In this week’s New Yorker, Michael Specter takes a great look at the world of in-vitro meat—grown in a lab, outside an animal body. It's not a matter of if, but when. Will you eat it? More

You're probably on camera right now. Wave hello. If you were wearing this line of Cold Flare jewelry from a pair of ITP students, you'd be invisible—or at least, anonymous(er). More

Liquid crystals – yes the same as the ones in your calculator — may soon save lives: they’ll be detecting deadly bacterial infections. It turns out liquid crystals are incredibly sensitive to endotoxin, a lipid that’s found on the outside of many bacteria, including E. coli and Salmonella. More

It’s disappointing that in his speech earlier today, Barack Obama didn’t tackle America’s dangerous dependence on foreign olive oil:

It seems to me that the California Olive Oil Council needs to develop a more robust lobbying/pr effort to raise awareness on this front. I’m eager to offer my services!

Taken from:
The United States of America Consumes 8 Percent Of World’s Olive Oil, Produces Just 0.1 Percent

The Nielsen Company’s most recent research on mobile connected devices sheds new light on how consumers are using their tablets, eReaders and smartphones – and where they are using them, too. According to Nielsen’s recent survey of nearly 12,000 connected device owners:

• Seventy percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners said they use their devices while watching television, compared to only 35 percent of eReader owners.
• Sixty-one percent of eReader owners use their device in bed, compared to 57 percent of tablet owners and 51 percent of smartphone owners.

But just how much time are tablet, eReader, and smartphone owners spending using their device while watching TV or lying in bed?

When asked how they spent time with their device:

• Tablet owners said 30 percent of their time spent with their device was while watching TV compared to 21 percent lying in bed.
• Smartphone owners say that 20 percent of the time they use their smartphones is while watching TV, compared to 11 percent lying in bed.
• eReader owners indicated only 15 percent of their eReader time was spent watching TV, though they spent a whopping 37 percent of their device usage time in bed.
• 

Link:
In the U.S., Tablets are TV Buddies while eReaders Make Great Bedfellows

It's pretty amazing that there's already one pill used to beat back HIV in the body—but now there's another. The FDA's approved Edurant, which, when used with other drugs, drops the virus' presence inside patients. Lives saved. [AP] More

The cool trick about stem cells is that they’re super adaptable, and can become any other sort of cell, right? So why not use a mass of stem cells to regenerate a limb? Or grow an extra one? Well, it looks like it’s all a bit more complicated than that. According to new research on the self-regenerating Zebrafish, the fish don’t just form a mass of stem cells on a fin’s stump to regrow the limb. Zebrafish actually use a slurry of cells, of different origins and with different purposes. Think salad, not soup. More

There are some words in foreign languages that just don’t have a direct translation to English. Here now is a list of twenty of them. Your failure to learn them will give me plenty of schadenfreude.

When linguists refer to “untranslatable” words, the idea is not that a word cannot somehow be explained in another language, but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another. This often is due to different social and cultural contexts that have shaped how the word is used.

Link

See the article here:
20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World

Royal Dutch Shell has made a final decision to construct a massive natural gas plant, which it claims will be the world’s largest floating manmade object.

Read More:
Gas plant to be largest floating manmade object

The internet was 25 years away from inception when this photo was taken in 1945, but the Boston Globe had another way to rapidly disseminate breaking news amongst the masses: chalkboards in a busy city intersection. [Boston Globe] More