There has been one beneficiary of flu madness: the elbow. Handily bendy, usefully pointy, the joint is seeing its moment in the sun. Rubbing elbows together in greeting has been suggested as a way to avoid spreading infection, but if that doesn’t work for you, here are some other options.
Also in today’s links: ringtones for cars, a beetle that better be funny, and more.
- A bill in Congress proposes adding noise to hybrid cars, which can be eerily silent as they glide along running in electric mode. Beeps or a continual buzzing could be generated by the vehicles to help sighted and blind people better determine that a car is approaching, and from which direction. I say why stop with that? Why not let people purchase downloadable noise-tones for their cars? Yeah, it could sound like a cacophony of ice cream trucks, but maybe it’d save the music industry.
- Stephen Colbert didn’t get a module at the International Space Station named for him, but he did get a beetle! Agaporomorphus colberti joins the ranks of Agathidium bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi in the pantheon of beetles named by a pair of entomologists.
- From white dwarf stars to black holes, the Hubble Space Telescope has been capturing mind-boggling images for 19 years now. Here’s a gallery of some of the most gorgeous and fascinating pictures.
- Where do luxury liners, freighters and tankers go to die? South Asia, where “scores” of workers die each year in explosions and fires taking the ships apart. But governments will meet next week to discuss the ship breaking industry, and how conditions can be improved.
