wait until little Timmy comes home and tries something with that horse.....

This makes me wonder, were there Maplitonian currency, who would be on it? I do remember it would likely be very inconvenient to handle. Tesla is an obvious choice. Certainly not Edison.

Moles have the ability to smell in stereo, according to new research.

Like many mammals, you have the ability to see and hear in stereo. This allows us to work out with precision where sights or sounds are coming from - if you hear a sound, your brain works out which ear is receiving more information and you conclude the sound's source is on that side. But whether any mammals have the ability to smell in stereo has been the subject of long-standing debate.

Until, that is, Kenneth Catania (Vanderbilt University, Tennessee) decided to test the Eastern mole (Scalopus aquaticus). He devised an arena containing 15 pits, arranged in the form of a semi-circle. One of these pits had a chunk of earthworm in. Every time the mole headed straight for the food (1). In a further experiment which involved temporarily blocking one nostril, the moles always veered off course in the direction of the unblocked nostril - if their right nostril was blocked, they went left (2). The last test involved putting crossed plastic tubes in their nostrils; in this condition moles often couldn't find the food at all.

The result took Catania by surprise. "I came at this as a skeptic. I thought the moles' nostrils were too close together to effectively detect odor gradients," he commented. With evidence of this ability in a mammals, future research can investigate which mammals possess it. "The fact that moles use stereo odor cues to locate food suggests other mammals that rely heavily on their sense of smell, like dogs and pigs, might also have this ability," said Catania.

Experiment videos:
1 (free-smelling) - http://bit.ly/VI0Qm7
2 (one nostril blocked) - http://bit.ly/Y9HroQ

To read the paper: http://bit.ly/Y9HroQ

Photo credit: Ken Catania.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com ... ole-noses/

http://www.livescience.com/26871-moles- ... smell.html

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/02/mole ... oles-smell

In December 1921, while working under the direction of Kettering at Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley discovered that the addition of TEL to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines. The company named the substance "Ethyl", avoiding all mention of lead in reports and advertising. Oil companies and automobile manufacturers, especially General Motors which owned the patent jointly filed by Kettering and Midgley, promoted the TEL additive as a superior alternative to ethanol or ethanol-blended fuels, on which they could make very little profit. In December 1922, the American Chemical Society awarded Midgley the 1923 Nichols Medal for the "Use of Anti-Knock Compounds in Motor Fuels". This was the first of several major awards he earned during his career.

In 1923, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote in January 1923, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He went to Miami, Florida for convalescence.

In April 1923, General Motors created the General Motors Chemical Company (GMCC) to supervise the production of TEL by the DuPont company. Kettering was elected as president, and Midgley was vice president. However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." Over the course of the next year, eight more people would die at DuPont's Deepwater, New Jersey plant.

In 1924, dissatisfied with the speed of DuPont's TEL production using their "bromide process", General Motors and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now known as ExxonMobil) created the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation to produce and market TEL. Ethyl Corporation built a new chemical plant using a high-temperature ethyl chloride process at the Bayway Refinery in New Jersey. Within the first two months of its operation however, the new plant was plagued by more cases of lead poisoning, hallucinations, insanity, and then five deaths in quick succession.

On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley himself was careful to avoid mentioning to the press that he required nearly a year to recover from the lead poisoning brought on by his demonstration at the press conference. According to Deborah Blum in The Poisoner's Handbook (p. 123), Midgley sought treatment for lead poisoning in Europe a few months after his demonstration at the press conference.

The team soon narrowed their focus to alkyl halides (the combination of carbon chains and halogens), which were known to be highly volatile (a requirement for a refrigerant) and also chemically inert. They eventually settled on the concept of incorporating fluorine into a hydrocarbon. They rejected the assumption that such compounds would be toxic, believing that the stability of the carbon–fluorine bond would be sufficient to prevent the release of hydrogen fluoride or other potential breakdown products. The team eventually synthesized dichlorofluoromethane, the first chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which they named "Freon". This compound is more commonly referred to today as "Freon 12", or "R 12".

Freon and other CFCs soon replaced the various toxic or explosive substances previously used as refrigerants, and were later used in other applications, such as propellants in aerosol spray cans and asthma inhalers. The Society of Chemical Industry awarded Midgley the Perkin Medal in 1937 for this work.

This led him to devise an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. This system was the eventual cause of his death when he was entangled in the ropes of this device and died of strangulation at the age of 55. There is ongoing speculation as to whether his death was the result of an accident or suicide.

Is that the guy from Law & Order?

That is Detective Lenny Briscoe, yes.

this is so fucking funny