I do. My wife has had one for as long as I’ve known her. It’s an amazing thing. I’ve seen it work countless times including when we’ve unexpectedly lost power and had to awaken at some horrendous hour without an alarm. She simply “sets her body clock” and awakens at the designated hour. Like clockwork. Amazing. Wish I had one.

So I was pleased to read that researchers at the University of Lubeck in Germany have discovered what may be the first biological evidence for the curious ability to wake up at will. As I might have guessed, they believe it has to do with hormonal secretions triggered by the stress of having to wake up. Hmmmm.

Unfortunately, they haven’t yet developed a psychological technique to strengthen the ability to set one’s internal alarm clock. Cognitive self-instruction, they speculate, in which a person drills himself in his plans for the next day, may wind the alarm.

So for now I’ll depend on the alarm clock. And my wife.

        Click to enlargeThey still haven’t found a cure for the common cold, mind you, but I’m happy to report that scientists have been hard at work analyzing the dynamics of cow tipping — “a pastime allegedly common in rural areas, in which participants sneak up on an upright sleeping cow and then push it over for amusement” — and concluded it would require 4.43 able-bodied hayseeds to accomplish the task.

The physics seem sound. One objection that could be raised, however, is that the formula fails to take one critical factor into account: the total volume of alcohol consumed prior to the event. The groundbreaking study deserves kudos nonetheless. Read more…

Personally, I’m of the school of thought that believes cow tipping is pure urban legend. After all, I’ve never known anyone who has actually tipped a cow. Usually, they know a guy who knows a guy who has a friend whose crazy cousin Wilbur from Wisconsin used to go drinking with some guys who tried to break the local record for cows successfully tipped in one night, and probably would have if the cops hadn’t showed up and spoiled the attempt.

But I’m always open to being proven wrong, so if you’re a real live cow tipper and are willing to prove your unusual skill by tipping a few for me, let me know. I’ll bring the video camera and a case of beer. Maybe we can put this age old question to rest once and for all…

For more information and science on this exciting and controversial subject, check out Wikipedia where offered are evidence that cow tipping is an urban myth and, conversely, the possibility that cow tipping may be achievable.

Regular contributer Michael sent this clip demonstrating MIT’s “I/O Brush”, which allows you to paint using the world as your pallette.

Look promising? Get the full lowdown here.

Numerologists, your moment is about to arrive. Mathematicians and lottery players, you may want to pay attention, too. At three minutes and four seconds after 2 AM on Sunday, the 6th of May, time will align itself in a perfect pattern, 02:03:04 05/06/07.

For those who slept though last year’s 01:02:03 04/05/06 moment at 1:02 a.m. and three seconds on April, 5, 2006, this is your second chance. The moment  won’t come again for another century, in 2107. Of course, the times and dates will align sequentially once every year until 9:10 and 11 seconds on Dec. 13, 2014, or 09:10:11 12/13/14. After that, time will revert to its usual untidy mix of hours, minutes and seconds passing through the days of our lives.

For most of us, these sequences are little more than, well, coincidental sequences of numbers. Still, the phenomenon is giving some Internet chatrooms fodder for idle conversation. At digg.com, the impending moment sparked a lively exchange, including one nostalgic post by “uglyredhonda” that said, “Still nowhere near as cool as 12:34:56 on 7/8/90.” Oh yeah. That was way cooler.

Serious party mathematicians, though, won’t go to sleep. There’ll be a shots of tequila and a few high fives and then they’ll move on. That is, until we count from 1 to 6 at 01:02:03 on April, 5, 2106. Now that will be worth staying up for.

According to recent research, the female brain is the human default structure. The male brain, they say, is just a female brain on testosterone.

The effect starts when the male fetus is only six weeks old and develops testicles. The female brain is not significantly hormone affected until puberty. That explains why little girls are so sensible and also explains high school girls.

All this was discovered after research psychologists overcame their fear of feminists a few years ago and decided to really study male-female mental differences. The work included functional brain scans and tests of all ages.

Feminists should be pleased. The very few widespread social differences are about as expected. Men tend toward more automatic cooperation under stress (soldiers, football); women tend to be better at nurturing (that’s how we’ve survived) and indirect aggression (women are smaller and need some response to direct male aggression.)

Except for very small portions of the population, the individual differences are even smaller. Men tend to be more able to mentally rotate a solid object. And while vocabularies are about the same for similar education, women tend to have fluency in more of it.

The New York Times, among other papers, recently published a new Hubble Space Telescope photograph of distant galaxies colliding. Of course, astronomers have had pictures of colliding galaxies for quite some time, but with the vastly improved resolution provided by the Hubble, you can actually see the lawyers rushing to the scene… 

But I kid, I kid! Actually, this is a Hubble image of NGC 6745 showing the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for  hundreds of millions of years. Just off the  above photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy,  pictured above, used to be a  spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears  peculiar.