Commercial for the new Apple iPhone 5nSa

(via The Tea Party Economist)

Lightsabers soon to be a reality?

Though quite popular a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, lightsabers are rather hard to come by on our planet. The technology to produce them has eluded us. Until now.

The Center for Ultracold Atoms, a joint venture between Harvard and MIT, has created what is considered to be a new state of matter: photonic molecules. ExtremeTech reports:

This new state of matter is surprising and interesting, as photons are considered to be massless and incapable of interacting with each other. According to the research group’s leader, who has the unbelievably coincidental surname Lukin, these photonic molecules behave somewhat like lightsabers from the Star Wars universe, with the photons pushing and deflecting each other, but staying linked.

For an explanation of how it all works, read the full article.

Finally! One of my childhood dreams may actually have a chance of coming true!

String theory explained to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody

Singing scientist Timothy Blais explains string theory, a capella-style, to the tune of "Bohemian Rhapsody." And it actually makes much more sense than the original song.

Romania's brilliant response to British anti-Romanian immigrant campaign

Back in January, officials in (Not-So-)Great Britain were considering running a negative advertising campaign in Romania and Bulgaria designed to discourage immigration from those countries.The Guardian reported:

The plan, which would focus on the downsides of British life, is one of a range of potential measures to stem immigration to Britain next year when curbs imposed on both country's citizens living and working in the UK will expire.

A report over the weekend quoted one minister saying that such a negative advert would "correct the impression that the streets here are paved with gold".

There was no word on how any advert might look or whether it would use the strategy of making Britain look as horrible as possible or try to encourage would-be migrants to wake up to the joys of their own countries whether Romania's Carpathian mountains or Bulgaria's Black Sea resorts. With governments around the world spending millions on hiring London-based consultants to undertake "reputation laundering" there would be a peculiar irony if Britain chose to trash its own image perhaps by highlighting winter flooding of homes or the carnage of a Saturday night A&E ward.

The people of Romania responded with a campaign of their own. A rather brilliant one, too:


(via The Tea Party Economist)

Would you board Flight 666 to HEL on Friday the 13th?

I would, if I had to. In fact, many passengers take the daily Finnair flight AY666 from Copenhagen to Helsinki. And as luck would have it, that particular flight falls on Friday the 13th twice in 2013. No big deal.

Barbie without makeup

Barbie has been criticized for giving young girls an unrealistic image of beauty. Perhaps the critics are right. Artist Eddi Aguirre shows us the real Barbie, sans makeup:

Global cooling? Arctic ice cap grows 60% in one year

Just six years ago, the BBC reported scientists' dire prediction that the Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013:

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.

"So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."

"Yikes! It's 2013 now! What about all those poor polar bears?!"

Don't worry. The bears will be just fine. Mail Online reported on Saturday that the Arctic ice cap has actually grown larger. In fact, it is nearly one million square miles bigger than it was this time last year. That's a 60% increase in 365 days. Looks like some scientists will be frantically scrambling for more grant money in the coming months.

(Image: Mail Online)

To those who have been paying attention, this comes as no surprise. Global temperatures have remained steady for the last decade-and-a-half. Even the climate scaremongers at The New York Times can't ignore the obvious. Is it any wonder why the term "global warming" has since been replaced with the more ambiguous "climate change"?

So cheer up. Waterworld is still the stuff of science fiction, and Greenland won't be turning green again anytime soon. Perhaps it's time for these Chicken Little climatologists to simply chill out.