What a strange day for news
Man, was today ever a kicker for weird news stories.
First, there's an alarming rise of West Nile cases in the US, and an even more alarming rise of dengue fever cases in Indonesia.
However, if we ever suffer a large population drop, the world could be repopulated much more quickly using the new and improved Womb On A Microchip (available soon from Ronco). Seriously:
Teruo Fujii of the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues are building a microfluidic chip to nurture the first stages of pregnancy. They hope, eventually, to create a fully automated artificial uterus in which egg and sperm are fed in at one end and an early embryo comes out the other, ready for implanting in a real mother.
It's a Pez dispenser for embryos!
Meanwhile, NASA is about to launch the shuttle Endeavour on a mission to the International Space Station; one piece of the intended cargo was a computer which had been deliberately sabotaged for some reason. It's a good thing ground crews found it, because we probably couldn't rely on the astronauts to do so -- certainly not those astronauts who've been flying the space shuttle while drunk.
Let me repeat that last one, and just let the idea wash over you for a minute: astronauts have been flying the shuttle while drunk.
Feels weird to think about that, doesn't it?
In the oceans of the world, an octopus is credited with discovering a very valuable hoard of rare porcelain, and the Russians are trying to claim the North Pole as their territory.