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A sponge is a sponge because its porous material is able to absorb liquid of any kind. But what about liquid metal? Can a sponge actually absorb the heavy quicksilver material known as mercury? Not at all. At best, a little bit of mercury goop gets caught on top of the sponge and slides away like its T-1000 shaping itself back together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PWCx3faQSfQ

Time travel has always been the thing we associate with the future. But we keep reaching the future, only to find that time travel still eludes us. What's holding us back? Nothing, it turns out. Okay, traveling through time at the same speed as everyone else is kind of ... commonplace. But compared to the enormously complex things you'd have to do to break the chains holding us temporally together, living your life at normal pace sounds a lot easier. And hey, you can still tell people you're a time traveler! https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FflcA85zcOM

In a steamy tropical forest 46 million years ago, a prehistoric mosquito bit a critter, drew blood and was blown into a lake in what is now the northwestern state of Montana. Belly full, she died and sank. Flash forward to the present. Researchers found the minuscule female insect fossilized in a paper-thin piece of shale—which had sat in someone's basement for 25 to 30 years with other rocks— and concluded it still contains its last supper. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science reports a first for biology: a blood meal found intact in a fossil. This image provided by the Smithsonian Institution shows a fossilized female mosquito in a paper-thin piece of shale. The 46 million year-old insect drew blood in its last meal, was blown into a lake in what is now northwestern Montana and sank, belly still full. It's a first for biology, a blood meal found intact in a fossil. While the scenario sounds eerily similar to the Michael Crichton book and movie "Jurassic Park," no new T. rexes will result. Unfortunately for would-be dinosaur cloners, the mosquito flew long after dinosaurs went extinct, and its meal was probably blood from a dino descendant, a bird. And an even bigger blow to the "Jurassic Park" scenario is that scientists have long known that DNA from other critters couldn't survive in insect fossils, said study lead author Dale Greenwalt, a retired biochemist who collects and analyzes insect fossils from Montana for the Smithsonian Institution. So this is more a scientific curiosity, a look-what-we-found, that starts out like early chapters of the sci-fi thriller. Greenwalt said. Using two different types of light-refracting x-rays that determine what chemicals are present, Greenwalt and colleagues determined that the female mosquito's belly was full of iron, a major feature of blood that gets oxygen to the rest of the body. Iron levels were higher than elsewhere in her body and anywhere on a non-biting male used as a control subject. Then the team found evidence of porphyrins, which are bound to iron in blood. Putting the two together makes "a definitive case" for blood, Greenwalt said. Outside expert Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University said while the study is exciting and significant, it is preliminary and she thinks Greenwalt's team didn't prove their conclusion that it is blood by ruling out all other possibilities.

Ever since the late 17th century, it's been understood that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's Newton's Third Law of Motion. But a group of German scientists recently came up with a trick that appears to break that law, one that lets light accelerate all by itself. And it could bring us faster electronics in the process. Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727) This is not a simple trick. It involves fiddling with the mass of photons, particles that are believed not to have a mass at all, and requires a form of negative mass, a state that scientists believe does not exist. That's the trick part. And that's also why it merely appears to break Newton's third law. All that said, it's pretty impressive. Newton Third Law: A force is a push or a pull upon an object that results from its interaction with another object. What these German scientists basically did is create an optical diametric drive. The basic principle behind a diametric drive calls for an object with positive mass to collide with an object with negative mass causing both to accelerate forever in the same direction. In the 1990s NASA tried and failed to build one, because it would make an awesome spaceship engine. However—and that's a big however—diametric drives are difficult to build because there's no such thing as an object with negative mass, at least not one that scientists have observed. Bear with me here. To get around these basic rules of physics and quantum mechanics, our friends the German scientists used photons to create something called effective mass. This is what a particle seems to have when it's responding to forces, and there is such a thing as negative effective mass. So the scientists sent a series of laser pulses through a two loops of fiber-optic cable—one bigger than the other—that connect at a contact point. As the pulses are traveling through the different-sized loops at slightly different times, they share photons creating an interference that gives them effective mass, some positive and some negative. In this so-called optical diametric drive, the pulses accelerate in the same direction. Cool, huh? Complicated, but cool. This is an illustration of the "super-photon." Needless to say, the idea of laser pulses that accelerate continuously bears big implications for anything that uses fiber optic cables. This method could make computers, communications networks, and so forth to get faster and more powerful. Just remember that it's a highly experimental new technology; it's going to take a while before this makes your iPhone better.

Before the word wide web was a twinkle in Tim Berners Lee's eye, CERN had developed the Grid—a world-spanning network of computing power to help drive the progress of physics. In fact, the Grid is still very much in existence, and does rather more than just help share the reams of data the Large Hadron Collider collects. This video tells you everything you need to know about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cj8ZNgnzSSU

I've mentioned a few ways to detect liars, but Pamela Meyer has discovered just about all of them. She's taken a look at the most common behaviors of liars, scientifically, and shares her expertise on how to detect them. Meyer believes that lying is often a cooperative act. We willingly let others deceive us because we want to avoid conflict. We may tell each other an email didn't receive a response because it ended up in the spam folder or that dinner was delicious (or at least tolerable). This is okay to some extent because we're all okay with it, but studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times per day. Many of those are white lies, but studies have also discovered that strangers lie three times within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. Meyer sees lying as what we do to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. When we want something to be true, we lie so that it at least appears to be true in the hopes that we may be able to make it that way before any truth is uncovered. We hope it will be true, and so our lies are essentially loans of a desired future. We all do this on occasion, but some lies are worse than others. Fortunately, science points to plenty of indicators to help us detect when we're being told a lie, many of which are contrary to what most people believe: Liars like to distance themselves from the subject. Taking Bill Clinton as an example, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," has the two giveaways of "did not" and "that woman" help point out that it's a lie. Liars use qualifying language, like "to tell you the truth." Repeating the question before answering it dishonestly is a common indicator of a lie. Liars look you in the eyes too much. They don't fidget, but rather freeze their upper body. Liars will fake smiles. Here's how to tell the difference. Liars like to offer details. When liars are the culprits and trying to avoid punishment for what they did, they're more likely to suggest strict punishments for the "real culprit." Liars are terrible at telling their stories backwards. Liars will often point their feet towards an exit. Liars will often put barrier objects between themselves and the person asking them about their lie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P_6vDLq64gE Meyer's talk demonstrates several other lie detection methods, such as head shakes and asymmetrical expressions, that you really need to watch the video to understand. It's fascinating and worth the 15 minutes it'll take to watch—especially because, with a little practice, you should be able to point out lies in your everyday life pretty easily.

When someone is lying about something, they're usually unconsciously trying to distance themselves from the situation to make the lie more tolerable to tell. As The Wall Street Journal points out, this means that when people lie they tend to use the word "I" a lot less. A lot of people generally avoid using the word "I," including high-powered people and bosses, but it's also a pretty good indicator that someone is hiding the truth. The Wall Street Journal explains: Of course, the lack of pronoun usage isn't a definitive way to spot a liar, but it's something you can add to your lie-spotting toolkit.

Scientists recently discovered a new type of botulinum toxin (a.k.a. botox) that they believe is the deadliest substance known to man. Because they've yet to discover an antitoxin, researchers won't publish the details of gene sequence due to security concerns—a first for the scientific community. Thank God. When scientists say this stuff is deadly, they mean it. It takes an injection of just 2 billionths of a gram or inhaling 13 billionths of a gram to kill an adult. A spoonful of the stuff in a city's water supply could be catastrophic. The toxin, which comes from the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, blocks the chemical that makes nerves work, causing botulism and death by paralysis. In a comment accompanying a newly published journal article on the new botox, Stanford Medical School professor David Relman said the substance posed "an immediate and unusually serious risk to society." You'd be right to wonder: If this stuff is so dangerous, why do we have it in the first place? Well, it's not manmade if that's what you're thinking. Before this new discovery, there were seven known branches on the botulinum family tree, but researchers recently found an eighth type of toxin in stool samples of an infant with botulism. It just so turns out that eighth type, known as type H, is the deadliest substance in the world. Scientists are withholding the genetic sequence so that terrorists, for instance, can't synthesize it and do something terrible. Terrorists do like botox, too. It was one of these toxins that the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo tried to release in downtown Tokyo in the 1990s. Despite the somewhat sensational nature of this latest discovery, everything is okay for now. This is, however, a rude reminder of how scientific discoveries can always be twisted into weapons of warfare. Unless we keep them secret, that is.