Theoretically, it is entirely possible to keep sound waves from escaping.  Working around the methodology which allows light waves to be bent, a professor at prestigious Duke University theorizes that it is possible to do the same to sound waves, thereby stopping them from ever being heard.

The really spooky thing is that sound waves trapped in such a manner, be it by invisible shield or technical contraption, will never escape.  That makes me think of being trapped in some sound shielding bubble with my own thoughts — and having to exist forever with my own sound waves as well, echoing forever with nowhere to go.

The Time.com website has put up a video slideshow report about how Darfur refugees have benefited from solar technology that allows them to cook food using the power of the sun.

The alternative, burning firewood, has proven dangerous in the past, not because of the fire but because going off into the bush to gather firewood has put Darfur women at risk.

Link is here.

RNL Bio is the Seoul-based company that has fired the opening shot in the race to profit from nutty pet owners.

This week, RNL Bio released five pit bull puppies cloned form the dead dog of an American woman named Bernann McKinney.

The deceased canine who provided the DNA for this historic achievement bore the appropriately dignified moniker, “Booger”.

This German patient is sure to be clasping double armfuls of happiness to his painkiller-saturated breast right now, after being the first person in history to receive transplants of two complete arms.

A team of 40 medics labored for 15 hours in a hospital near Munich, Germany to give the unidentified patient back the appendages he lost six years ago in a horrible accident.

And what does one say after waking up with someone else’s hands? “It’s alive!”? Well, according to the doctors the patient’s first words were, “Very good.”

My question is, where did the arms come from? Strangest Science News suggests that the patient watch the film “Idle hands”.

To save myself from a load of acronyms and scientific gobbledygook, I present this link to the full article.

The Time website just came out with a cool photo essay about animals in space. The photo essay is supposed to commemorate NASA’s fiftieth anniversary, but I’m more interested in the animals themselves.

Are they heroes? Pioneers? Hapless experimental test subjects?

The handful of images including the one above may not suffice to reach a conclusion, but it does give a person a lot to think about.

Slideshow here

Check out this assortment of ghouls and nasties, all working for the benefit of medicine.

They’re medical training manikins (not mannequins, which you find in shop windows), and they range from creepy to out-and-out slasher film gory, to kinda SF cool (as in the example above).

And while you’re at that site, you can vote for the most disturbing one, too.

If you have a thing about hypodermic needles and all that injection stuff, you’re going to love this. Researchers have developed a type of salmonella bacteria that, when dripped into the mouths of rodents, can trigger the mouse’s immune system without causing further harm. Why? Because it basically kills itself shortly upon arrival.

Hopefully the technology can be applied to viruses, fungi and other baddies soon. How soon? Human tests are expected within a year.

I think the only thing cooler than seeing this 207-foot cruise ship grounded in practically zero water is seeing how freakishly well-balanced it is. How is that thing not tipping over?!

What’s also unclear is just how it ended up beached. Right now it’s still unclear if human error or mechanical malfunction is to blame.

We’ve known for a while that one way to make the body impervious to certain diseases is to give it a low, safe dose of that disease, so our immune system gets a good idea of how to fight it and build up antibodies to fight it. That’s the basic concept for vaccination in general.

What’s so cool about this latest development is, scientists have actually developed a weak-ass artificial polio virus inside a lab. The weakened virus, first developed in 2002 by the same team at the State University  of New York, will hopefully lead to a safer polio vaccine that triggers the body’s immune system without actually being able to cause disease.

The problem with today’s polio vaccines is that they can be accidentally released into, say, the water supply, and there mutate into a stronger version that can cause disease. With the designer virus, this will hopefully be made impossible.