Inkjet device prints cells over burns.

Cool, maybe soon dentistry can be done via fax! From the National Post:

Inspired by a standard office inkjet printer, U.S. researchers have rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto burn victims, quickly protecting and healing their wounds as an alternative to skin grafts.

They have mounted the device, which has so far only been tested on mice, in a frame that can be wheeled over a patient in a hospital bed, they reported on Wednesday.

A laser can take a reading of the wound's size and shape so that a layer of healing skin cells can be precisely applied, said the team at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

"We literally print the cells directly onto the wound," said student Kyle Binder, who helped design the device. "We can put specific cells where they need to go."

Tests on mice showed the spray system, called bioprinting, could heal wounds quickly and safely, the researchers reported at the Translational Regenerative Medicine Forum.

Rush announces 2010 tour, will perform Moving Pictures in its entirety!

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG.

More info and tour dates here. OMG.

Rush - Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart - is without question one of the most inventive and compelling groups in rock history, equally famed for both its virtuoso musicianship and provocative songwriting.

Announced today, The Time Machine Tour is an evening with Rush, where they will perform their classics, give a taste of the future - and for the first time ever - feature the Moving Pictures album live in its entirety.

The band is currently working on their 20th studio album with producer Nick Raskulinecz (co-producer from 2007's Snakes & Arrows) and in addition to their classics plan to showcase a few new tunes live this summer.

"We were off for a year and a half, and now it's just pouring. Everything is totally crazy and there's not a minute left in the day. We've got these half-dozen songs, and we'll probably go in the studio and work on a couple of them and see how it goes, perhaps release something - and I say perhaps - and then we plan on being on the road," says guitarist, Alex Lifeson.

This summer's Live Nation promoted tour will visit approximately 40 cities throughout North America beginning June 29th in Albuquerque, NM and finishing October 2nd in West Palm Beach, FL with stops along the way in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Holmdel, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington, and more along the way (complete tour itinerary follows).

Rush has sold more than 40 million records worldwide and garnered untold legions of devoted and admiring fans. According to the RIAA, Rush's sales statistics place RUSH third after The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for the most consecutive gold or platinum studio albums by a rock band.

Released in 1981, Moving Pictures was their most successful album, certified 4x Platinum and features some of Rush's most well known songs and perennial radio favourites Tom Sawyer, Limelight and the Grammy-nominated instrumental YYZ.

Ryanair going ahead with on-flight pay toilets.

From the Consumerist:

Almost a year after announcing their plans to charge passengers for using toilets on their planes, discount airline Ryanair is finally pushing ahead with not only installing the pay potties on their jets, but cutting down the number of toilets available to passengers.

Or as the very British Daily Mail puts it: "Spending a penny on a flight will soon cost as much as a pound."

Ryanair is currently redesigning their cabins to install the pay toilets on 168 of their planes, which will cost about $1.40 per trip to the loo. Additionally, they are cutting the number of toilets on the plane to make room for extra seats.

Venomous purple jellyfish invading Britain.

From Daily Mail:

Swarms of a highly venomous jellyfish that turns beaches into no-go areas are invading Britain's coastal waters for the first time, scientists said.

The growing number of mauve stingers - fist-sized creature that packs a hefty sting - is being linked to the rise in sea temperatures over the last few years.

The pink and purple jellyfish may be small, but they can cover hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean in a single 'bloom'.

Until a few years ago, they were rarely seen in British waters, preferring the warmer conditions of the Mediterranean and Mid Atlantic.

But over the last three years, hundreds of millions of them have appeared in the north east Atlantic -and they are getting closer to our shores.

However, in 2007 a 10-mile square bloom of mauve stingers killed 100,000 salmon at a fish farm in Northern Ireland causing damage estimated at £1million.

Baker hacks off apprentice's arm for "bad apples."

How do you like them apples? From News.com.au:

A baker almost severed the arm of a trainee during a "blind rage", hacking him with a meat cleaver during an argument over apples, an Australian court was told today.

The Brisbane District Court was told Vietnamese national Hoe Thai Nguyen attacked his uncle, who he was training, with such force he severed through the largest bone in his forearm. The incident occurred at a Maryborough bakery, 250km north of Brisbane, on April 4 last year.

The court was told Nguyen, who had been in Australia on a work visa since late 2007, attacked Cuong Ngoc Pham, aged in his 30s, for choosing the "wrong apples" for use in pastries.

Nguyen, 31, was today jailed for eight years after pleading guilty to one count of causing Mr Pham grievous bodily harm during an intentional malicious act.

Court rules against net neutrality.

From the NY Times:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a sharp blow to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to set the rules of the road for the Internet, ruling that the agency lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

The decision, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, specifically concerned the efforts of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, to slow down customers’ access to a service called BitTorrent, which is used to exchange large video files, most often pirated copies of movies.

After Comcast’s blocking was exposed, the F.C.C. told Comcast to stop discriminating against BitTorrent traffic and in 2008 issued broader rules for the industry regarding “net neutrality,” the principle that all Internet content should be treated equally by network providers. Comcast challenged the F.C.C.’s authority to issue such rules and argued that its throttling of BitTorrent was necessary to ensure that a few customers didn’t unfairly hog the capacity of the network, slowing down Internet access for all of its customers.

But Tuesday’s court ruling has far larger implications than just the Comcast case.

The ruling would allow Comcast and other Internet service providers to restrict consumers’ ability to access certain kinds of Internet content, such as video sites like Hulu.com or Google’s YouTube service, or charge certain heavy users of their networks more money for access.

Scrabble to allow proper nouns.

Awesome, now I can use "Jay-Z" to get rid of crappy letters! From BBC:

The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count.

Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

Until now a few proper nouns had been allowed which were determined by a word list based on the Collins dictionary.

Coozer-Bits.

Eats: The most and least sustainable fish to eat.

Hero: Inventor of box wine dies at 92.

WTF: Secret video shows US troops laughing as they kill unarmed journalists, children in Iraq.

Cthulhu Watch: Giant undersea bug terrorizes robo-sub, Internet.

Creepy: Two women try smuggling dead guy onto plane, a la Weekend at Bernie's.

Pizza delivery man fights off armed robbers, still makes delivery.

From Huffington Post:

A New York City pizza deliveryman outwitted an armed robber trying to make off with his pies and still managed to deliver them to his customer.

Assami Semde, 19, a student from Burkina Faso who has been in the U.S. six months, was working at Famous Famiglia 125 pizza in East Harlem and was making a delivery to an apartment Friday evening when the robbery attempt occurred, his boss said.

"He's just the greatest, most polite guy you'll ever meet," said his boss, Frank Grecco, who owns the pizza shop. "He wasn't expecting this, he was just doing his job."

As Semde headed to the 27th floor, he came across two men in a hallway who started harassing him, saying they wanted a slice of pizza. Semde said no, that he had a delivery to make. But one of the men pulled out a gun and told him and Semde dropped the pies on the ground. As gunman reached down, Semde said he lunged at him, and toppled him off balance. The 6-foot-4 Semde scuffled with the men as building security making a routine check came by and the two fled.

[...] The security officers called the police who responded within minutes. But before Semde went to the precinct to file the report, he delivered the pizzas.

British couple jailed in Dubai for public kiss.

From Daily Mail:

Two Britons today lost their appeal against a conviction for kissing in public in Dubai.

Ayman Najafi, 24, and Charlotte Adams, 25, were given a one-month prison sentence by the Gulf resort's authorities.

They were allegedly seen kissing on the mouth in a restaurant, breaching Dubai's strict decency laws.

They were arrested by police in November last year and appeared in court last month.
According to reports, a judge at Dubai's Misdemeanours Court heard written evidence from the 38-year-old mother who complained to police.

She said she was offended by their behaviour at the Jumeirah Beach Residence, where she was dining with her daughter.

The judge dismissed Mr Najafi's claim he had merely kissed Miss Adams on the cheek and sentenced both to a month in jail followed by deportation.

The pair were bailed pending today's appeal against the sentence and have now said they will appeal again.

It is understood the Dubai authorities are holding their passports so they cannot leave the country.

Employee suicides spike at Disneyland Paris.

From The Independent:

Disneyland Paris is investigating after two park employees committed suicide in the past six weeks, under working conditions which a trade union described as "humiliating".

A Eurodisney chef hanged himself at his home near Paris last Friday, on the same day he was due to return to work after a period of sick leave. According to the Disneyland branch of the trade union federation, Force Ouvrière, the worker, in his 40s, had told colleagues he wanted to leave his job because he was struggling with demands to "increase figures with fewer resources".

Disneyland Paris directors have denied the suicide was work-related and said that it should not be made "a symbol of something it isn't." It added that the chef had been "highly appreciated by his managers" and well-integrated with fellow employees.

The company has organised a meeting with the chef's fellow employees to discuss the suicide and its possible causes.

Trade union representative, Mary Lyn Lesueur, acknowledged the man's personal problems contributed to his death but insisted that, "it's certain that there is a real management problem at Disney".

The worker was not the first Disneyland chef to commit suicide in recent weeks. On 21 February a 30-year-old chef de partie (line cook) from the park threw himself in front of a train after working in conditions which a trade union spokesman called "humiliating".

Physics professor writes open letter to Hot Tub Time Machine.

Great letter from a real professor. Click here to read the whole thing.

Dear Sirs:

As a noted time-travel expert, I looked forward to your new film, "Hot Tub Time Machine" with great anticipation. Of course, one expects a fair amount of artistic license in movies. For example, even in 1985, the most energy efficient flux capacitors could be powered at far less than 1.21 Gigawatts of electricity. It is also wholly understandable that you have ignored (or are perhaps ignorant of) the vast literature on time machine design and have therefore built yours around a hot tub, which has been shown to be unstable, rather than around the more conventional wormhole. Further, you exhibit an admirable attention to detail on many particulars. Following on the Terminator model, you correctly realize that time travel may only be undertaken while in the nude.

However, I cannot stand idly by as you subject your characters to a number of inviolable paradoxes. Considered from least to most egregious:

1. Predestination Paradoxes. In models of time travel with a single timeline, a traveler who has already experienced the past has no choice but to repeat his/her actions. It is troubling to me that you address predestination in matters of only the most trifling detail, such as whether John Cusack is destined to get a fork in the eye or the fate of Crispin Glover's arm, all while allowing gross details of history to be changed with impunity. Tinkering with history isn't a matter of "close enough." Once things are changed, however slightly, they're changed for good.

Your characters, showing better temporal intuition than you, yourselves, comment on this point, and warn of the "Butterfly Effect." A couple of observations are in order. First, the movie of that name was unspeakably terribly, and you do yourself and your characters a disservice to speak of it approvingly. Secondly, the changes wrought in the past would have so changed the future that any foreknowledge would quickly become worthless. If you don't make your fortune in the first couple of days, it's already too late. The alternate future you will have created will likely have everyone running around in goatees and building doomsday devices.

Adorable laundry-folding robot to kill us all.

Just wait until it starts folding our fleshy bodies. From PopSci:

This laundry-folding robot may not find many fans at the local laundromat, but only because it takes so long in holding up each towel for scrutiny before folding. Still, its fussiness speaks to a special care for laundry -- or painstaking programming routines -- that has won our hearts. You see, folding isn't a chore for this robot. It's an art.

The special PR2 bot is the result of a collaboration between University of California-Berkeley researchers and the gadget guys at Willow Garage. A first video shows the robot very carefully inspecting and then folding a pile of five unfamiliar towels of various sizes on a table, sped up 50 times.

Federal judge: Bush wiretapping program was illegal.

From Raw Story:

In a repudiation of the Bush administration's now-defunct terrorist surveillance effort, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that government investigators illegally wiretapped the phone conversations of an Islamic charity and two American lawyers without a search warrant.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said the plaintiffs provided enough evidence to show "they were subjected to warrantless electronic surveillance" by the National Security Agency.

The judge's 45-page ruling focused narrowly on the case involving the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, touching vaguely on the larger question of the program's legality.

Nonetheless, Al-Haramain lawyer Jon Eisenberg said the ruling had larger implications.

"By virtue of finding what the Bush administration did to our clients was illegal, he found that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was unlawful," Eisenberg said.

Sugar gliders at the mercy of stupid Americans.

From News.com.au:

Australia's iconic sugar gliders are being bred and traded as domestic pets in the US where they sell for about $US220 ($A240) each.

Vets are treating malnourished gliders for broken bones and chronic lethargy as clueless owners feed the creatures classic American fare - soft drink and hotdogs - instead of insects.

Companies are charging a small fortune for glider accessories and spruiking the tiny marsupials as Easter pets.

"Sugar gliders are exploding right now but wild animals generally are not recommended as pets," Humane Society captive wildlife specialist Beth Preiss said.

"It's difficult caring for wild animals in captivity."

Florida is the commercial breeding hub, fueling a sophisticated trade that is booming online.

News Limited found dozens of examples of caged gliders being fed unusual foods such as ham, hotdogs and soft drinks.

Feds probe 2nd report of Mexican military helicopters in US airspace.

From the Houston Chronicle:

The U.S. Department of Defense said it was investigating the second sighting within three weeks of a Mexican military helicopter flying in U.S. airspace over rural Zapata County.

“The incident did occur and it's still under investigation,” department spokeswoman Maj. Tanya Bradsher said, confirming that the copter, believed to belong to the Mexican navy, was seen Sunday.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Rick Pauza earlier in March confirmed a Mexican military helicopter hovered as long as 20 minutes on March 9 over a residential area near Falcon Lake, a reservoir on the Rio Grande.

He said CBP officials who lived in the neighborhood were among those who saw it.

Pauza said the helicopter crossed back without incident and that once the sighting was reported up the chain of the command “that was the extent of it.”

Man nabs burglar by sealing door with nailgun.

From the Daily Mail:

A DIY hero stopped a burglar from robbing a disused factory by sealing the only exit with a nailgun.

Night watchman Simon Jayne noticed someone lurking inside the former textile mill while he carried out a routine check on the premises.

But when the thief attempted to run away, Mr Jayne used his nail fun to fire 12 nails into a wooden door to seal it firmly shut.

As the door was the only way out of Albion Mill in Ewood, Blackburn, Iulian Mihociu, 29, was trapped in the factory until police arrived to arrest him just minutes later.

Mr Jayne, whose quick thinking was praised by local officers, said: 'I only acted on instinct and thought nothing about it as I trapped him.

'I had my nail gun with me to do some maintenance tasks on the building but never believed I would need it to catch a burglar.'

April Fools "news" items across the web...

The Guardian: Labour Party to rebrand Gordon Brown as tough alpha male.

PC World: Sudden PC acceleration causing injuries.

Starbucks: Responding to consumer demand, Starbucks introducing two new sizes: the Plenta and Micra.

ThinkGeek: Some funny new products. (I would totally buy "My First Bacon")

ReadJunk: James Cameron to helm Batman 3.

Marvel: Introducing... Hulkpool.

SF Chronicle: Obama clears way for oil drilling off US coasts. Oh wait, that's true.

Cigarettes may contain pig blood.

I wonder if cloves contain cloven hoofs. From News.com.au:

Cigarettes may contain traces of pigs' blood, an Australian academic says with a warning that religious groups could find its undisclosed presence "very offensive".

University of Sydney Professor in Public Health Simon Chapman points to recent Dutch research which identified 185 different industrial uses of a pig - including the use of its haemoglobin in cigarette filters.

Prof Chapman said the research offered an insight into the otherwise secretive world of cigarette manufacture, and it was likely to raise concerns for devout Muslims and Jews.

Religious texts at the core of both of these faiths specifically ban the consumption of pork.

"I think that there would be some particularly devout groups who would find the idea that there were pig products in cigarettes to be very offensive," Prof Chapman said today.

"The Jewish community certainly takes these matters extremely seriously and the Islamic community certainly do as well, as would many vegetarians.

"It just puts into hard relief the problem that the tobacco industry is not required to declare the ingredients of cigarettes ... they say 'that's our business' and a trade secret."

The Dutch research found pig haemoglobin - a blood protein - was being used to make cigarette filters more effective at trapping harmful chemicals before they could enter a smoker's lungs.

Cucumber in rear was "failed suicide bid."

Oldest excuse in the book, next to "I was only trying to help the sheep over the fence." From News.com.au:

A Hong Kong man, taken to the hospital to have a cucumber removed from his bottom, told doctors he inserted it in a suicide attempt.

The Sun reported Chin Wei, 62, said the method was a variation of the Japanese ritual suicide hara-kiri - usually carried out with a sword plunged into one's own stomach.

He was found in a pool of blood by his daughter before being rushed to receive medical health.

Medics said a severe tear to the man's anus was not life-threatening.