One million.

It is truly remarkable that one single factor, namely smoking, which is entirely preventable, accounts for nearly one in ten of all deaths in India.

If those numbers don’t stagger you, then consider yourself unstaggerable. And ask yourself this: In all the conversations you’ve had about the future did anyone ever predict that in 2015 one million Indians would die from voluntary herbal poisoning?
Read the whole story here.

. . . or more accurately, whatever a gecko does, I guess, I mean who cares about accuracy in a post when I have magic glue that lets me climb up walls like Spiderman. They’re calling it “directional adhesive” and it looks like this way up close:

The adhesive sticks when it’s pulled along a surface but doesn’t stick when it’s lifted. So your hand wouldn’t slide down the wall but you could pull it free easily. Well, actually you could pull it off easily as long as you were able to lift your hand in a perpendicular line to the surface. If you were just hanging by one hand from a beam you’d be stuck there a while with no way to support your weight enough to pull your hand straight away. So you could climb up walls like a super mutant, but not across ceilings, and you sure wouldn’t want to high-five anyone as they passed by in a speeding train.

That being said however, the truly coolest application of this will be, finally, a great way to hang stuff on walls. Am I the only person disappointed by our civilization’s failure to find a better way to hang stuff on walls? It’s 2008 and I’m still worried about getting my deposit back on my apartment because I’m putting nails into drywall. I mean come on, Science, fix it! Oh wait, you just did.

Best Pull Quote of the Day:

This is a major milestone in the new field of gecko-inspired adhesives.

Click through for related video treats. You’ve earned it.

Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have released the first known photographs of gorillas performing face-to-face copulation in the wild. This is the first time that western gorillas have been observed and photographed mating in such a manner.

“Understanding the behavior of our cousins the great apes sheds light on the evolution of behavioral traits in our own species and our ancestors,” said Thomas Breuer, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

But the award for best pull quote goes to:

“It is also interesting that this same adult female has been noted for innovative behaviors before.”

Whatever, they can keep The Upright Missionary. I won’t be impressed until the gorillas figure out The Four Tongued Monkey. (I’m sorry.)

Fatal shark attacks worldwide dipped to their lowest levels in two decades in 2007 with the sole casualty involving a swimmer vacationing in the South Pacific, according to the latest statistics from the University of Florida.

USA!USA!USA! Boy, it feels good to win something.

The jumps — saltations, in complexity parlance — appear to be non-linear emergent phenomena, the result of networked interactions that produce self-organization at ever higher levels. From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is a mechanism of a higher universal law, perhaps even a variant on the second law of thermodynamics.

And so I would like to say thank you to Brandon Keim, author of the article. Thanks Brandon, now there’s geek juice all over my keyboard. Thanks alot.

Even the most mundane possible application of augmented reality becomes beautifully surreal/real and really rather charming in a quick outing for coffee. What might just be a clever World of Warcraft gag becomes a micro-glimpse into a future where the data cloud is permanently wrapped around your optic nerve. If you’re going to be in New York in March maybe I’ll bump into you at Eyebeam.

Scientists at UNC Chapel Hill have discovered a new and remarkable pathway to controlling cell function. It involves the ability to fiddle with “G-protein receptors” from within the cell instead of from outside, a drastic difference from almost all of modern medicine.

. . . reactions to everything from taste and smell to stimulants like adrenaline or caffeine requires G-protein signaling. More than half [!!!-Ed.] of all drugs, from asthma and heart medicine to antidepressants, target G-protein receptors. Discovering a protein that activates G-proteins from inside a cell could open up an entirely new pathway for drug development, said Henrik Dohlman, Ph.D., senior study author and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics in UNC’s School of Medicine.
“No drug is 100 percent effective, 100 percent free of side effects and 100 percent safe. The more options we have biochemically, the more selective we can be in designing new drugs. If we can find another way of modulating G-proteins, we could expand the drug targets that are available to pharmacology,” Dohlman said.

This brings us much closer to the age of drug design and further away from the age of pharmacology-by-trial-and-error. Most hot, designer drugs around now were “designed” back when pharmacology consisted entirely of the let’s-eat-this-big-molecule-and-see-what-happens method. Evolving to a stage where we can design specific proteins and other molecules for specific purposes in the body is a necessary step for a better global future, not just a transhumanist pipe-dream.

The Use-Thing is designed to make the presence of a crowd a little more easier to bear for the horribly anti-social, and we’re betting it’ll do just that one way or another. Its designer, Guido Mamczur of Germany, intended it to simply block out the sound and sights of those awful people you’re forced to coexist with, but we’re betting folks will give a wide berth to the crazy ball-headed person walking down the street anyway. Both ways, you’re covered.

I think that helmet is big enough to count as architecture, right? Fill that thing with beer and television, and you may count me in for approximately five minutes. Then you may count me unconscious.

where to even start?
-Snoop Dogg has become a parody of a caricature of himself. seriously.
-This is the best appropriation of 70s culture I’ve ever seen.
-The song involves a keytar and a talk box (step aside, Frampton… or, should i say, nuzzle up? [nizzle up. heh heh. nizzle.]).
-Someone (his name rhymes with poop hog) approached a music video director and demanded something like “A flying circular bed, super-lo-fi-looking-hi-fi-radiation coming off my body, one of those crazy photobooth mirror tricks, and star wipes… lots and lots of star wipes.”
-For the first time in recorded history, Snoop Doog sings. And then he kicks a nasty flow.
-The original name of this song is “Sexual Eruption”, which apparently needed to be censored (wtf, America? wtf?! you ruin *everything*).
-Grammar is bent so violently that it still transmits meaning and maintains flawless aural candor, despite total syntactical incoherence.
-Did I mention the keytar?!

Just bask. Bask in the unbridled awesomeness that is the transcendent masterpiece of contemporary popular culture’s true arbiter.

for shizzle.