A couple of remarkable flying machines. At White Sands, the solar powered Zephyr has just set a new world record for unmanned continuous powered flight. And in Germany, they’ve demonstrated a 200 kph winged jetpack, the Gryphon, which can carry a pilot, oxygen, and 20kg of gear.
Now, if we could just combine these and get [...]

In keeping with my current fixation on bad logic from professional thinkers, I was delighted to find Robin Hanson of George Mason University on Cato Unbound running some excruciatingly poor arguments about public health spending. He’s another associate professor, like Jonathan Haidt, which makes me wonder if there is a certain pattern developing here. [...]

This is too unfocussed, but I like the colours.

More pictures of weird deep-sea squid, courtesy of National Geographic, via Art Black.

An alarming squidshot: a Vampyroteuthis infernalis (vampire squid from hell) turning itself inside out.
(Thanks to Art Black, YouTube and National Geographic)

From J Clin Pathol 2006;59:1116
We regret that there was an error in the August issue… On p784, lines 1–2, ‘‘bone marrow’’ should have been replaced by ‘‘point of care glucose test (BM)’’. We apologise for this error.

Yesterday the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) withdrew Prexige from Australia and ordered a national recall of the medication. The generic name of Prexige is lumiracoxib and it belongs in the same class as Vioxx, a drug that in 2004 was also precipitously removed from the world marketplace. Although they both belong to the class of [...]

Over at Edge, Nathan Myhrvold has a gripping photoessay on the way lions live and hunt. You may be surprised to find that many of the “facts” we know about lions are tosh recycled by unwitting documentary makers. Did you know that lions do not hunt co-operatively? The more lionesses join the hunt, the lower [...]

According to the blog of marine biologist Kevin Z., now that all species of the squid genus Moroteuthis have been reclassified as genus Onykia, someone has the unenviable task of explaining this to the squid. Hence the new pastime of squid wrestling.

Photo courtesy of Alaska Fisheries Science Center

For many years, there has been talk of a machine that would print and bind a book in about 15 minutes, enabling bookshops and distributors to reduce the cost of shipping and storage of books. Shops would keep a range of covers in stock for browsers to examine, and maybe a few dumpbins of books [...]