Scientists have created a black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Well, an acoustic black hole. Not a real black hole.But they may get some perfectly genuine Hawking radiation out of it, so it’s still cool. One of the many curious properties of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed […]

It’s beginning to look a lot like a Bollywood Christmas. [via Ellen Datlow]

Saw a couple of films noir recently, one a classic, the other more recent.Gun Crazy (1951) was the classic, and was a pure example of the film noir— or, as we called them in America, B pictures. Made on the cheap, full of actors you don’t remember ever seeing before, and filmed on the streets […]

I occasionally use this space to talk about the military or the government, usually to point out their errors.Seems only fair that I congratulate the Pentagon when it does something right.The Pentagon used a multimillion-dollar grant to fast track the burgeoning art of face transplants, in hopes of helping the 200 or so veterans who […]