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It’s BUGS! – If you’re a fan of spicy food, you owe a lot to bugs, both the crawling kind and ones you can see only with a microscope. New research shows they are the ones responsible for the heat in chili peppers.

The spiciness is a defense mechanism that some peppers develop to suppress a fungus that invades through punctures made in the outer skin by insects. The fungus destroys the plant’s seeds before they can be eaten by birds and widely distributed. The pungency comes from capsaicinoids, the same chemicals that protect them from fungal attack by dramatically slowing microbial growth.
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UPDATE: This is not a political website, but I’ve decided that Obama has my vote and for a unique reason: His running mate, Joe Biden, had a burst aneurysm like I did, and I know what that does for you.

Lately there’s been a great controversy about whether “the surge”–which sent 28,000 more troops into Iraq a year ago– has “worked” or not, with the US military and John McCain saying yes, it’s been effective and critics of the war saying no, it hasn’t been. But to me the whole question is a matter of words and is thus completely meaningless.
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Two scientists have come up with a new method to cause a spaceship to effectively travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. This means that spaceships that travel faster than light speed are possible, although at the moment, the amount of energy needed is greater than we can handle. If other civilizations have mastered this technique, the old scientific argument that they could never get here is moot. They may indeed be here.

By manipulating the extra spatial dimensions of string theory around a spaceship with an extremely large amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could cause the ship to travel faster than the speed of light.
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Glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening to raise sea levels and drown coastal cities. Now a German geologist has developed a method to slow down, or even stop, the melt.

Researcher Hans-Joachim Fuchs wants to install fans on melting glaciers that will blow cold air from the glacier onto the dissolving ice, slowing down (or even stopping) the melt. Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea: In the August 20th edition of the Independent, Tony Paterson quotes Swiss glacier expert Martin Funk as saying, “If you are trying to cool a glacier, wind screens are a crazy idea.”
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