Solar flares, satellite beer-tracking, shuttle computer glitch, Second Life’s first tabloid, Australia digs stem cells, cover your online tracks…

• 1 – Flares, Asteroids and Extinctions
  “Imagine our Sun spewing out a flare 100 million times stronger than usual, releasing the energy of 50 trillion atomic bombs. The effect on our planet would be catastrophic.” No kidding.
  (tags: civilisation destruction asteroid extinction flare solar star science cosmology astronomy space)
• 2 – Heineken To Track Beer By Satellite
  “Do you know where your beer is? Dutch beer maker Heineken wants to make sure – so it has put together a team that includes IBM and the University of Amsterdam to track beer by satellite.”
  (tags: management inventory system tracking satellite distribution delivery brewer beer Heineken)
• 3 – Jim Kalb’s Palindrome Connection
  “A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal — Panama!” Bumper selection of palindromes.
  (tags: humour sentence weird wordplay English palindromes spelling language)
• 4 – Shuttle Computers Find No End to 2006
  “One year might as well be an eternity for NASA’s space shuttles, which – it turns out – have no automatic reset once the calendar hits Jan. 1, 2007.” Well, that’s proprietary code for you.
  (tags: year new date reset clocks calendar computer shuttle space NASA)
• 5 – Ten Ways To Tell If Someone Is Lying To You
  “The professionals look and listen for signs of nervousness, and pay close attention to the content of a suspect’s story. Does it contain a lot of detail? Does it stay consistent through repeated tellings?”
  (tags: lifehacks telltales observation detection lying lies deceit psychology human)
• 6 – Second Life plugs into broadband TV
  “Channel 4 and the Sci-Fi channel are among the companies contributing content to Second Life’s first broadband TV network, due to launch in the virtual world at the end of this month.”
  (tags: sf scifi fiction science channels TV television broadband reality virtual world synthetic Life Second)
• 7 – Second Life gets its first tabloid
  “Axel Springer, the publisher of Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper, is poised to launch a weekly paper designed to sate the virtual population’s appetite for news and gossip.”
  (tags: media newspaper tabloid community reality virtual world synthetic Life Second)
• 8 – Early Earth Haze May Have Spurred Life
  “Hazy skies on early Earth could have provided a substantial source of organic material useful for emerging life on the planet…”
  (tags: life ingredients molecules organic haze atmosphere environment Earth prehistoric)
• 9 – Australian Senate OKs Cloning Embryos
  “The bill … would relax rules on stem cell research and allow therapeutic cloning of embryos for medical research. The House of Representatives still needs to pass the bill before it becomes law, but lawmakers had expected the Senate to pose the biggest
  (tags: medicine law Senate passed bill research cloning embryo cell stem Australia)
• 10 – Mass Producing Engineered Organs
  “Bioartificial kidneys seem to work, but can we make enough for everyone who needs one?”
  (tags: biotech engineering biological production mass transplant dialysis replacement kidney device assist renal health medicine)
• 11 – Cut from different cloth
  “After determining the chemical composition of over 2000 stars in the four nearest dwarf galaxies to our own, astronomers have demonstrated fundamental differences in their make-up…” Cosmological revelations.
  (tags: discredited models galaxy dwarf stars composition chemical cosmology astronomy space)
• 12 – Piracy stats don’t add up
  “Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are “unverified and epistemologically unreliable”, the report says.”
  (tags: copyright unreliable unverified statistics piracy content IP software music Australia)
• 13 – Bizarre Lunar Orbits
  “What appear to be flat seas of lunar lava have huge positive gravitational anomalies—that is, their mass and thus their gravitational fields are significantly stronger than the rest of the lunar crust.”
  (tags: satellite orbit low gravity density mascons concentrations mass planning mission Lunar Moon NASA space)
• 14 – Delete Your Bad Web Rep
  “A new startup, ReputationDefender, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing.” The web gets weirder by the week.
  (tags: networking social security reputation privacy ethics identity online internet)
• 15 – How to Generate High Quantities of Content for Your Blog
  “I am totally in favor of bloggers working on post quality (and have written many tips on this) however – I still think that some bloggers could improve their blogs by upping the quantity of posts.”
  (tags: articles tips writing content quality productivity ideas advice blogging)