It's Friday!

Who knew I used to be a health nut? Seems that during my undergrad I was diligently -- even fastidiously -- repairing damaged lung-tissue cells while playing Starcraft with my roommate:

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

(...)

Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous. (emphasis added)

Bam! One more demon-weed myth busted. Read the entire Washington Post article here (will launch a new window).

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We had access to too much money, too much equipment,
and little by little, we went insane.
  - Francis Ford Coppola, on filming Apocalypse Now.

Continuing the theme of nifty science, I suppose you've heard about DARPA's most recent foray into invisibility technology? Man, I love those guys... buncha edge-of-reality fruitcakes with a two-billion-dollar budget and Asimov's collected works as research guidelines.

Anyway, this has been a "quirky" news item for every major news outlet in the country, but in case you missed it here's CBC's report (will launch a new window):

A cloak made of a "metamaterial" wouldn't reflect light or cast a shadow.

All light or other electromagnetic waves would be steered around the object, making it invisible, said study author David Smith, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

"The theory has only now become relevant because we can make metamaterials with the properties we are looking for," Smith said in a release.

Hilariously, the CBC decided to go with an image of a Harry Potter action figure to illustrate this story. Apparently, the boy-wizard's invisibility cloak is the most popular analogy Reuter's or AP or whoever could come up with. Does no-one remember Predator?

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Speaking of Predator, this made me chuckle:

An attempt was made to get shots of the Predator swinging from tree to tree using a monkey in a red special-effects suit. However, the monkey kept removing the suit and the idea was abandoned. (from IMDb's page for the movie)