an ode to stumbleupon.com and other news

It's time for me to just come right out and say it.
www.stumbleupon.com is one of the most underrated websites on the internet. Let me put my opinion of this website across to you gently: It's frikkin awesome, do you hear me?

Instead of spending ALL your time on Facebook and/or Twitter, spend half an hour on www.stumbleupon.com and then paste all the awesome stuff you find onto Facebook and/or Twitter. Smart huh? (And a win win!) (And if you start bitching about how long it takes to register on the stumbler, you're full of poop. Stop telling your friends how wonderful your life is for five minutes and spend two of those minutes getting your registration in order. For the next three minutes, bask in the glory of your geniousness. You'll thank your lucky stars, soon-soon.)

Don't forget you heard it here first. (Sort of.)




Now, onto other news.

Formula One
Aman (my husband) and I watched the Formula One last night. Was a fairly decent race. Nothing AMAZING overall, but entertaining nonetheless. Don't know if you heard, but Jenson Button was almost hijacked in Sao Paulo. (Before the race, not during. Doh.) According to reports, this past Sunday (yesterday) Button was being driven in his armoured car by his plain clothes policeman protector dude (you know, the usual Sunday hangout routine) when five or six armed gunmen sort of "stalked" the car and then started running towards it when the plain clothes policeman got suspicious and began driving through the traffic. (Bashing cars up on the way might I add.) But Button escaped safe and sound and was able to race another day! Thanks plain clothes policeman!

The centre of the galaxy taste of raspberries and smells of rum
Yes. In a bizarre twist, scientists have discovered that the centre of the galaxy might very well taste like raspberries and smell like rum. Yum! Yum! How did they find this out?  Well, the discovery follows years and years of hard slog by astronomers who trained their 30m radio telescope on the enormous ball of dust and gas in the hope of spotting complicated molecules, like amino acids, that are vital for life. Finding these in interstellar space is the million dollar lottery win for astrobiologists, as this might very well raise the possibility of life emerging on other planets after being seeded with the molecules. In this latest observation, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy and, while although they didn't find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.

Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian online: "It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries." Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum. Delish! Now all we need to do is build a time machine and head out there as soon as frikkin possible!

To invisibility and beyond!

According to the BBC's website, scientists in the UK are working on a flexible film that could create something very similar to the invisibility cloak that Harry Potter made famous. The film that the cloak would be made of contains tiny structures that together form a metamaterial, which can, among other tricks, manipulate light to render objects invisible. Nice! Apparently, flexible metamaterials have been made before, but only work for the light of a colour far beyond that which we see.