Menssana Research's Breathscanner 1.0 is a billion times more sensitive than a police breathalyzer, and can be used to check for asthma, ulcers, and trouble with a heart transplant.

Recent tests of the Menssana device have been encouraging. In a 2003 pilot study of 201 women, some of whom had diagnosed breast cancers, the breath test identified 88% of those cancers. The test's accuracy is comparable to a mammogram.

And in a 2004 clinical trial that involved 407 volunteers, including 195 patients with untreated lung cancer, the breath test picked up nearly 91% of the tumors.

Link to ZD Net Article | Link to Menssana Research

What happens when you put a frog inside a 16-Tesla magnetic field at the Nijmegen High Field Magnet Laboratory? It levitates!

In fact, it is possible to levitate magnetically every material and every living creature on the earth due to the always present molecular magnetism. The molecular magnetism is very weak (millions times weaker than ferromagnetism) and usually remains unnoticed in everyday life, thereby producing the wrong impression that materials around us are mainly nonmagnetic. But they are all magnetic. It is just that magnetic fields required to levitate all these "nonmagnetic" materials have to be approximately 100 times larger than for the case of, say, superconductors.

Link | Gallery of Levitating Objects (Thanks Tony!)

What do you get when you parody popular songs using "karaoke-style backing music with vocals provided by audio pronunciation samples from online dictionaries"?

Link

For more of Heidi's artwork, see: Link

What is a fish highway? The website explains it best:

Imagine a means for fish to swim out the top of your aquarium, up to the ceiling, across the room and then down into another tank. That's a fish highway.

Link to Website (Apparently, there was even a patent back in 1877 on this idea!)

Check out Gelchop's other curious creations! Link (Don't miss the strange "Kowai Mori exhibition", the Wall Animal, and this weird sculpture at the Yatsushiro School)

In a freak accident, one of the Boy Scout leaders flung a knife from his hands while trying to catch another scout who tripped. The knife hit Kevin Coulter in the head and lodged in his brain!

The blade landed in between his frontal lobes. It was 2 millimeters away from hitting a major blood vessel in his brain.

Kevin's doctors told him it was sheer luck where the knife hit.

“That's the best spot you know, if you're going to have a knife in your head,” said Kevin.

Link (via J-Walk Blog)

After Hurricane Katrina, watermelons are growing everywhere in St. Bernard Parish, New Orleans.

Presumably, the seeds were deposited during the hurricane and unusually high temperatures have produced a natural mystery.

A watermelon's consistency is 90 percent water, which means if you eat the St. Bernard Parish melons, you're drinking Katrina juice.

Link | CNN has the video.

Thom LaBean and Christopher Dwyer of Duke University exploited the self-assembling properties of DNA to create the world's first mass produced nano-structures (here a 4x4 grid spelling - what else - DNA!). Link

What's better than a baby panda? Sixteen baby pandas, of course!

Sixteen panda cubs, shown with their expert caretakers, debuted Friday at the Wolong Panda Research Center in southwestern China's Sichuan Province.

Professor Zhang Hemin, head of the Wolong research group, said that the species has produced more cubs than ever before, with sixteen born and nurtured at his center at the Wolong base, and another two born in the United States.

Link

Craig Venter, who became famous for completing a privately-owned map of the human genome in 2000, is spearheading the effort to make the first synthetic lifeform.

Dr. Venter, 59, has since shifted his focus from determining the chemical sequences that encode life to trying to design and build it: "We're going from reading to writing the genetic code," he said in an interview.

Venter's team aim to construct a simpler version of Mycoplasma, a bacterium commonly found in human's reproductive and respiratory tracts. The bacterium has a small genome in the first place: with only one chromosome and 517 genes.

Link (via World Changing)

The internet's got everything, including a museum dedicated to asphalt. Yes, that asphalt that you drive on.

The museum even had a recipe to make your own asphalt. Sounds dangerous.

Link

If you've got the urge to complain about your job,consider this: safety equipments of the builders of Empire State building consisted of ... gloves and a stylish hat!

The New York Public Library has a cool collection of Lewis Wickes Hine's series of photographs called The Construction of the Empire State Building, 1930-1931. Link

This 1862 State of Mississippi $20 note features the picture of wartime Governor J.J. Pettus and slaves on a wagon of cotton.

Kurt Jacoboni has a great collection of Confederacy-issued money (don't miss the US fractional bills - betcha didn't know that the Feds used to have 50 cent bills!) Link

Wafah Dufour is Osama bin Laden's sexy niece. Wait, Osama has a sexy niece? And she loves America, too!

“At the end of the day, I believe that the American people understand things and they have compassion and they see what’s fair,” she says. “They’re very fair, and that’s why I love America, and that’s why my mom loves America."

Link

Apparently, Festivus is alive and well:

The celebration of Festivus is alive and well in northwestern Pennsylvania, nearly a decade after the bizarre "holiday" garnered pop culture notoriety on "Seinfeld."

Residents were preparing to celebrate "the festivus for the rest of us" Friday with a night of airing grievances, feats of strength and, of course, the aluminum Festivus pole.

Link | Festivus "Holy War" in Florida (don't these people have anything better to do? | Festivus Link | Wikipedia Entry

Scientists S.D. Biju and Franky Bossuyt discovered a new species of plump and purple frog and named it Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis.

The frog's closest relatives live 1,800 miles away on the islands of Seychelles, near Madagascar. So how did the species travel from Africa to India?

Not by hopping, say the researchers, but by continental drift. They speculate that when India broke apart from Africa and crashed into Asia millions of years ago, the frog rode India like a ferry.

Link

Bigger is better, at least when it comes to brain. Neuroscientist Sandra Witelson at McMaster University found that verbal intelligence was clearly linked to brain size in women and right-handed men (why only right handed men?)

Link

It's A Wonderful Life, the internet edition: Link

Alan Dean got upset when he took a closer look at the free Virgin Mobile wrapping paper his 12-year-old daughter got from Canada's cinema chains Famous Players.

The wrapping paper, part of an advertising campaign by Virgin Mobile Canada, depicts stylized angels kissing and sexually touching each other. The male angel is touching the female's breast, while the female angel has her hand on the male's genitals.

Famous Players has since pulled the wrapping paper from its promotion. Link

For more of Scott Greene's obsession, er... artwork with parabolic dishes, see: Link

Shannon Goff made this helicopter from cardboard! Link (don't miss the piano!)

Jack "The Matchstick Man" Hall made violin, acoustic guitar, ukulele, and other musical instruments out of matchsticks!

According to his son Tony's website:

This one-of-a- kind 1984 ukulele was made entirely from used wooden matchsticks...10,000 of them painstakingly glued together with 2 lbs of hide glue.

Link to Tony Hall's website | Another Link

Rutge's William Brown and Robert Trivers led a study in which they measured the degree of body symmetry in children and its correlation in their lives.

They found out several interesting things:

- Jamaican girls and women are more likely to cradle dolls and babies, respectively, on their left side of the body if their ears are symmetrical.

We interpret these results as making sense because information going into the left ear (and left visual field) go immediately to the right half of the brain, which is specialized for interpreting emotional information (such as is conveyed in a baby?s voice and actions).

- Girls that are more symmetric are more attractive

- Lower dermatoglyphic asymmetry (whatever it is) tracks with academic achievement

And, this just in:

- Symmetric people are better dancers!

The new study involved 183 Jamaican teenagers, ranging between 14-19 years old, who danced while their movements were captured using motion-capture cameras similar to those used in video games and movies to give computer-generated characters fluid movements.

Women watching the recordings preferred the dances of men who were more symmetrical, while men were more impressed by the dances of more symmetric females.

Link to Triver's website | Live Science Article

Bill Powers of Anchorage, Alaska, built this 16-foot hand-packed snow man called "Snowzilla". Link