I saw this video and I thought it was pretty cool – had to forward it along…  Try some of these tricks yourself!  (I think pouring the carbon dioxide to extinguish the candles is fantastic!…)

I like hearing about new and interesting ideas within science – they help us to explain our world better…
(And now, I step on my soapbox…)  HOWEVER, I do think some ideas are just plain hooey, because they are less science and more intellectual rationalization for why we can’t explain things at the moment…
Take the Many-Worlds interpretation. 
In quantum mechanics, particles in the universe are represented by things called wavefunctions.  These wavefunctions describe the probabilities that one would observe a particle in a particular state, for example.  However, once we observe the …

Today, Virgin Group’s Richard Branson is unveiling his venture’s first space tourism vehicle, SpaceShipTwo.
The ship’s predecessor, SpaceShipOne, also designed by the aerospace legend Burt Rutan, won the $10 million X Prize, given to the first private spacecraft to fly into suborbital space twice within a 14 day period.
Given the winning and demonstrated design of SpaceShipOne, Branson launched Virgin Galactic to give people the opportunity to visit outer space, for a mere $200,000.
Read more about the unveiling here…

Somehow I got on the mailing list for ThinkGeek (probably because, well, I get geeky science magazines like Wired…).  But I found myself thinking that this was the coolest, geekiest stuff I’d ever seen in one place.
For example, I mentioned in another post about the Star Wars Force Trainer, where you can raise a ball with your mind.
But wait, there’s more!…
How about the Tauntaun Sleeping Bag?  Remember the scene from The Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo finds Luke Skywalker outside on the frozen planet of Hoth.  The sun is going …

A quick note on one of my favorite new technologies – quantum computers.  Quantum computers are coming into reality, and here’s a story about the world’s first programmable one…
Quantum computers can do a number of things exponentially faster than regular computers, such as searching through unsorted databases and factoring integers (which is useful for codebreaking).  While these applications are pretty limited, there are new algorithms that let quantum computers work on important useful problems…

These are probably some of the coolest things I’ve run across in a while, and they all have to do with using your mind to control things…
Now, most of us already use our mind to control things – like our arms and legs, but they’re of course connected to our brain through nerves and our spinal cord.
But, what about things that are not physically connected?  Well, this is where the cool stuff comes in…
In Rome, a group of European scientists say that they’ve successfully connected a robotic hand to a …

On Monday, Europe’s Large Hadron Collider set a record by smashing protons together at energies never achieved before.  This energy, 1.18 trillion electronvolts (TeV), beats the previous record of 0.98 TeV in 2001 by America’s Tevatron collider at Fermilab outside of Chicago.
So, you might be asking, why should we care?
Well, to figure out how the universe works, scientists have needed to build incredibly huge proton-smashers to unlock what’s inside of them.  The Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) is buried 300 feet under the border between France and Switzerland and is actually …