One More Thing: One More Monkey

Research based at the University of Portsmouth finds that most apes, including gorillas, chipanzees, and orangutans laugh when tickled. Yet another human behaviour with roots going back much further than we suspected. Check out the video here. I'm mosty curious about how one goes about recruiting grad students to tickle damn dirty apes!

The third generation iPod shuffle caused much dicussion on the interwebs due to all the buttons moving to the headphone cord. Built in convenience or Apple working very hard to stick it to peripheral makers? Well, now the buttons can go back on the darn thing thanks to a wrap-arround add-on from Scosche. Unfortunatly, you would have to cough up and extra 30 clams just to put functionality back into the device, and you might have some awkward moments explaining that it's a "TapStick".

Those of you waiting for Google Chrome to move from being Windows-only to being more platform agnostic will be happy to hear that Google has released a dev build for OS X and Linux. While not ready for primetime, it does show that the zippy browser is not far from a Mac or Linux box near you.

It seems that there are other ways to look for penguins besides tracking the elusive Linux hippie, such as finding their poop... from spaaaaace! The British Antarctic Survey were recently able to identify 10 previously unknown Emperor penguin colonies based on stains on the ice resulting from penguin poop visible from orbit. It's not a glamorous job, but it pays the bills. And it is a step above being the guy who tickles monkeys all day.

Sun stealing our atmosphere, Don't Panic.

Using data provided by the ESA's Mars Express and Nasa's Small Explorer (SMEX), researchers at UCLA have worked out that not only does the Earth's magnetic field not protect Earth's atmosphere from being lost into space by the action of the solar wind, but we actually lose it faster than Mars or Venus. Earth's magnetic field makes life as we know it possible by blunting the sun's radiation, but it apparently also funnels some atmospheric gases off into space, although the phyisical mechanism is not understood. Be sure to read down to the section entiled "don't panic" (appreciate the Hitchhiker's Guide reference), as its important to note that the loss of atmosphere is so slow that the sun will die before our atmosphere becomes too thin to sustain life. Hey, I never said that we weren't doomed.