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We’re not even sure why we need to sleep, but one thing we do know is that it’s hard to sleep when the person lying next to you is snoring loudly.

Snoring is caused by the vibration of relaxed and sagging tissues in the throat. As sleep deepens, the tongue relaxes, as do the soft tissues of the throat and the roof of the mouth. The tissues can sag into the airway, causing it to narrow. As air is inhaled or exhaled through the narrowed opening, the relaxed tissues of the soft palate vibrate. The result is snoring.
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Where has swine flu been hiding all this time? Why, in swine, of course!

The H1N1 virus that everyone’s talking about was infecting pigs for at least 10 years before it recently jumped to humans. For Reuters, Maggie Fox quotes researcher Michael Worobey as saying, “This virus most likely has been circulating under the radar in pigs for the better part of 10 years. Once it jumped into humans it probably circulated for months under the radar. There is lots of room for improvement of our surveillance of swine flu in pigs.”
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Sending craft out from the earth to explore space is an expensive proposition, and one of the most expensive parts of it is the rocket fuel needed to escape gravity. If we could set up a space station on the moon or on another planet (such as Mars) it would be much easier to escape gravity. It would be especially cost effective if we could manufacture the FUEL needed on that planet as well (and we’re not talking about watermelon hooch, either)!

Scientists are working her on earth to develop just such a fuel and they think they’ve come up with one. It has the “consistency of toothpaste” and is less damaging to the environment. Made of aluminium powder and ordinary ice, it’s known as Al-ice, or ALICE.
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While everyone is worrying about energy costs and the greenhouse gases produced by power plants, it turns out that the average American is using LESS than energy than before. The reason? The country’s population shift to the more moderate and warm climates of the American West and Southwest. Turning on the air conditioner for part of the year uses less energy than heating the house over a long winter (improved insulation in new construction probably has something to do with this too). Is this what some of those mysterious messages have been about?
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