Tuesday coffee break: a library of the world's most unusual compounds

"Deep in the bowels of a brutalist concrete building on the Strand, long shelves are packed -- crammed, really -- with some of the world’s strangest substances, from the past, present and sometimes, it seems, the future. Take Aerogel: the world’s lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice. Nearby are panes of glass that clean themselves, metal that remembers the last shape it was twisted into, and a thin tube of Tin Stick which, when bent, emits a sound like a human cry. There’s a tub of totally inert fluorocarbon liquid into which any electronic device can be placed and continue to function. The same liquid has been used to replace the blood in lab rats, which also, oddly enough, continue to function."

Thursday coffee break: like weird stuff?

American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse "The Georgia Guidestones may be the most enigmatic monument in the US: huge slabs of granite, inscribed with directions for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. Only one man knows who created them -- and he's not talking." (wired.com)

Top 15 Unanswered Questions posed by Chuck Berry

A dubiously useful list in no particular order.

1. Maybellene, why can't you be true?
2. What to do?
3. Will you dine and dance with me?
4. Out the door?
5. Nadine, honey is that you?
6. How long to get fixed?
7. Should I pick you up at a quarter to eleven?
8. Is it a date?
9. Where to dine?
10. Can we get in?
11. Girl, what'd I say?
12. Oh mommy, mommy, please may I go?
13. Oh baby doll, will it end for you and me?
14. Who's the queen standin' over by the record machine?
15. Would you get hip to this kindly tip?

Friday coffee break

• The Six Biggest Mysteries of our Solar System (New Scientist)


• Scientists Rank Global Cooling Hacks (wired.com)


• The Energy Scale (image)

An eradicated killer

The Demon in the Freezer: How smallpox, a disease of officially eradicated twenty years ago, became the biggest bioterrorist threat we now face.

Winner, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2000. (Richard Preston, The New Yorker)

The Great Flood (of denial)

I've been having a good time reading a Powerpoint presentation on How Creationists Explain Evolution. Por ejemplo, did you know that the earth used to be surrounded by a giant water canopy? And fossilization can happen instantly! (Navigation buttons for slides are in right-hand corner just above the first slide.)

Three words that could overthrow physics

What is magnetism? "I set out on what I assumed would be a minutes-long odyssey to understand the phenomenon [of magnetism]. Seventy-one days later, I am here with astonishing findings.

For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another -- more astonishing still, perhaps -- nobody seems to care." (Discover magazine)