Thomas Kirkwood writes in Scientific American about why women live longer than men. Fellas, the good news is that you might be able to increase your lifespan by fourteen years. The, uh, bad news:

As many dog and cat owners can attest, neutered male animals often live longer than their intact counterparts. Indeed, the evidence supports the notion that male castration might be the ticket to a longer life.

Might the same be true of humans?[...]

The historical record is not good enough to determine if eunuchs tend to outlive normal healthy men, but some sad records suggest that they do. A number of years ago castration of men in institutions for the mentally disturbed was surprisingly commonplace. In one study of several hundred men at an unnamed institution in Kansas, the castrated men were found to live on average 14 years longer than their uncastrated fellows.

Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: NIH

Rowan, a German Spitz, was born without eyes. But he's able to navigate by barking and listening to the echo:

Mrs Orchard who breeds dogs at Spilmah Home Boarding in Potton, near Biggleswade, Beds added: "'When he's running around in the open it's just as if he were the same as the rest of my dogs.

''When he first started going out there were no leaves on the trees but when the leaves grew there was the rustling and we noticed the change in his behaviour.

'He would go out and to find his direction he would use his bark. It really does seem to be a form of echolocation.

You can watch a video of the dog at the link.

Link via Urlesque | Photo: Express.co.uk

Bruno Kurth and Tobias Reichling. Vanessa Graf, Tanja Kusserow-Kurth, and Torsten Scheer built an enormous relief map of Europe topped with models of famous monuments. They used 53,500 pieces to create a structure that measures 12.5 feet on a side. 44 monuments lie on the surface of the map.

Link via Make | Photo: Tobias Reichling

Luxury furniture maker Dedon sells Nestrest. This chair designed by Daniel Pouzet and Fred Frety can sit on the floor or be suspended from an overhead hook.

Link via Born Rich | Photo: Dedon

Note to cheating students: teachers aren't as naive or as technologically illiterate as you think they are.

Link via Geekologie

The fear of being buried alive is an old one, and is even the origin of the phrase "saved by the bell". Annalee Newitz of io9 has a roundup of technologies developed over the years, right up to the present day, to prevent a person from meeting this fate. Pictured above is Thomas Pursell's 1930s-era tomb that featured doors that could be opened from the inside.

Link

Todd from Cleveland, Ohio submitted this picture of his latest tattoo to Geeky Tattoos. The only thing that could improve it is a cursor hovering over a right-click menu.

Link

BCB International sells underwear made to protect your genitals and femoral arteries from injury by explosive blasts. They're made with a double layer of Kevlar and are fire resistant. The shorts have been tested on dummies with substantial success.

Link via Gizmodo

So, you've used a time machine to travel back to the London of 1835. You encounter Oliver, an impoverished street urchin of 12 years of age. For some reason, you've decided to explain to him what the Internet is. How do you proceed? Comedian and graphic designer Doogie Horner created a flowchart to illustrate your options.

Link via Urlesque

Previously by Doogie Horner: What Your Facebook Portrait Says about You

The robot-building team at Bellarmine College Prepatory School in San Jose, California built a t-shirt cannon that can fire 200 t-shirts before reloading. It can spit them out as fast as three shirts per second. Link via Make | Photo: Team 254 Prevously: The T-Shirt Cannon

The Tianhe-1A, which is at the National University of Defence Technology in Tianjin, is the fastest computer in the world:

According to Nvidia, a technology company that supplied parts for the Chinese computer, the Tianhe-1A was clocked at 2.507 petaflops, or more than two quadrillion calculations per second. It has the power of 175,000 high-end laptops.[...]

Until now, the fastest supercomputer was the Jaguar, built by Cray, and installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Jaguar has clocked 1.75 petaflops in testing.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: NVIDIA

(Video Link)

Utah's largest pumpkin for the year, weighing in at 1,169 pounds, was dropped on an old Pontiac after being hefted up by a 175-foot crane:

The pumpkin was grown by Matt McConkie from Mountain Green and it is calculated that the descent of the giant pumpkin reached a top speed of 67.1mph for 3.1 seconds before meeting its end.

Link via Geekologie

Annalee Newitz of io9 compiled a list of some of the grossest jobs in scientific research, like fart statistician:

How do you know when you fart too much? Because gastroenterologists have studied human fart production, figured out what the average number of daily farts should be, and determined that levels above that might indicate a medical problem. All hail the fart counters, who are keeping our gastrointestinal tracts healthy. And because I know you want to know: The mean number of farts in humans is "13.6 episodes per day," according to one expert.

Other featured jobs include testicle crusher and corpse grinder.

Link | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Charles Williams used under Creative Commons license

Illustrator Brock Davis made this invoice. It's one that bounty hunter Boba Fett would have sent to Jabba the Hutt for capturing Han Solo.

Link via Nerd Bastards | Artist's Website

Previously:
Ghostbusters Invoice: Gettin' Paid for Ghostbustin'
Expressionist Versions of Classic Arcade Games

Zhipeng Wu of the University of Manchester (UK) has developed a breast scanning device that is more portable that mammogram machines. Also unlike x-ray mammography, it uses microwave technology to accomplish the same task:

[...]concerned patients can receive real-time video images in using the radio frequency scanner which would clearly and simply show the presence of a tumour.

Not only is this a quicker and less-intrusive means of testing, it also means women can be tested at GP surgeries, which could help dramatically reduce waiting times and in some cases avoid unnecessary X-ray mammography. The scanner could also be used at home for continuous monitoring of breast health.

The patented real-time radio frequency scanner uses computer tomography and works by using the same technology as a mobile phone, but with only a tiny fraction of its power.

Link via DVICE | Photo: University of Manchester