Through a century of work and 170km - a Roman aqueduct, across Syria, has been found. Including a section that extends for 94 km underground.

Pay for Pray - please, I pray, let this be a hoax. Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

Tactile illusions . aaaand I'm off to work. NOT going to hunt down a blackboard AT ALL.

Ice cream stealing birds.

Performance drug use - more sophisticated than I had the slightest inkling of.

A photographic survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms. Several of the darkrooms featured have since closed down. Others will surely follow. (The darkroom with the slogan pinned to the wall, 'I want to stay here forever', was dismantled shortly after I photographed it and is now being converted into luxury apartments.)

Big magnets are not your friend. Via the the Dan's Data blog. Ouch! (Warning - somewhat graphic images of a mushed finger tip). Have the zooborn post on standby.

..and I take again cafe...

After a record breaking day in Victoria, Australia, at least 26 people are dead, with more expected to be found. The state premier fought back tears at a press conference, as fires and heat have disrupted travel across Victoria.

Cornify! And to think I never knew I needed it...

So anyway, one photographer sent a daguerreotype of the Obama inauguration along to another photographer whose wife then found the first photographer in a Gigapan picture also taken at the inauguration. Since the daguerreotype process was announced in 1839 and GigaPan was spun off in 2008 (and was itself the result of R&D deployed as part of the Mars Rover mission) that puts nearly 170 years between the two. Which is, I dunno, kinda neat really.

And it wasn't Galileo. Despite his innovative work, Harriot remains relatively unknown. Unlike Galileo, he did not publish his drawings. Unlike Galileo, Harriot is not being widely celebrated during 2009, dubbed the International Year of Astronomy as a commemoration of the telescope's 400th year. This has been another episode of Publish or Perish.

A Meyer Whedon crossover I can get behind.

How to Memorize Scripts . Ken Levine asks around.

Hypothetically, what would happen if you combined ghost nurses, NSFW content (you have been warned), and, uh, inspired? dialogue. Behold.

Time Magazine has a slideshow of a 1980 photoshoot, when the freshman Barack Obama was asked if he would mind posing for a classmate of his. via

World's oldest sample of weapon's grade plutonium has been identified - retrieved from a rusty safe at the bottom of a waste pit during clean up excavations.

Two men were found alive, floating in an Esky in the Torres Strait. They had been there for about 25 days, after their boat sank a couple of days before Christmas. Eskies - don't leave home without them.

Rembrandt Q&A . A photographer chats with Rembrandt about lighting a scene.

Difficult to say while drunk. tinyurl used because actual URL is 143 characters long