An Irish company is using four American diamondback rattlesnakes in a new clinical trial that will test snake venom as a treatment for cancer. The snakes, which hail from the Albuquerque BioPark, will be allowed to bite something and have their venom extracted humanely. The venom contains proteins that will be extracted and refined to target and kill cancer cells.

Snake venom has long shown promise as a treatment for cancer, in a wide range of animal trials dating back several years. Celtic Biotech isolated a protein in a type of rattlesnake venom that causes malignant cancer cells to commit cell suicide. The company developed a venom-derived drug called CB24 and started testing it on humans at the end of October, working with patients at the George Pompidou University Hospital in Paris. The trial is expected to last a year, and is designed to prove CB24‘s safety and therapeutic value, according to Celtic Biotech.

The company has already tested it in mice and in human cell lines with great success. Other institutions in the U.S. have independently verified CB24's anti-cancer properties, the company says.

The four Albuquerque diamondbacks were sent to the Kentucky Reptile Zoo last week, according to the BioPark. There, specially trained reptile curators will extract the snakes' venom and ship it to Paris.

Snake venom is potent not only as a paralytic agent and neurotoxin but also as a cancer treatment, Celtic Biotech says - a little goes a long way. The protein is derived from crotoxin, which apparently has some targeting abilities as well as toxicity. This makes it particularly attractive as a cancer therapy, because it does not harm healthy tissues when it is administered properly. This could make it a useful alternative to other chemotherapies.

Celtic Biotech has been researching snake venom since 2003 and holds several patents, according to the Irish Times.

We were thinking this should have occurred to the Irish before St. Patrick kicked out all the snakes.

[Albuquerque Journal]

This month, Mongolia will launch a project creating a huge manmade ice block to combat the sweltering summer in the capital city of Ulan Bator. As the ice melts, it will cool the city and provide fresh drinking water.

The $750,000 geoengineering project, one of the world's largest ice-making experiments, seeks to artificially make "naleds," ice sheets that form along frozen streams and rivers. In Mongolian river beds, layers build up as new water flows onto the surface and freezes, forming ice caps that can build up to more than seven meters thick.

Anglo-Mongolian engineering firm ECOS & EMI will drill holes in the Tuul river as soon as ice forms, so that fresh water will bubble up and freeze, then repeat this process to create a naled so thick it will take months to melt. The hope is that the project will serve as a model for other northern cities to save energy, repair permafrost and combat rising temperatures.

[The Guardian]

The electric JawSaw is a terror for wood but safe for the operator. Its metal jaws leave only a small amount of the chain exposed, minimizing the risk of contact with the user's body as well as preventing kickback and chain damage when it's sawing branches on the ground. The steel teeth can lock onto a piece of wood of up to four inches in diameter to increase stability while the chain rips through it. And unlike other chainsaws, the JawSaw doesn't require any additional tools to replace the chain or set the tension. $120

We've constructed a world out of fiber optic cable and silicon, but Arizona State University researchers think their new material can do better. They have synthesized a new kind of single-crystal nanowire from a compound of erbium--a material generally used to dope fiber optic cables to amplify their signals--and they claim it could increase the speed of the Internet, spawn a new generation of computers, and improve photovoltaic solar cells, sensor technologies, and solid-state lighting.

That's a tall order, but the ASU team says their erbium material is up to it. In fact, erbium is already augmenting these things. Erbium atoms are generally used to dope fiber optic cable, boosting its optical properties and amplifying signals. But because of the particular properties of erbium, cramming enough atoms onto a cable to make it an effective amplifier requires a fairly long cable.

So how do you cram more erbium atoms into a cable? You make the cable itself out of erbium. That's easier said than done, and the breakthrough here is the erbium compound that can be produced in high quality, single-crystal form. Using the compound, the researchers can create objects with 1,000 times more erbium atoms in them than they could when they were simply doping other materials with erbium. And while that doesn't translate directly into cables or silicon chips that are 1,000-times faster, it does translate into remarkable improvements in speed and efficiency, the researchers say.

It also enables erbium atoms to be packed into small architectures where they couldn't be packed in significant numbers previously. That means they can be integrated into silicon chips to speed the performance of computers and other devices even as the fiber optic cables that feed those devices data are also improved by the erbium compound. And all of that could be powered with vastly more efficient PV solar cells made of the erbium compound.

The researchers are testing the material for a range of applications, including those mentioned above. There's no word yet as to when it might be commercially available. But we imagine it will be fast.

[TG Daily]

The gadget world is full of neat eye-tracking interfaces, from an iPhone version to a fully functioning laptop. But these are all fairly pricey and complex, making them niche devices rather than widely adoptable tools. Now a Honduran teenager has an eye tracker that solves the problem: A $300 open-source kit meant for people with disabilities. It's called the Eyeboard.

Recent high school grad Luis Cruz, 18, started out tinkering with video game technology, and says he designed the Eyeboard to help people communicate using eye movements. It is based on electrooculography, which takes advantage of the eyes' electrical potential. The eye acts as a dipole, with the cornea positively charged and the retina negatively charged. As a person's eye moves, the negative pole moves relative to the person's face. Attaching two electrodes to a person's head near his or her eyes can capture this change. Cruz integrated the electrodes into a pair of glasses and connected it to an amplifier. It's based on an ATmega328P microcontroller and runs on software Cruz wrote himself.

He is releasing it as open source to enable quicker development of tools like autocomplete, which would make the system work more quickly.

It works by tracking a user's eye movements across a keyboard, translating voltages through the software and pasting letters onto a virtual notepad. A user simply looks at the letters he or she wants and writes a sentence. Watch him demonstrate it in the video below.

Cruz has tested the system at an organization called Arca de Esperanza, which works with children who have suffered brain injuries. He believes he can produce further versions that would cost between $200 and $300, which could make the devices a realistic purchase for many more people. He is seeking PayPal donations to further the cause and to help him afford a college education in America.

[via Gizmag]

Salvaging a downed oil platform takes months, as a team of divers cuts apart the rig and a derrick hauls each piece to the surface. The VB10000 can remove an entire rig in a few hours, for a quarter of the price. Last fall, Versabar's $100-million monster completed its first lift off the coast of Louisiana.

Divers connected hooks to the platform trusses, cut the platform legs away, and four hoists picked the whole thing up. About as wide as a football field and as tall as a 25-story building, the VB10000 is desperately needed-U.S. regulators have identified 1,800 rigs that must be removed within 10 years.

Read more about the Versabar and the company's founder, Jon Khachaturian, in our profile.

To get a full spectrum of viewpoints on the Jawbone Jambox, a tiny--seriously tiny--portable speaker, we asked two separate writers to scrawl down their thoughts. The first comes from Michael Berk, an writer at audio/videophile publication (and PopSci sister pub) Sound+Vision, who lends his expert viewpoint. The second comes from Dan Nosowitz, a writer here at PopSci, for a view at regular-person usage. Spoiler: they both really like it.

MICHAEL BERK, SOUND+VISION

Even audiophiles need to take their music on the move now and again, and venturing out of the sweet spot, whether you're on the road or just heading out to the lab to solder together some custom cables, shouldn't mean giving up on sound quality altogether. Much of the action lately has been Apple-centric, using Apple's AirPlay wireless standard, but not everybody's an Apple enthusiast. Luckily, there's been a healthy amount of innovation on the Bluetooth front, with a growing group of solid little speakers managing to satisfy the oft-opposing demands for portability and actually good sound.

The Jawbone Jambox is one of the clear front runners in that bunch. Packing a feature set that manages to rival a number of bigger products (apps, easy firmware updates over USB, personalization options ranging from alert sounds to configurable buttons), the Jambox crams a pair of 1 1/4-inch drivers and a surprisingly capable passive bass radiator into a minuscule--even stylish--package. Add to that the well-engineered UI (the thing talks to you to let you know its Bluetooth status; a welcome change from the watch-the-speed-of-the-flashing-LEDs paradigm) and you have an ideal traveling companion, especially if you're the sort of listener who doesn't enjoy wearing headphones--or if you'd just rather share.

The Jambox won't fool you into thinking you're listening to a pair of towers, but it puts out the kind of sound that'll surprise your dinner party guests or officemates in a big way, especially if you stick to material that highlights the little unit's strengths, notably midrange and treble output (the low end is admirable, but not really convincing). Voices and solo acoustic instruments work particularly well: John Cale's heartbreaking piano and vocal take on Nico's "Frozen Warnings" (from the Nico/Icon soundtrack) made me forget I was listening to a device that's less than six inches long.

The Jambox even does a good job with well-recorded rock: firing up King Crimson's "The Construkction of Light" (from Level Five) at the office quickly brought over a crowd of curious colleagues, all of whom were surprised to find that the tiny red brick was putting out such impressively solid performance.

There are some limitations, of course. It falls apart a bit with anything involving dense bass and percussion, especially (as is the case with so many small speakers) contemporary bus-compressed, heavily multiband-limited rock. Grinderman 2 was hardly tolerable, and Animals for Leaders' impressive double 8-string guitar assault on the "Circular Sea" (from the new Weightless) didn't fare well at all. But those sorts of things are just beyond the reach of such a small device, and so long as you keep the levels low, you won't be disappointed.

DAN NOSOWITZ, POPSCI

I have my Jambox set up in my kitchen, in between the seltzer maker and the food processor. It is the perfect kitchen speaker. Let me count the ways:

• It's ridiculously small, so it takes up hardly any of your precious counter space.
• It's very sturdy and well-made--it may not be waterproof, but I'm not worried about it getting splashed with vinegar or accidentally bonked with a mixing bowl. And the rubbery bottom keeps it anchored in one place, even if there's tomato juice all over the counter. The thing feels like a premium product--understandably, given its admittedly steep price, but still.
• Bluetooth! It connects flawlessly to my iPhone and iPad, so I can keep my phone safely in my pocket rather than plugged into the speaker on the dangerous counter.
• The sound may not be spectacular if you're trying to have a dance party, but for podcasts or music while cooking, it's wonderful. Bass is surprisingly loud, though not full and rumbly like a real stereo, but acoustic stuff sounds especially excellent.
• It's totally wireless: no power cord, no audio input necessary (when using Bluetooth; it does have a 3.5mm (headphone) input, if you want to go that route). The battery life is surprisingly awesome--I charge it probably every other week, and use it every day--and it doesn't take up a valuable kitchen outlet, nor does it litter my counter with cables.
• It's loud enough to overcome the whirr of a food processor or general kitchen clatter. And it talks to you with these pleasant little bleeps and bloops and calming female voice actors. ("Your battery is nearly full." "Thanks, Jambox lady!")
• Having a speaker in the kitchen saves a lot of energy--otherwise, I'd have to blast music from another room, not very efficient or all that pleasant.
• It has these big volume buttons on top that are easy enough to press that I can hit them with an elbow when my hands are covered in beet juice or whatever.
• Did I mention the thing looks awesome? It looks awesome.

This isn't some marvel of engineering that can replace a stereo or anything. But given its size, I'm totally impressed with the Jambox. My kitchen would feel very quiet without it.

NASA's new budget, approved by a House and Senate conference committee and going before the full House today, will save the over-budget James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But the allotment for commercial space taxis to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station has been cut in half.

So goes budgeting in the era of austerity. NASA would receive $17.8 billion overall to cover the fiscal year that is already underway as of October 1. That's $684 million less than NASA received last year and $924 million less than President Obama requested for the space agency. It green-lights $3.8 billion for human space exploration activities--$1.8 billion of which would go toward NASA's new heavy-lift rocket while $1.2 would go toward its new deep space crew capsule--and preserves the JWST, provided costs don't spiral beyond $8 billion.

On the science side of things, NASA would receive roughly $155 million more than it got last year for a total of $5.1 billion. About half a billion of that would go toward getting the JWST into space on schedule in 2018.

But for every give there must be a take. President Obama requested $850 million to hurry along the development of commercial spacecraft capable of replacing the space shuttle's principal task of resupplying and re-staffing the ISS. He's getting less than half that--$406 million to be exact.

That could make things tough for NASA's commercial spacecraft development programs. The agency had hoped to keep at least two--and possibly three--companies currently developing spacecraft (those are Boeing, SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corp., and Blue Origin) in enough money to continue developing their spaceships. Building spaceships is expensive, and on a budget now halved some tough decisions may have to be made, though NASA has not yet commented on how the bill might affect its spending on commercial space initiatives.

[Reuters]

Cops tracking gang activity frequently need to decipher graffiti, decoding messages, identifying gangs and even monitoring individual people by looking at their bubbly letters and spray-painted scrawls. New software can help speed the process by automatically checking graffiti against a library of street art.

The system works by filtering existing images, which are currently captured and labeled by hand. Given a specific graffiti query, the system finds a list of similar images based on visual and content similarity, and then returns the gang names associated with those similar images. Michigan State University computer scientists led by Anil Jain have been working on the software for a couple years now and plan to present their findings at the ACM Multimedia conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., later this month.

Like other image-recognition programs, the graffiti matching system searches for matches based on commonalities, according to Jain and his colleagues. This helps filter different graffiti that depicts the same logo or tag, but may look dramatically different based on the person or gang who created it. First, the system extracts visual features from a new image, and then letters, numbers and symbols are manually annotated. Then, the system finds candidate images that share similarities with this new image.

It would be nice to have a system that automatically recognizes numbers and letters, but this is too difficult with existing technology because graffiti is so variable, Jain and his colleagues say. Instead, Jain uses crowdsourcing to identify words, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, according to New Scientist.

When using both image and text similarity, the system is able to pinpoint a gang or individual with about 65 percent accuracy, New Scientist says.

The system still needs some tweaking so it can be applied to vast graffiti image databases, Jain and colleagues explain. "In the future, we plan to explore additional information about graffiti other than the textual features, such as the time stamp and location of graffiti," the authors write.

[New Scientist]

You know, it's one thing to "shoot down" the top secret spy drone of the imperialist zionist heathen enemy. But come on Iran--stop bragging. Iran today released a two-and-a-half minute video and the first images depicting the RQ-170 stealth drone that it claims it shot down on Sunday. It's the first visual proof that leaders of the Islamic Republic are actually holding the drone it their possession.

If you missed this latest diplomatic dust-up: on Sunday Iran claimed its military had downed an American drone, a claim that U.S. officials somewhat backed up by saying controllers in Afghanistan had recently lost contact with a drone flying in that country and that--maybe just maybe--that drone accidentally wandered into Iranian airspace.

The plot thickened when the U.S confirmed that in fact the missing drone was indeed an RQ-170 (as Iran had originally claimed), a top secret drone designed to cruise undetected at up to 50,000 feet. It's the same drone that offered aerial recon before and during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. And it's something the U.S. intelligence infrastructure would likely not like shared with its adversaries.

And now, as you can see in the video below, it certainly appears that a RQ-170 is in Iranian custody. The release of the images and video coincides with Iran's lodging an official diplomatic protest over the American incursion into its sovereign airspace.

So we know the Iranians really have the drone and that the drone appears to be intact. Now comes the part where we, the public, try to parse the posturing (on both sides) from the truths. For instance, Iran claims its air defenses detected and shot down the drone as soon as it entered Iranian airspace. Yet the drone in the video looks highly un-shot-up and mostly un-crashed. The official in the video is apparently explaining this away by claiming Iran's military brought the drone down with the intention of causing minimum damage. Gravity generally doesn't bend its rules based upon intention, but okay.

And then there's the fact that the drone was recovered some 140 miles from the border. Had the drone been engaged just as it crossed into Iranian airspace, one could envision it limping its way in-country for a distance. But more than 100 miles?

Of course, the U.S. seems to be trying to sell the idea that it hasn't a clue how the drone got into Iranian airspace, so I'm not trying to throw too many stones here. Suffice it to say that Iran is currently holding a piece of super-stealthy U.S. intelligence equipment that's supposed to be secret, and whatever the truth is we're probably not going to hear it in its entirety from anyone. Enjoy the video--after all, it's also your first up-close look at the RQ-170.

[NYT]

Given a choice between eating chocolate alone and rescuing their pals, rats will apparently save their pals and then share the chocolate with them. Trapping a rat in a cage sparks its cagemate into action, as it figures out how to open the cage and liberate its jailed friend. This is an unusual example of rats expressing empathy, a trait thought to be reserved to us higher mammals, the primates.

It's interesting from an evolutionary perspective, because it suggests that pro-social behaviors originated earlier than previously thought. And it's interesting from a neuroscience perspective, because it suggests rats are wired for pro-social behaviors, which means they can be used as a model for human behaviors.

"There are a lot of ideas in the literature showing that empathy is not unique to humans, and it has been well demonstrated in apes, but in rodents it was not very clear," said study co-author Jean Decety, a psychiatry and psychology professor at the University of Chicago. "We put together in one series of experiments evidence of helping behavior based on empathy in rodents, and that's really the first time it's been seen."

The simple experiment used no fancy technology and no bizarre new methods - it just separated two rat friends that normally shared a cage and watched what happened.

The rats started out sharing a cage for two weeks, enough time to get acquainted. Then the animals were placed in a special chamber, where one rat was inserted into a cramped restraining device that could be nudged open from the outside. The other rat was free to roam around and observe the plight of its jailed pal, both squeaking ultrasonic alarm calls all the while.

The free rat was agitated when its cagemate was trapped, which the researchers say is evidence of "emotional contagion," a lower form of empathy in which animals share in the fear or distress of another animal. But what happened next was much more like true empathy. Although the rats were agitated, they didn't freak out, freeze or become overwhelmed with fear, which is one possible reaction to emotional contagion. Instead, they coolly circled the container, bit it, clawed at it and generally spent time near it, even reaching through holes to touch (and comfort?) the trapped rat.

The researchers tried several different controls to figure out what was motivating the rats. They experimented with empty cages, to ensure the rats weren't just curious about the box-thing, and they found the rats ignored the empty ones. They tried keeping the rats separate even after liberation - socialization would be a reward for freeing the trapped rat - yet the rat still freed its friend.

They even tried a "cagemate versus chocolate paradigm," the authors explain. A free rat was placed in an area with two containers, one containing its cagemate and one containing pieces of chocolate. It would open the chocolate cage about as often as the rat cage, suggesting "the value of freeing a trapped cagemate is on par with that of accessing chocolate chips." But more than half the time, the free rats did not hog all the chocolate chips. They saved them and let their liberated cagemates have half of them.

The rats figured out several different ways to open the door, and the researchers say they clearly learned what would happen. "Whereas rats initially froze after the door fell over, later on they did not freeze, demonstrating that door-opening was the expected outcome of a deliberate, goal-directed action," they write.

Female rats were also more likely to become door-openers, "which is consistent with suggestions that females are more empathic than males," the authors added.


Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, the paper's first author, said in a statement that the rats were not trained at all, but figured out how to complete a difficult task to help their cagemates.

"These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal," Bartal said. "They keep trying and trying, and it eventually works."

The study is published in this week's issue of Science.

With a 100mph top speed and 100 miles of driving range, the Brammo Empulse 10.0 is the fastest and farthest-driving consumer electric motorcycle ever made. The speed comes from the 57-horsepower motor; the range comes from the hefty 10-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery. The Empulse 10.0 recharges in 10 hours from a 110-volt household outlet. Brammo also sells two less-expensive variations on this bike-the 6.0 and the 8.0, which come with smaller battery packs. $14,000

Bill Gates recently confirmed during a talk at China's Ministry of Science and Technology that a company in which he is a primary investor, Terrapower, will be collaborating with Chinese scientists on a next-generation nuclear reactor. It's still in the early stages, but there are a lot of impressive superlatives being thrown around, and we have to wonder: Why not bring it Stateside, Mr. Gates?

Gates himself classified the project as in the "early stages," and understandably so: the reactor proposed would be a Generation IV reactor, which, well, don't exist yet. In fact, they're not even particularly close to existing; most estimates peg the earliest construction of a Generation IV reactor at around 2030. In case you were wondering, currently active nuclear reactors are classified as Generation II or III, with first-generation reactors having been long shut down. You can read more about current-generation nuclear reactors in our explainer.

But we're excited by the ambition of the project. Gates said "The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste," and classified it as a traveling wave reactor. It's a theoretical kind of reactor, under study by Terrapower that requires no enriched uranium, but actually uses depleted uranium, which means hardly any nuclear waste. They can also run for, theoretically, decades without refueling. The name comes from the idea that fission begins in a specific part of the core and moves outward, in a traveling wave.

Terrapower and the Chinese scientists will be researching the possibilities of this reactor over the next five years--good thing Terrapower falls under the umbrella of our pal Nathan Myhrvold's loaded Intellectual Ventures, because that research alone could top a billion dollars in cost.

[BBC]

This week's gallery features underground park concepts in the Lower East Side, stolen drones in Iran, a portrait made of memories, a possible Earth 2.0, and more. (More, in this case, includes the highly-trained martial arts gecko you see above.)

Click to launch the gallery.

HP has spent the last year or so, as the new owner of the WebOS mobile operating system, alternately making arbitrary decisions about the platform's future and making sure to not release any nice hardware for it. After the company ignominiously shut down WebOS for good this summer, we thought that was it for the best smartphone platform nobody used--but today, HP surprised us with an announcement that WebOS will be going open-source.

Designed by Matias Duarte, the man largely responsible for Android's greatest achievement to date, WebOS was the ultimate fizzle: packed full of great ideas, some of which are still unparalleled and others of which are shamelessly stolen, the platform died due to unuse, misuse, and generally shoddy hardware. Eventually TouchPad tablets were jettisoned for $100 a pop and the new flagship phone, the Pre 3, was never even released Stateside. But today's announcement gives us some hope.

HP is releasing all of WebOS's underlying code to open source, meaning anyone can alter it as they choose. That could mean tons of new apps, it could mean new hardware with a newly free OS (unlikely, but possible), and it could mean a new explosion of interest in the little OS that never made it. HP will try to make this sound like a noble enterprise, helping the open-source community and whatnot, although at this point the company has absolutely nothing to lose in doing this. But we're excited that WebOS may have some life in it yet--perhaps only a kit OS, a hobby for a small community. But anyone who snatched up a $100 tablet should take another look at it--it may not be as dead as it seems.

[via Wired]

Unlike here in New York, where telling a cabbie to take you to even some of the most common intersections often result in a response of "Okay, how do I get there?", London cabdriver tests are notoriously difficult and complete. You don't just pass the test--you earn "The Knowledge," or the ins and outs of a massive and complex city from end to end. And, it turns out, the level of training needed to pass the test actually changes the structure of the brain, according to a new study.

London's black cab drivers typically spend three or four years working up to the test--and no wonder, considering it requires knowledge of more than 25,000 streets, in addition to the names of all the neighborhoods, landmarks, and tourist spots. And it's not like London is a simple grid. That level of memorization is so intense and unusual that it compelled neuroscientists at University College London to follow prospective cabdrivers from the beginning to the end of their test, from a neurological point of view.

Compared to the control group, those who passed the test (about 39 percent of those who had studied) showed a significant growth of grey matter in the posterior hippocampus. Even more interesting, that same group proved worse at other tests, like recalling complex visual information, than either the control group or the group that failed the test. That suggests, says professor Eleanor Maguire, that "the human brain remains 'plastic,' even in adult life, allowing it to adapt when we learn new tasks."

This particular study is a followup to one done by the same neuroscientists a few years back. But that study just tested already qualified cabdrivers against a control group. This study traces the same people as they study for and take the test, which emphasizes the fact that these people's brains do physically change over time.

The new study appears today in the current issue of the journal Current Biology.

[Press Release via Wired]

With a range of 9,000 miles, roughly the distance from New York to Hong Kong, the Bombardier Global 8,000 flies farther than any other private jet-1,000 miles more than its closest competitor. General Electric developed engines for the craft that use carbon-fiber casing and other weight-saving tricks to improve efficiency by 8 percent over previous designs. The plane's design includes a thinner, lighter swept-wing and cuts fuel use by another 6 percent.

We're in for a weird one, you guys. Surfing, sandwich-eating mammoths will surf in the mountaintops. The threatened American crocodile gets saved by nuclear power plants. At least the future won't be boring.

Want to win this radical Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• A Nuclear Plant's Cooling Canals Help Save Endangered Florida Crocodiles
• Scientists to World: We're Going to Finally Clone that Woolly Mammoth We've Been Talking About
• A Surf Park High In the Pyrenees
• The Army's Latest Innnovation: A Sandwich That Stays Fresh for Two Years

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• Microsoft Kinect, Version 2.0: Dust Off Your Kinect and Start Talking to It
• Italian Mathematician (Maybe, but Probably Not Really) Explains Away Dark Matter With Math
• Kepler Team Confirms First Earth-like Planet in a Habitable Zone, And Finds 1,094 More Worlds
• Two Behemoth Black Holes, the Largest Ever Discovered, Could Swallow Billions of Suns
• Slow-Motion Video: Playing Racquetball With a Hard-Boiled Egg
• Living in the Future: Play Any Song, Anytime, Anywhere
• Keeping Heads Above Water
• Hands-On: OnLive's Mobile App Gives Your iPad the Power of a Gaming PC
• A Global Astronomy Social Network To Let Amateurs Peep Through Robotic Telescopes
• Should Video Games Adhere to International Humanitarian Law?
• Video: Iran Puts Its Captured RQ-170 Drone on Display
• The Most Amazing Images of the Week, December 5-9, 2011
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus Review: This Is Android