Paper Airplane World Record

New paper airplane world record set by former Cal quarterback.

T Rex Had Strongest Bite Ever

Study: "T. rex had the strongest bite, ever".

Past studies estimated the T. rex's biting force to be as powerful as 13,400 Newtons (3,012 lbs). However, the new British study, which tested a wider range of muscles, found the biting force was more likely between 35,000 (7,868 lbs) and 57,000 Newtons (12,814 lbs) in a single rear tooth.

"That's equivalent to a medium-sized elephant sitting on you." Dr Bates told the BBC.

The human biting force is typically less than 1,000 Newtons.

(Via Don S.)

Financial Math and HIV Vaccine

Using financial mathematics for discovering HIV vaccine?

More info here and this WSJ article from last year.

Thumb-Sized Linux Computer

"Linux computer the size of a thumb drive now available for preorder". (Via B.A.)

Twitter Selling Old Tweets

Twitter is selling your 2-year old Tweets to market research firms.

Just remember, if you're receiving a service like Twitter or Facebook for free, you're probably the product not the customer.

IBM Paves The Way Towards Scalable Quantum Computing

Alex Knapp: "IBM Paves The Way Towards Scalable Quantum Computing"

Leap Day Babies Relish Their Unique Birthdays

"Leap Day Babies Relish Their Unique Birthdays"

And the messy math of Leap Years.

How to Transmit News Photos by Wire -- In 1937

"How to Transmit News Photos by Wire -- in 1937".

The video is actually pretty cool for its time:

Wine Tasting Fallacies

This recent Freakonomics podcast discusses how much our perception of a wine's quality is biased by our (correct or incorrect) belief about its price.

A tidbit from one of the blind taste tests:

Levitt used four decanters. Into the first decanter, he poured one of the expensive bottles of wine. The other expensive wine went into decanter number two. In the third decanter, he poured the cheap wine, which cost around $8. In the fourth decanter, he repeated one of the expensive wines...

LEVITT: The data could not have cooperated more completely with my hypothesis. So for starters the four wines received almost identical ratings on average. Although there were a wide spread among individuals, on average, tallied up, people did not prefer the expensive wines to the cheap wine.

On top of that, and this was the thing that I was hoping for and dreaming of but didn’t believe would actually come true: It turned out among individuals if you compared how differently they rated any two of the wines that they had, it turned out that by a small margin, people actually rated the same wine from the same bottle but presented in a different decanter as being the most different among the two wines.

So the two wines that were absolutely identical, when you looked at the gap between the ratings that an individual gave to those wines, the gap was bigger than they did between the other wines, which actually were different.

(If you don't want to listen to the MP3 file, you can click on the button at the bottom of the page marked "Audio Transcript".)

Classy Turtledove

Author Harry Turtledove tells terminally-ill fan how his book series will end and sends him advance copy of the latest volume in the series.

Nomadic Planets?

Is the galaxy teeming with nomadic planets (planets that don’t actually orbit any star)?

Image Of Single Molecule Electrical Charge

"Single molecule's electric charges seen in first image". (Via V.G.)

Superconductivity Update

"Iron-Based Crystal Superconductor Breaks High-Temperature Record"

Making Sudafed From Meth

Tweet of the day: "US crackdown on crystal meth means Sudafed is hard to buy. But meth is easy to buy; here's how to make Sudafed from it"

Direct link to article (PDF): "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine"

Teller Reveals His Secrets

Teller (of Penn & Teller) writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind.

Police Search Tips

"5 Reasons You Should Never Agree to a Police Search (Even if You Have Nothing to Hide)"

Fifth Amendment Protects Suspects from Having to Decrypt Hard Drives

WSJ: "Fifth Amendment Protects Suspects from Having to Decrypt Hard Drives"

From the article:

The Fifth Amendment privilege isn't triggered when the government merely compels some physical act, like unlocking a safe-deposit box, the court said. But the amendment protects testimony in which a person is forced to use "the contents of his own mind" to state a fact.

"We conclude that the decryption and production would be tantamount to testimony by Doe of his knowledge of the existence and location of potentially incriminating files; of his possession, control, and access to the encrypted portions of the drives; and of his capability to decrypt the files," wrote Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat...

On the other hand, we have this story from a similar Colorado case: "Ruling Stands: Defendant Must Decrypt Laptop"

The Myth of the Eight-Hour Sleep

Humans used to sleep in two separate 4-hour chunks separated by 1-2 hours of wakefulness rather than a single 8-hour block.

Visualizing the Paths of 10,000 Taxi Rides Across Manhattan

"Visualizing the Paths of 10,000 Taxi Rides Across Manhattan":

20 iPhone Tips and Tricks

"20 iPhone tips and tricks everyone should know".

I'll have to see if I like the British or Australian-accented Siri better than the standard American version.