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I had no idea, but Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, had lost his voice early last year. Well, he regained it 3 days ago when he discovered that he could talk in rhyme! I mean it! Anybody want a peanut?

As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis. It happens to people in my age bracket.

I asked my doctor – a specialist for this condition – how many people have ever gotten better. Answer: zero.
…
The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

You can read his full blog about it here

Element 118

By firing atoms of metal at another metal, Russian and American scientists reported Monday, they created a new element — No. 118 on the periodic table — that is the heaviest substance known.

Ununoctium, as the new element is temporarily named, has no known use but inspired almost a decade-long pursuit by scientists on four continents. Controversy in the course of its discovery hobbled the career of one physicist and almost wrecked the world’s most productive team of element hunters at Berkeley.

So far, science has gotten a fair measure of trouble out of element 118 for a substance that breaks down in a few thousandths of a second. As quickly as the discovery was announced, at least one competing team voiced doubts that it had been found at all.

Nine buildings have been excavated at Stonehenge!

Nine Neolithic-era buildings have been excavated in the Stonehenge world heritage site, according to a report in the journal British Archaeology.
The buildings all had plaster floors and timber frames, and most had a central hearth. Two, including a house possibly inhabited by a community chief or priest, were enclosed by ringed ditches, the largest measuring 131 feet across. Postholes indicate a wooden fence would have surrounded the smaller of the two structures.

I personally find it interesting that two of the buildings were ringed by a ditch…Stonehenge is also ringed by a ditch…I wonder if that was a form of protection from spirits and such in their day/region – a hermetic circle of sorts?

The Article: Ancient Stonehenge Houses Unearthed

A team of scientists in the Netherlands have created ‘mood clothes’. Like mood rings, these outfits sense the wearer’s mood and change colors based on that information; however, unlike mood rings, they do this using electronics built into the clothing. The researchers foresee this technology being widely implemented one day to allow the wearer to interact with their environment without having to directly interact with it.

Van Heerden and his team have designed two prototype garments as part of a project named SKIN — inspired by the way human skin reacts naturally to both external and internal stimuli.
Related technologies could someday lead to cars that automatically navigate a quiet route when the driver is stressed, or chairs that sense exhaustion and automatically dim the room lights.

Click here for the full article.

Alan Epstein, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has created a tiny (quarter-sized) jet engine that could provide electricity to just about any electronic device. I love the idea – but did we really need a new way to expend fuel? At least it appears to run on non-petroleum-based fuels.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/10/10/microengine_tec.html

A tiny gas-turbine engine that fits on a quarter could replace batteries currently used to power laptops, cell phones, radios, and perhaps even home generators.
The engine works on the same principle as a jet engine: a compressor sucks in air from the outside and compresses the air. Fuel injectors add fuel to the compressed air and the mixture gets ignited. (Epstein’s engine will run on a variety of fuel, including kerosene, propane, ethanol, methanol or hydrogen.)
The hot gas produced expands rapidly to turn a turbine, which turns a coil inside a magnet to create electricity.

A team of doctors/professors at Stanford are working on replacement corneas for people who’s corneas are damaged or diseased. These could be though of as Protective Covers.

You can read the full article here.

Ok, I’ll admit that I must be a little behind the curve because my dog has one of these, but I had no idea that they were putting them in humans now.

The VeriChip is an RFID tag that can hold (as you would imagine) identity, medical and insurance information, along with any other information you want. The tags could even be used by a security team to allow/deny access to a building or rooms within a building according to the RFID signal (just like many keycards in use today).

I learned about this technology through this article, which explains that the first teen to be implanted with one died in a motorcycle accident Saturday.

This is one of the original news articles about Derek and his family, who were all implanted with the VeriChip in 2002.

As with the RFID-enabled passports announced by the US government earlier this year, I am skeptical as to how secure these are as a means to carry your personal information.

A team of 5 doctors performed a cyst removal operation on a man in an Airbus 300 airplane Wednesday. The conditions under which they operated where ‘near zero-gravity’.

The surgery went “exactly as we had expected,” Martin told reporters near Merignac airport, outside Bordeaux. “All the data we collected allow us to think that operating on a human in the conditions of space would not present insurmountable problems.”

Read the full article here.

The SR4 Gamemaster’s Screen with Contacts and Adventures book is shipping to stores this week!

This 4-panel GM Screen provides handy and useful charts for playing Shadowrun, Fourth Edition. Comes with a 32-page gamemaster aide for creating short scenarios, including a selection of ready-to-run plot hooks.

Click here for more product information, including links to eBook vendors who are carrying electronic versions.

An ex-utility lineman who suffered electrical burns to both arms and shoulders in 2001 now has a pair of prosthetic arms which are controlled by other bodily muscles, such as the pectoral muscles.

Jesse Sullivan has two prosthetic arms, but he can climb a ladder at his house and roll on a fresh coat of paint. He’s also good with a weed-whacker, bending his elbow and rotating his forearm to guide the machine.

You can read more about how Mr. Sullivan’s new arms work here.