Birds are dinosaurs – and within five years, paleontologist Jack Horner believes he’ll produce a classic dino look-alike by manipulating the genes of a modern day chicken. Researchers are breaking dino bones apart, finding blood vessels, elastic tissue and 80 million year old cells. Jurassic Park, here we come!

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I love classic pseudo futuristic ramblings that are supposed to have a hint of scientific genius. The August 1956 issue of Mechanics Illustrated asks anthropologists, physiologists, engineers and industrial designers how they would go about improving the human body, and here’s what they came up with:

The spine – should be replaced by “a solid column, with a greatly increased load-carrying capacity”

The brain – should be situated in the chest cavity, near the heart, making the chest bigger in size and the head cylindrical

The ribs – rather than individual ribs, organs should be encased in a giant clamshell device, which can be opened easily for surgery

The eyes – add an extra set in the back of the head for a 360 degree perspective

Antennaes – could be concealed in head to pick up low frequency sounds from behind

The teeth – remove 35% of them to give more space to the remaining 65%

The toes – little toes and toenails serve no purpose and should be eliminated

The nose – replace it w/ a short trunk so that the air doesn’t have to make a hairpin turn before going down into the lungs, avoiding “several kinds of sinus trouble and what-have-you.”

Other suggestions included: wings, UV contact lenses, built-in marsupial-style pouches, a food storage compartment, 360 degree neck mobility, an eye in the tip of the finger, a hook on the head so you can hang yourself up and be hands-free on bumpy subways, extra fingers behind the ears to keep hats from blowing off, and folding ears to catch low-pitched sounds.

Via Modern Mechanix via Gizmodo

You may remember that an object plunged into Jupiter. The blemish it left behind has, within three weeks, grown to the size of the Earth!

This past week, astronomers have discovered a new moonlet in Saturn’s orbit. The small moon is about a quarter of a mile in diameter and first photographed from the Cassini. 1000 light-years away, astonomers also found the first occurance of a planet orbiting backwards – ie. in the direction opposite to its star’s rotation – possibly due to a near-collision between star and planet. And by 2020 NASA says it should be able to detect 90 percent of potential collisions and hazards nearing earth’s orbit. These potential hazards are defined as those objects larger than 3 football fields.

Via BBC
Via Space.com
Via JPL’s Asteroid Watch

For the past few days word has been flying around the internet that a German physician, treating a 42 year old American in Berlin for leukemia, ‘accidentally’ cured him of HIV, of which the patient was also suffering. Come to find out that Dr. Gero Hütter didn’t necessarily cure him accidentally, it was more a theory he was putting to the test.

In need of a bone marrow transplant, Dr. Hütter chose specific marrow from a donor who carries the naturally occuring genetic mutation that renders cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes Aids. After a successful transplant, the patient appear to be recovering well and more importantly, appears to be free of HIV as well, even after over 600 days without antiretroviral medication.

More tests using this method will be conducted on HIV+ patients, but if they prove to be successful, this type of gene therapy will become much more accepted as a treatment for the HIV virus.

Who needs planet Earth when we’ve got Mars?? That’s what I’m saying. The Mars Society, a group of scientists who share a goal of colonizing Mars, believes that humans can colonize the red planet in little more than 1000 years, in stark competition with other scientist’s who say it would be 20,000-100,000 years. According to the society, Mars could be colonized in 3 steps, the first of which is occurring now, exploration. Though many human landings would need to take place, the following steps would involve sketchy actions, such as giant mirrors directing the sun to the planet in an attempt to warm it, freeing gasses and eventually creating a global warming type effect. One of the options would be to build several chemical plants on the surface, pumping out 1,000 tons of fluoromethane an hour, which would raise the temperature on the red planet by 50°F over 30 years. See the complete PopSci walkthrough for a complete walkthrough of scenarios for terraforming planet Mars.

Read more: Mars habitable in 1000 years

It’s now 5 minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock, which is maintained by the Board of Directors of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. The clock, which was created in 1947 as a tangible means of communicating how close humanity is to being annihilated, with midnight representing total destruction by nuclear war. The last time the clock moved was in 2002, thanks to the hawkish turn the American government took, stalling disarmament and backing out of the Anti-Ballistic missile Treaty, effectively granting permission to the rest of the world to being stockpiling arms. Thanks be to the United States’ horrid leadership over the past 5 years, the board decided to advance the clock by 2 minutes, citing concerns over Iran and North Korea’s nuclear weapon intentions and the rapidly decreasing environmental stability thanks to global warming. In honor of, sit back and enjoy R.E.M.’s epic track, dedicated to just this topic…

Read the Board’s statement after the jump..

Read more of ”Doomsday Clock hits 5 minutes to midnight, sales of R.E.M’s “Document” up“

In a new paper published on Sunday and delivered at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society a scientist is stating his theory that two NASA space probes (Vikings) may have found alien microbes on Mars 30 years ago but inadvertently killed them. The theory presented is that Voyager was looking for life forms specific to Earth-life, where salt water is the internal liquid of living cells, rather than hydrogen peroxide, a liquid which could more realistically survive the cold and dry climate of Mars. As the Viking probes performed their experiments on the Mars surface any hydrogen peroxide-based life would have been killed by experiments consisting of water poured onto the planet surface and another which heated the soil to see if something would occur, essentially baking and Martian microbes.

Read more: Scientist: NASA found life on Mars — then killed it

So you want to piss off your friends or shut up the loud yapper next to you on the subway? Well, get your Radio Shack catalog out of the bathroom and your soldering iron warmed up and ready to go. The wonderfully hacky Ladyada has put together a detailed process for creating the Wave Bubble and published it under a Creative Commons license. What is the Wave Bubble you ask? It’s a self-tuning, wide bandwidth portable RF jammer (cell, WIFI, Bluetooth, etc) that fits snugly in your pocket (though I’d recommend you not keep it in there too long). Using an internal lithium-ion battery, you can jam dual band frequencies (like mobile phones) for up to 2 hours within a 20 foot radius, then recharge via a mini-USB connector. If you’re actually skilled enough to take on such a highly technical project, you should still be aware that this technically is against FCC regulations (therefor don’t even think of selling pre-made jammers). Did I mention that you shouldn’t even think of building this?

Read more: Wave Bubble RF jammer

Dow (booo) and Popsci have put together a really slick and interactive periodic tables list created using Flash. Users are able to scroll over the various table entries, read short (and sometimes snarky) descriptions of the elements and link to even more useful information on the one table you wouldn’t want to eat anything off of.

Read more: Interactive periodic tables

Whoa I don’t even know where to start with this. Wayne’s word (not world – duh) is a giant, giant collection of texts and articles covering natural history, making Wayne’s word one of the largest (if not THE largest) virtual text book. Covering everything from blood types and Crassulacean Acid Metabolism to morse code conversions in JavaScript and the Zigadenus, you can spend hours browsing through all of the online texts and quite possibly write a report or 10 for your kids’ science class.

Read more: Wayne’s word – The online textbook of natural history