Tiny Planet

Serious and all as the current swine flu outbreaks are, there is always going to be room for satirical humour:

A gallery of the deliciously gross, from the above bacon cheese pizza burger to that Scottish classic, deep-friend Mars bar.

If Ireland has only the 15th most consumer-friendly healthcare system in Europe now, what will it be like next year, following various budget cuts?

According to the latest rankings, there have been significant improvements in waiting times over the last few years with Ireland scoring highly for waiting times for major not-acute operations in particular. However, Ireland scored poorly for direct access to specialists, cancer therapy and MRI scans.

Microwave an instant chocolate cake in a mug. Tiny Planet accepts no responsibility for things going wrong or it tasting like crap, though.

People are giving up their pets because of the credit crunch.

Blogger gets 20 years for posting a picture of Burma’s military leader.

Dirt + manure = energy.

Meanwhile, the Maldives is trying to buy land in case the islands are swamped by rising sea levels.

Why would you shock yourself for the sake of good posture?

A German doctor has cured a HIV-positive patient with a bone marrow transplant.

Roald Dahl retold through surrealist photos.

Who says newspapers are dead? Turn your RSS feeds into a PDF paper.

Printers, scanners, fax machines, built-in optical drives and landline phones are junk sucking you down into hell and should be destroyed for the sake of your very soul. Or words to less than apocalyptic affect.

I know you didn’t think of this before: a weak sun may have brought down the Mayans as well as China’s Tang dynasty (Subscription required if you want to read the Science article linked to by the link).

Archaeologists shed new light on the witches of Cornwall.

A German lady has failed to set a record for carrying beer mugs. No puns on huge jugs, please.

While the world continues to cheer the election of Barack Obama as president of the world’s most powerful democracy, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck has been anointed king of the world’s newest, Bhutan.

Apparently you can accidentally steal a car.

Gorillas need surgery too.

Companies are turning to blogging as a way of reporting layoffs, rather than letting them get picked up by the traditional media.

It’s a beard off!

Cleantech is growing in silicon valley.

The Mars lander is guestblogging on Gizmodo

Because science is awesome we can now clone formerly extinct animals.

Because science is dumb a HIV vaccine actually increased the risk of infection.

I think Dilbert has given us a way out of taking responsibility for the economic crisis.

Jeff Jarvis on a future for news media:

I proposed a problem to solve: What if a city, say Philadelphia, loses its paper tomorrow. What would you build in its place to serve the community? The [working] group went to town. Rather than trying to hack at the old, they build something new.

They calculated the likely revenue Philadelphia could support online and then figured out what they could afford in staffing. Instead of the 200-300-person newsroom that has existed in print, they decided they could afford 35 and they broke that down to include a new job description: “community managers who do outreach, mediation, social media evangelism.” They settled on three of those plus 20 content creators, two programmers, three designers, five producers (I think they were a bit heavy on those two), and — get this — only three editors.

I’m glad I don’t have money saved with Bank of Ireland.

Flickr’s three billionth photo.

No duh headline on a very important story: How HIV changed ex-addict’s life.

… can it?

In a series of tests, the businesswoman, named only as KH, was unable to pick out the tones of a whole series of well-known people including posh actress Joanna Lumley, David Beckham and ex-PM Margaret Thatcher. However, the only voice she could identify was the Scottish burr of actor Sir Sean Connery, star of James Bond hits including Dr No.

The UCC vote on stem cell research was passed 16-15. The pro-life campaigners are up in arms. I wonder if that referendum plan will ever get off the ground; I doubt it.

It looks like University College Cork will be the first institution in Ireland to allow the use of embryonic stem cells for research.  According to a report in the Evening Echo, a local paper in Cork, the university president is in favour of it.

“The advantage to hunmanity offered by the use of embryonic cells in research over-rides any argument against it. This research is taking place in universities the world over. If we are to remain cutting-edge scientists in Ierland, to compete with other international universities in being successful, this research is essential.”

The governing body votes on the plan on Tuesday.