Is there anything these science types can’t do? Not content with being able to alter the speed at which it travels, now they’ve found a way to make light travel backwards. To add weirdness to confusion, these backward travelling pulses move faster than lightspeed as well. Apparently it’s not as much of a causality violation as it may sound, but I’m going to simply take their word for that.

That ‘dark matter’ stuff is still causing headaches for cosmologist and astronomers, not to mention layman science geeks like myself. And here’s more fuel for the fire; this article on ‘dark energy’ discusses a number of ideas pertaining to black holes, but also mentions the theory that the entire universe itself may be a ‘dark energy star’. My head hurts.

They’re more like cages, really, but at an atomic scale. Scientists have discovered a new configuration of atoms of gold that forms an enclosed space in a similar way to ‘buckyball’ carbon. That makes the Au16 cluster the smallest metal cage possible; now the boffins intend trying to trap other molecules in the cages.

Tim O’Reilly has published an analysis of sales from his online Safari line against sales of print books from Bookscan. Not surprisingly, selling online allows him to move a lot more product down at the end of the long tail.

Granted it’s Oklahoma, but this zero net energy home is still only slightly more expensive than similar houses built using less environmentally sensitive technologies.