awesome duuuuuuude

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Nearly 7 full months after taking her boat out of harbor in Sydney, Australia, Jessica Watson returned to a hero’s welcome yesterday: having become the youngest person in history to sail solo and unassisted around the world. And having been following her voyage during these past several months, I must say that she looks none the worse for wear 🙂

The journey lasted more than 23,000 miles, including some time across the equator. During her trip Jessica consumed “32 cans of Spam, 64 cans of tuna, 32 cans of pineapple, 576 chocolate bars, and 290 freeze dried ready meals all alone in her small yacht.” She was kept company by a crew of stuffed animals, and an assortment of timed care packages from her family that she opened per a set schedule. And when not navigating her ship “Ella’s Pink Lady” Jessica kept busy keeping a blog that ...

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A would-be pilferer of an expensive comic book has been arrested after being caught in the act and apprehended by none other than Spider-Man himself!

The friendly neighborhood webslinger was also assisted by several Jedi Knights and high-speed hero who rides the lightning, the Flash.

Here’s the story from The Sun…

SPIDERMAN foiled a would-be thief as Jedi Knights blocked his escape route.

No, it’s not a comic book plot but the scene which unravelled in a Australian book store on Saturday.

Store owner Michael Baulderstone, dressed as Spiderman, spotted the man trying to steal an X-Men book worth $160 (£97).

The 45-year-old called for back-up and the hapless thief was surrounded by superheroes within seconds.

Mr Baulderstone said: “We had about 40 people dressed up as their favourite superheroes to celebrate International Free Comic Day, so he didn’t have much of a choice but to hand the comic

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And it might be coming to market in “five years or sooner!” according to Dr. Jay Narayan, the thinkin’ dude who came up with it.

From the article at Thinq…

Future solid state disks may finally be able to catch up with the large capacities of mechanical hard drives, thanks to an ingenious project by a scientist at the North Carolina State University.

Dr Jay Narayan has developed a silicon storage chip that stores data in magnetic nanodots, or quantum dots; tiny structures that can measure just 6nm in diameter. Each nanoscale dot stores a single bit of data, but you can squeeze so many dots onto a small area of silicon that the university says that a single chip can “store an unprecedented amount of data.”

Dr Narayan says that the technology could enable you to “store over one billion pages of information in a chip that

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A group of United States soldiers from the 82nd Airborne based in Fort Bragg, currently stationed in Afghanistan, have produced a music video of themselves dancing to Lady Gaga’s hit song “Telephone”. Y’all have to check this out!

Well done guys! All the more praiseworthy given your present location. I just hope that this won’t become an issue when it gets to be time for your next evaluation 😛...

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On the medical side of things, researchers at Ohio State University have hit upon a promising new lead in the fight against cancer: an experimental drug that kills cancerous cells by cutting off their supply of sugar.

From the article at the university’s website…

Researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center-Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute have designed an experimental drug that chokes off that sugar supply, causing the cells to self destruct.

The agent, called OSU-CG12, is an example of a new class of anticancer drugs called energy-restriction mimetic agents. It is described in a paper published recently in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

“Energy restriction may offer a powerful new strategy for treating cancer because it targets a survival mechanism used by many types of cancer,” says principal investigator Ching-Shih Chen, professor of medicinal chemistry, of internal medicine and of

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Miroslaw Swietek, a physical therapist in Jaroszow, Poland, has perfected the art of going out with a camera and flashlight in the early morning hours to capture stunning photographs of insects asleep and covered in drops of dew. That’s a dragonfly resting on a leaf that you see above.

Nothing else needs to be said: Swietek’s photos speaks for themselves. But if you want to see more of his handiwork, The Daily Mail in Great Britain has several other “sleeping insect” images that Swietek has made....

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Back in the day a lot of us cut our computin’ teeth on the Commodore 64. First appearing on the market in 1982, 14 million Commodore 64s were sold before the line was finally retired twelve years later. My sister had one. How good was it? I would often trade time on my Nintendo Entertainment System for a turn on her Commodore 64 (usually to play games like Aliens, still one of the best video game adaptations of a motion picture that I’ve ever seen). And for bunches of people, the Commodore 64 was their first entry into what became known as the Internet, via services like CompuServe and America Online.

So if you’re one of the old-skool fans of this snazzy lil’ system, you’ll be excited to know that come June you’ll be able to purchase the heavily revamped Commodore 64: packing a wazoo of new ...

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3-D printing is starting to become quite a commercially viable technology. And now a smart-thinkin’ dude named Enrico Dini has raised the game bigtime with the D-Shape printer: a large-scale printer that consumes sand and along with magnesium-based glue, can churn out furniture, sculpture… and even entire buildings!

Dini suggests that in the future, his technique could be used to quickly establish a base on the Moon by supplying it with native lunar dust and building required structures from there, instead of hauling material from Earth.

Hit here for more about the D-Shape printer, which will probably be pretty cheap when it comes to market… but the cost of the ink cartridges will be insane! 😛...

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This clip begins with that scene from Top Gun where Tom Cruise buzzes the control tower. And it then proceeds to assault your senses (and possibly good sense) with ten low-altitude flybys that Hollywood probably wouldn’t dare do without ‘spensive computer graphics. But these are real. And #3 on this list had me literally grabbing at my own head, it’s so scary! That dude on the ground has some brass ones…

Okay, #3 is maybe all the more amazing for me ‘cuz the pilot is flying upside-down. And I once saw a plane crash at an air show. It was in 1996 here in Rockingham County, and the dude in the cockpit was doing a low-altitude maneuver upside-down over the runway. It happened right in front of where we were sitting and it looked horrific. But he got out with just a few scratches and I heard that ...

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