Bunker-busting bombs are pretty darned effective against hardened underground bunkers, but maybe it's not such a good idea to blow up chemical or biological weapons (that may just spread 'em, which makes things worse).

So the Pentagon dreamed up something straight out of science fiction movies: a rocket ball!

The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize sites containing
chemical or biological weapons: rocket balls. These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno. The makers call them "kinetic fireball incendiaries."

David Hambling of Wired's Danger Room blog has more: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/secret-rocket-b.html

A team of Princeton University scientists analyzed proteins involved in energy production of cells and discovered that they have the ability to control their own evolution:

"The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a 'blind watchmaker'?" said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. "Our new theory extends Darwin's model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness." [...]

Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins' behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. By operating only at extremes, referred to in control theory as "bang-bang extremization," the proteins were exhibiting behavior consistent with a system managing itself optimally under evolution.

I'm a little fuzzy on how the self-correcting behavior is transmitted in the germline ... Link - via io9

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. is one swanky place - but that's not the case in other cities. As a new US President is set to move into the famous 1600 Pennsylvania, Ironic Sans blog decided to take a virtual tour of other not-so-famous 1600 Pennsylvania Avenues around America: Link - via Buzzfeed

Carpooling is a really good idea. It saves gas, money, the environment ... But if you live in Ontario, Canada, it is also illegal.

Well, here's the story of a startup company called PickupPal, who wants to make it easier for people to find others traveling to the same place and carpool there:

Great idea, right? Wrong. The bus companies freaked and sued under an Ontario law that limits carpoolers to traveling only from home to work and back, riding with the same driver every day and paying only by the week, among other restrictions. This is despite the fact that the government has spent “billions” in carpooling lanes.

Anyway, the court case was decided and PickupPal lost. They were fined CA$11,000 and forced to keep that despicable carpooling activity within the strict limits of the law

TechCrunch has the story: Link

Canadian artist Susy Olivera uses photos and foam to create a 3-D collage. This one above is titled Time is Never Wasted. More on her website: http://susyoliveira.ca/site.htm [Flash]

There were three medieval kingdoms on the shores of a lake. There was an island in the middle of the lake, over which the kingdoms had been fighting for years. Finally, the three kings decided that they would send their knights out to do battle, and the winner would take the island.

The night before the battle, the knights and their squires pitched camp and readied themselves for the fight. The first kingdom had 12 knights, and each knight had five squires, all of whom were busily polishing armor, brushing horses, and cooking food. The second kingdom had twenty knights, and each knight had 10 squires. Everyone at that camp was also busy preparing for battle. At the camp of the third kingdom, there was only one knight, with his squire. This squire took a large pot and hung it from a looped rope in a tall tree. He busied himself preparing the meal, while the knight polished his own armor.

When the hour of the battle came, the three kingdoms sent their squires out to fight (this was too trivial a matter for the knights to join in).

The battle raged, and when the dust had cleared, the only person left was the lone squire from the third kingdom, having defeated the squires from the other two kingdoms, thus proving that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.

If you like that, there are more excellent math jokes at University of Alberta's math professor Volker Runde's website: http://www.math.ualberta.ca/%7Erunde/jokes.html

Apparently, you can make a rockerless rocker - all you need are two metal strips, wheels, a little Yankee ingenuity and Gandhi. Found at the always-entertaining Modern Mechanix.

Don't flirt with that woman! That's Miss Alice Reighly, president of the Anti-Flirt Club of Washington, D.C. The 1923 club is for women and girls who have been embarrassed by men trying to flirt with them! So much for the Roaring Twenties!

Check out the larger scan at Shorpy Photo Archive (an excellent blog to browse, btw): Link

This is not your father's formaldehyde-filled FEMA trailer ... Artist Paul Villinski gutted a 30-foot Gulfstream "Cavalier" trailer of its toxic materials and rebuilt it into Emergency Response Studio, a "green" artist's studio complete with solar panels and micro-wind turbine!

The studio is entirely powered by a 1.6 kilowatt photo-voltaic solar system featuring an array of nine large solar panels which tilt upward from the trailer's roof to face the sun. Additional power comes from a micro-wind turbine spinning atop a 40-foot high aluminum mast. Eight large batteries, each weighing as much as an average man, store this power and are seen underfoot through a clear Lucite floor section as one steps into the trailer. A large wall section cranks down to become a deck, a ten-foot, geodesic skylight provides daylight and expansive headroom in the work area, and a thirteen-foot wall section has shed its aluminum siding in favor of clear polycarbonate sheathing. [...]

Villinski, who creates art out of discarded objects and repurposes them into provocative sculptural pieces of beauty and transformation, conceived the project in 2006 while in New Orleans preparing for an exhibit at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery. Moved to create artwork in direct response to the conditions of post-Katrina New Orleans, he wished he could bring his New York studio with him to the Lower Ninth Ward.

Link - via TreeHugger

The Sentio is a digital tactile watch for the blind designed by Matthew Wagerfield. The watch has segments that rise 1 mm from the surface of the watch to signify the hour and minute.

The face of sentio exhibits a pair of 7-segment displays that would normally be found on digital alarm clocks, watches or any other digital numerical display. This pair of 7-segment displays outputs either minutes or hours depending on the mode that it is dynamically set to.

However, the 14 segments evident on the face of sentio do not conform to the expectations of lighting up; since this would be superfluous to visually impaired users.

Instead, these segments are mechanically animated. Each segment has the ability to rise up 1mm above the face of the watch so that it can be both seen as well as touched. This visual and tactile display provides a fully inclusive format of displaying the time to anyone; regardless of impairment.

Link - via Core77

Now that is an awesome staircase! The creative "floating" stairs are designed by Florence architect Guido Ciompi for The Gray Hotel in Milan, Italy. The Contemporist Blog has more: Link - via stair porn (SFW actually, the blog features a lot of wonderful stairs)

Think you know a lot about James Bond? Well, AskMen dug up some pretty esoteric fun facts about everybody's favorite spy. Here's the 5 Things You Didn't Know About James Bond - for example:

1- James Bond was inspired by an American zoologist

To come up with his Bond character, Fleming pooled traits from several people he knew and had read about. In naming his soon-to-be famous spy, Fleming picked James Bond after the famed bird expert with the same name. Bond wrote the acclaimed Birds of the West Indies, considered by many experts to be the definitive book on Caribbean birds. To come up with Bond’s cool demeanor, Fleming took attributes from real-life spies Sidney Reilly and Sir William Stephenson, as well as popular jazz composer Hoagy Carmichael. In fact, Fleming, who worked in British naval intelligence, also channeled his former peers in the creation of his iconic character. [...]

4- There are only seven 00s

You’re forgiven if you were under the impression that Bond’s MI6 organization was fully stocked with agents. Throughout the movies, we learn that Bond is one of just seven 00 agents spying for the British, but he has the best knack for staying alive. In different movies, we’ve see the deaths of 002, 003, 004, and 009. Agent 006, believed killed, returns as the villain in GoldenEye before he’s disposed of. Besides Bond, only the unnamed 008 proves to be a skilled agent. He’s mentioned several times as Bond’s replacement should he die or be pulled off a mission for insubordination. It’s unclear why no 001 or 005 have ever been mentioned.

Read the whole list here: Link

It seems like McDonald's is trying out a new marketing strategy in Japan that has ninja-like stealth: no-brand, no Golden Arches, ... and even no clown!

Neil Duckett went to the fast food restaurant, simply called "Quarter Pounder" in Shibuya and took some photos: http://neilduckett.com/quarter-pounder-opens-in-shibuya-omotesando/ - via Inventor Spot

The Dark Knight has a new enemy to battle: the mayor of Batman, Turkey!

Huseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman, has accused "The Dark Knight" producers of using the city's name without permission.

"There is only one Batman in the world," Kalkan said. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us." [...]

The mayor is prepping a series of charges against Nolan and Warner Bros., which owns the right to the Batman character, including placing the blame for a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate on the psychological impact that the film's success has had on the city's inhabitants.

Link

Photo: Bryce Edwards [Flickr]

Who owns the rain? Not you - at least in Utah. If you collect rainwater to water your garden without applying for a "water right", then technically you're breaking the law ...

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via United Liberty