A Roy

""The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

TwitCritics leverages the constant flow of positive and negative movie references on Twitter to give a peek at public opinion on what's playing at theaters. By cataloging references to currently playing movies according to negative or positive wording within tweets, TwitCritics builds an index of movie popularity. Clicking on a movie gives you a view of the movie poster, the current rank, and a list of the most recent tweets related to it. The system isn't perfect of course, if you send out a tweet that says "I love cheese. I wouldn't see 'The Box' again anytime soon." it can throw the system off. Thankfully TwitCritics has a simple feedback mechanism for reporting inaccurate rankings—although from our casual browsing of movie reviews, the system seems accurate enough to give you a solid overview of public opinion on current movies. Have a favorite way to get a sense of what movies are worth buying a ticket for? Let's hear about it in the comments. TwitCritics [via MakeUseOf]" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate's penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory... more... - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Conserve soil and energy and protect air and water quality. The most popular GE crops are immune to herbicides used to kill weeds. Eliminating the need for repeated plowing to control weeds has encouraged the adoption of minimum tillage practices by farmers, which reduces soil erosion and fuel use. Consequently, GE crops cut greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking over 6 million cars off the road in 2006. And less eroded soil and fertilizer in waterways improves water quality. Check. • Minimize use of toxics. The most popular herbicide used with the GE crops mentioned above replaces others that are three times as toxic and persist twice as long in the environment. Another major GE trait is insect resistance conferred by Bt proteins from a bacterium that deter or kill specific groups of worms that eat crops. In its sprayed form, Bt is approved for organic crops. In its GE crop form, it reduced global insecticide use by 300 million pounds between 1996 and 2006 (a 30%... more... - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"The UK medicines regulator has granted its first licence to a homeopathic remedy under controversial new rules allowing complementary therapies to make medicinal claims. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has granted an arnica homeopathic product a licence for the relief of sprains or bruising. Experts say that it contains zero active ingredients and condemned the decision as a “cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine”." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"“Indications are limited to the relief or treatment of minor symptoms or minor conditions, ie, symptoms or conditions which can ordinarily and with reasonable safety be relieved or treated without the supervision or intervention of a doctor. “Indications for serious conditions are prohibited.” - Nils Reinton

"Venice, Italy is sinking. To save it, Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself. She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters carbon, too." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Forget about the hybrid auto -- Shai Agassi says it's electric cars or bust if we want to impact emissions. His company, Better Place, has a radical plan to take entire countries oil-free by 2020." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Plugging Into the Sun Sunlight bathes us in far more energy than we could ever need—if we could just catch enough." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Readability2 is based on Readability, but goes even further in the stream lining process, removing absolutely everything—logos, print buttons, etc.—and leaving only the actual images from the article you're reading, plus the text, of course. One of the nifty features is that Readability2 keeps all the markup code in the body of the article, which makes for easy cutting and pasting." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Canonical will release the latest version of the open-source operating system Ubuntu this Thursday, and we look at how it stacks up against Windows 7" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

By the end of the century the Earth could be more than 6 degrees hotter than it is today. This slideshow demonstrates what could happen to our planet as each degree is reached if we don't act now to stop our carbon emissions. - A Roy from Bookmarklet