I’ve changed my share of diapers, loved up my little guy, carried him to and fro, bought the legion of requisite baby crap and soothed him at night when he gets scared. I feed him, play with him, can always make him laugh and someday I’m going to teach him how to convince a better-looking and more intelligent woman than you to agree to marry you and have your kids.

So I used to think I was a good, maybe even great dad. And then I saw this.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIJINiK9azc

Via the New Zealand Herald:

Harvard scientists are hoping to turn chickens into mini-dinosaurs, according to the Daily Mail.

Scientists at the Ivy League university have ‘rewound’ evolution with chicken DNA to create embryos with alligator-like snouts instead of beaks.

By altering the DNA of chicken embryos in the early stage of their development, the team were able to ‘undo’ evolutionary progress and give the creatures snouts which are thought to have been lost in the cretaceous period millions of years ago.

Wow. Nice. Good job, science.

Although the eggs cannot be hatched due to ethical restrictions,

Wait, WHAT? BULLSHIT! I CALL SHENANIGANS.

Yale? Are you going to just sit there and let Harvard have all the glory, or are you going to hatch a Dinochicken?

Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.

This could be epic; utopian and dystopian in equal amounts. One one hand, never have a cold again. On the other, instructing cells to kill each other is the kind of world-building conceit that drives a near-future action/thriller. The GM in me knows how I’d handle it if a character in my campaign came up with this. We’ll see how Sum of All Things deals with it.

First Jeopardy, and now this?

From Discovery.com (emphasis mine):

A team of researchers lead by Lulu Qian from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have for the first developed an artificial neural network — that is, the beginnings of a brain — out of DNA molecules. And when quizzed, the brain answered the questions correctly.

How could this ever become a problem? I really should have named my boy John Connor Kennedy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T89HO_qIMyo

This clip is from 1951, so this fella must have perfected his act in vaudeville?

My father sent this to me today. I’d never heard of Larry Griswold, although it looks like Jackie Chan might have. This man is just a master of slapstick comedy. I’m trying to imagine that act in a little 100-person theatre somewhere. It’s ironic that the bit he considered the climax of his act would have seemed very novel to his audiences, but is the least interesting to our modern sensibility . . . thanks to the fact he invented the trampoline!

And through that invention ,Mr. Griswold’s comedic legacy lives on. Bravo!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snp3rHDHwPg

From the Times of London:

A moat 30 metres (100ft) wide and rolling parkland will separate the building from the main road, protecting it from would-be bombers and removing the need for the blast barriers that so dismayed the people of Mayfair.

Will they put alligators or sharks in it? With lasers? They will need them, because this guy is right: England is a cesspit.