The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang". more inside

A collection of interesting bike designs.

I propose a game. Several years ago, I belonged to an online community which sported a thread of numbers. We started from 1. Most of the first several numbers were simply designated as prime, but when things got into double digits, we found assignations for the numbers. For instance: 23 could just be designated as prime. The next post could have to do with the 24th parallel, or the 24th element, or the 24th Nobel Peace Prize winner, or what 24 cups of flour could be used for (and is divisible by 2,3,6, and 12). 25 (divisible by 5) might talk about what happened in the year 25 C.E., or that there are 25 menus here, or that a 25 cent stamp in Canada looked like this. more inside

Health insurers are paying facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose the US healthcare reform bill. Users of Facebook apps by Zynga (which include Farmville, CafeWorld, Mafia Wars, etc.) earn virtual currency to use in games by following links to various "special offers". Get Healthcare Reform Right offers virtual cash in return for completing a form which is sent to government representatives. Now, in response, Healthcare For America Now has countered with ads of its own.

The CBS blacklist during McCarthy's Red Scare

40 Beautiful Examples of Black and White Photography more inside

The Lone Ranger in a Volvo SLYT about the Lone Ranger, in a Volvo...really more inside

A new species is emerging in Canada and New England: the coywolf

It's Official... Your Pet Can Catch H1N1 Flu... (even if it's NOT a pot-bellied pig). Well, one cat in Iowa and two ferrets in Oregon and Nebraska, but still zero cases of transmission from pet to human. Common sense advice from the Iowa Department of Public Health here, but is this what will finally start the Swine Flu Panic!!! that we know we're capable of? more inside

Dark matter discovered? The particle community is bustling with rumours of a possible discovery of dark matter in CDMS.

All Google Searches Are Now Automatically 'Personalized' even if you're not logged into a Google account (coookeees!). You can opt OUT (not a 'one-click' process, though). more inside

Weird Book Room Your Christmas shopping quandaries sorted. more inside

"Refreshing, Existential and Disturbing" That's what Search Engine Watch calls Ask.com's Top 10 Questions of 2009. Considering the site dropped the Question-based format in favor of plain search years ago, they're also way behind the curve. But it's not the worst Top 10 list you'll see before the end of the year (and you'll be seeing a lot more). more inside

Overseas and Overwhelmed 25 Stories of Culture Shock

Oooooh.

Shrink-It YAPG (Yet another physics game) involving shrinking (or expanding) objects to drop another object into a target. more inside

Barnes and Noble unveil Nook, an eBook reader that also saves and plays mp3s, among other file formats. more inside

Wordy snarky strips about the "creative business" industry.

Paper Cannon Exploding one-eyed pink rabbits.

Can reefs grow beneath Venice? A TED lecture in which Rachel Armstrong explains the process that uses proto cells to grab carbon dioxide from the air and encrust the old wooden pylons on which this charming Italian city is based. Eventually it is thought that a reef can be built to support the architecture, not only spatially from the bottom up, but procedurally, since no top down construction processes are required, but just the seeding of the old with the new technology. more inside