an average of nine times a week for eight years were compared to men who spent an ordinary amount of time on bikes, they were found to have less than 10% normal looking sperm, compared with 15-20% in the most fertile men. Sperm may also be affected by riding stationary bikes at the gym, so males should be careful to vary their exercise routine.
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…Now you can BUY them! – Whitley twitters. Anne twitters. And sometimes it’s hard to know who your friends are. Now, if YOU twitter, you can buy friends! An Australian company is offering to sell people potential Twitter friends for around $100. They contact blocks of around a thousand people and suggest that they may want to follow a certain twitter-er.
BBC News quotes Leon Hill, the CEO of USocial, as saying, “It’s up to the user to follow them or not.”
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A scientist has created a device that makes radio waves do what Albert Einstein said was impossible: travel faster than light. If other cultures on other planets have already learned how to do this, it could be the reason that SETI hasn’t picked up any radio signals (alien cultures are no longer making any noise because the beings there are transmitting using light signals instead).
We don’t yet know how to receive faster than light radio signals, but it could be that this is quite possible with the right kind of equipment. If so, then the universe could suddenly become quite a different place: one that is crowded with radio communications, rather than one that is virtually radio silent.
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