Cool treehouses. (Via @TreyPeden.)

Slow light:

For the past few decades, scientists have been playing more and more with the "slowing down" of light, and scientists at the University of Glasgow have achieved a breakthrough in this area. They've managed to slow the speed of light to a relative crawl -- 741 miles per hour, or about the speed of sound.

Is the flip side of "confirmation bias" the "backfire effect"?

Art and bribery in China.

3-D printer for chocolate. (Via VikR.)

The next step after "invisibility cloaks" are "event cloaks" that don't just hide objects, but events:

Using the ultimate bank heist as an example, McCall and Kinsler explain how a thief could, in principle, use an "event cloak" to steal money from a safe, without even the CCTV surveillance cameras being aware.

The burglar would somehow need to split all the light approaching the safe into two parts: "before" and "after", with the "before" part sped up and the "after" part slowed down.

This would create a brief period of darkness during which the burglar could enter the scene and steal the money, being careful to close the safe door before they leave.

With the safe-cracker gone, the process of speeding up and slowing down the light would then be reversed, leading to an apparently untouched scene once again.

Robbing a bank is, of course, only an example to illustrate the principle of what an event cloak could do. As McCall and Kinsler explain, a more likely application of a full-size event cloak would be to control the flow of signals in an optical routing system, where one may need to process simultaneous uninterrupted signals at the same time.

"Crowd Sourcing Identifies 2 Parkinsons Disease Genes"

"When the temperature is right, airplanes can drill holes in the clouds that they pass through... over a hundred kilometers across":

What kinds of webs do spiders weave in zero-gravity?

Orb-weaver spiders create asymmetrical 3D webs on Earth, but in previous experiments on the space station, their webs were much more symmetrical. As you can see in the time-lapse above, Esmeralda is following this trend with her circular web. But now Countryman is also noticing that on the ISS, the spiders aren't at the top of their web facing downwards to look out for captured prey. "They've been sitting in all different parts of their web and they're not necessarily facing down in relation to their habitat," she says.

On the ground, a spider simply has to let itself drop and gravity will help the long strands of the web fall into place. But when a spider tries this in space it goes nowhere...

"My Summer at an Indian Call Center".

Botnets are getting smarter and stealthier.

The space bubble that perplexed skywatchers. (Via @TreyPeden.)

The physics of chilling your beer.

Fantastic card trick by Mathieu Bich that fooled Penn & Teller:



(Via @RadleyBalko.)

"The Voyager probes have entered a strange realm of frothy magnetic bubbles". (Via @laforgetm.)

"20 craziest job interview questions".

And some good responses from Giles Turnbull. My favorite:

VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons, etc.?

"Hey you! Wanna discover orbits and moons, etc.? Then you need this, baby!" Either that, or just sell to peeping toms. Peeping toms have a long, proud history.

"How To Give Robot Vacuums a Personality (And Why It Matters)". (Via Tyler Cowen.)

"Social x-ray specs" that read your emotions from your facial micro-expressions.

"The Five Best Inventions of the Founding Fathers"

The 22 Rules of 4th of July Backyard Wiffle.

(I hope everyone has a good July 4 long weekend! Regular posting will resume Tuesday, 7/5/2011.)