If you climb up a few cinderblock steps to the small window, you can look through the bars at a scene meant to invoke a Guantánamo Bay interrogation. A lifesize figure in a dark sweatshirt, the hood drawn low over his face, leans over another figure in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered by a towel and his body strapped down on a tilted surface.

Feed a dollar into a slot, the lights go on, and Black Hood pours water up Orange Jumpsuit’s nose and mouth while Orange Jumpsuit convulses against his restraints for 15 seconds. O.K., kids, who wants more cotton candy!

In interrupting a day at the beach with scenes of the United States government’s rougher practices, Mr. Powers is being deliberately provocative. “What’s more obscene,” he asks, “the official position that waterboarding is not torture, or our official position that it’s a thrill ride?”

(Image: Michael Nagle for The New York Times)

What are zombie rhymes? Well, they’re like this:

Q: What do zombies like to eat?
A: BRAAAAAAAAAAINS.

Q: What do vegetarian zombies like to eat?
A: GRAAAAAAAAAAINS.

Q: What do vegetarian zombies eat when they’re on vacation in Jamaica?
A: PLANTAAAAAAAINS.

Q: What is the favorite city of Illinois zombies?
A: DES PLAAAAAAINES.

Q: What are zombies’ favorite scale model entertainment?
A: MODEL TRAAAAAINS.

(Image: San Francisco Zombie Flash Mob, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Ioerror's Flickr stream)

The Homewrecker is a 3.5-lb. weapon of cardiovascular mass destruction. They start with a deep-fried 15", 1-pound dog and top it with peppers, onions, nacho cheese, chili sauce, jalapenos, mustard, ketchup, coleslaw, tomatoes, lettuce, and shredded cheese. Assured intestinal wreckage will run you $14.99. Finish it in under 12 minutes and you get a free burial t-shirt. Do it in under 4 minutes and your family will have an extra $14.99 for the funeral.

Aaron says: "This amazing, elevated goat pen seems to be up your alley. They walk along planks above the visitors. It is at Underwood Family Farms [in Moorpark, California] ,which also has a lot of other animals."

A research program designed to enhance spiritual awareness for persons with a cancer diagnosis is accepting volunteer participants at the Bayview Campus of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. The program consists of a brief counseling intervention, including medical screening, rapport-building appointments, two all-day sessions that include psilocybin administration, and appointments to facilitate initial integration and application of insights gained. More detailed information is available at cancer-insight.org

Conducted by Drs. Roland Griffiths, William Richards and colleagues, this program is designed to help cancer patients who are suffering with some degree of psychological distress to become less anxious and depressed, and to become more fully engaged with life again. Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in the "sacred mushrooms" that have been used in religious ceremonies by indigenous people in Mesoamerica for approximately two thousand years, is employed to facilitate the resolution of personal conflicts and to occasion states of consciousness that for some may be indistinguishable from visions and mystical experiences recorded in the history of religions. Psilocybin has not been found to be toxic or addictive, and is considered reasonably safe for persons without a history of serious mental illness, when administered in accordance with the safety guidelines published by the Hopkins researchers. Additional information on safety and the unique contributions this intervention may make to human personal and spiritual well-being, may be found here.

The research is FDA approved and is open to persons between 21 and 70. Confidentiality is maintained for all applicants and participants.

I've just gotten word that René Cigler, a very sweet and talented artist who contributed to bOING bOING (she created the cover for issue 11), passed away. We will miss her very much. René Cigler's website

This is the straightforward poll of Compton and Daniels which asked 250 scientists at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory arm of the Manhattan Project in pre-Trinity July, 1945. (Originally published as “A Poll of Scientists at Chicago, July 1945,” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1948, 44, p63. and again published in Compton’s Atomic Quest in 1956.) You can take this test anonymously. Please try and keep in mind the time and place of the events unfolding: the Japanese resistance to the unconditional surrender ultimatum developing at Potsdam; the resistance to massive air raids; the tenacious fighting in the islands at the outreaches of the Empire; the thousands of American POWs; the circulating estimates of the coming Japanese invasion casualties (hundreds of thousands of Americans, far more so Japanese), and so on.

Alvin Buenaventura informed me that his company Buunaventura Press is the U.S. Distributor for the French publisher United Dead Artists, which published Charles Burn's book Permagel.

From the makers of Le Muscle Carabine comes a rare and exceptional over-sized Charles Burns, printed with deep, rich blacks on 170gr Rives paper. United Dead Artists, 16 x 12 in., pp. 32, 2008

Frederick Ausubel, a bacterial geneticist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, is searching for drugs to combat bacterial virulence, using tiny animals like worms, which have intestinal cells that are similar to those in humans, and which are susceptible to lethal microbial infection. The worm that Ausubel is studying, Caenorhabditis elegans, is one and a half millimetres in length. “You are probably going to have to screen millions of compounds and you can’t screen millions of infected mice,” Ausubel said. “So our approach was to find an alternative host that could be infected with human pathogens which was small enough and cheap enough to be used in drug screens. What’s remarkable is that many common human pathogens, including Staphylococcus and Pseudomonas, will cause intestinal infection and kill the worms. So now you can look for a compound that cures it, that prevents the pathogen from killing the host.” Ausubel first screened some six thousand compounds by hand and found eight, none of them traditional antibiotics, that may protect the worms. He is also attempting, among other potential solutions, to find a compound that would block what is called “quorum sensing,” in which bacteria release small molecules to communicate with one another and signal when a critical mass is present. Once this quorum is reached, the bacteria turn on their virulence genes. “Bacteria don’t want to alert their host that they are there by immediately producing virulence factors which the host would recognize,” triggering the immune system, Ausubel explained. “When they reach a certain quorum, there are too many of them for the host to do anything about it.” Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, has recently shown that it is through quorum sensing that cholera bacteria are able to accumulate in the intestines and release toxins that can be fatal; Pseudomonas is also known to switch on its virulence genes in response to signals from quorum sensing.

3,000 blank passports were stolen last week, but the Home Office said there was nothing to worry about, because they couldn't be forged.

In the tests, a computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN agency that sets standards for e-passports.

Greg says:

It's a Flickr set of some trees in my backyard.

It had just rained, the trees were wet, and then from the couch, I saw a face. It was so vivid. Who was it?

I was laying down, and the face was only exactly visible from my spot.

The pics are unaltered.

Delay is a stainless steel and aluminium clock designed by Bas van Leeuwen for Studio Bloomm. The clock is composed of three cogwheels: one for hours, one for minutes, and one for seconds. The time is shown at the spot where the three wheels come together. The idea behind Delay is that due to planned obsolescence, there is very little interest in the technology behind the objects that make up everyday living. Studio Bloomm hopes that Delay will spark some of that interest once again.

I like this cute cartoon explaining how a man allegedly stole electricity from his neighbor.

A 49-year-old unemployed man was arrested for entering a neighbor’s house and stealing electricity to power a rice cooker. The electricity in the man’s house had been recently shut off due to nonpayment, so he resorted to electricity theft to cook a meal for himself.

This escalator at a Tokyo convention suddenly went in reverse, injuring about 20 people, according to Gizmodo.

Erik says: "Here’s a spectacular idea: many kids don’t seem to enjoy eating meat, so why not change the flavor so you can’t taste the meat, give it an unappetizing color, and extrude it into spaghetti-like strands? The meat scientists who invented this stuff are hoping to bring it to market. Judging from the video the news page offers, which could give you nightmares for weeks, it’s going to be an uphill battle."

"It tastes like meat and it can look like meat but we can actually change the composition of the product quite a lot so we can mask the meaty flavour," Mike North from AgResearch says.

And with busy families demanding more convenient yet healthy foods AgResearch believes it is on to something.

Kids love spaghetti but for many parents it's hard to get them to eat meat - so the meaty, protein saturated, pasta version could be an innovative way of providing youngsters with vital nutrients and iron.

The team's solution was to use a series of silicon photodetectors (pixels) connected by thin metal wires. This network is supported and encapsulated by a thin film of polyimide plastic, allowing the flexible scaffold to bend when compressed. This scaffold takes up the mechanical stress and protects the pixels as the array takes its hemispherical shape.

The team made a hollow dome about 2 centimetres wide from a rubber-like material called poly(dimethylsiloxane). They flattened out the stretchy dome, and attached the electronic mesh. Then, as the hollow dome snapped back into its original shape, it pulled the array with it, forming a hemisphere that could be attached to a lens; the basis of the camera

“The ability to wrap high quality silicon devices onto complex surfaces and biological tissues adds very interesting and powerful capabilities to electronic and optoelectronic device design,” says Rogers. "It allows us to put electronics in places where we couldn't before."

After several weeks of travel throughout her mother country of Korea and Japan, she got to thinking of her roots, but not just her own, but those of all people. The web that is created by the roots made in relations to other people, society and culture as a whole. The differences between us all, the connections, the elation we all share, as well as the comfort and disappointments that come with all relationships we hold dear...

By exploring the darker side of relationships in Raveled, Hultberg is aiming to explore the side of human nature that is suppressed or unspoken in most people.

“I think of these people as having an enhanced soundtrack in life,” (neuroscientist Melissa) Saenz says. Her team is conducting brain-imaging studies to try to tease out the roots of that soundtrack as well as how a typical brain combines visual and auditory signals to improve perception.

Under ordinary circumstances, cancer is an individuated phenomenon. Its onset is determined partly by genetics, partly by environment, partly by entropy, partly by the remorseless tick-tock of time, and (almost) never by the transmission of some tumorous essence. It arises from within (usually) rather than being imposed from without. It pinpoints single victims (usually) rather than spreading through populations. Cancer might be triggered by a carcinogenic chemical, but it isn’t itself poisoning. It might be triggered by a virus, but it isn’t fundamentally viral. Cancer differs also from heart disease and cirrhosis and the other lethal forms of physiological breakdown; uncontrolled cell reproduction, not organ dilapidation, is the problem.

Such uncontrolled reproduction begins when a single cell accumulates enough mutations to activate certain growth-promoting genes (scientists call them oncogenes) and to inactivate certain protections (tumor suppressor genes) that are built into the genetic program of every animal and plant. The cell ignores instructions to limit its self-replication, and soon it becomes many cells, all of them similarly demented, all bent on self-replication, all heedless of duty and proportion and the larger weal of the organism. That first cell is (almost always) a cell of the victim’s own body. So cancer is reinvented from scratch on a case-by-case basis, and this individuation, this personalization, may be one of the reasons that it seems so frightening and solitary. But what makes it even more solitary for its victims is the idea, secretly comforting to others, that cancer is never contagious. That idea is axiomatic, at least in the popular consciousness. Cancer is not an infectious disease. And the axiom is (usually) correct. But there are exceptions. Those exceptions point toward a broader reality that scientists have begun to explore: Cancers, like species, evolve. And one way they can evolve is toward the capacity to be transmitted between individuals.

The University of Lincoln architecture student has in the past collapsed 40 times in a single day.

She said many people think that she is joking when her condition does make her fall over.

Ms Underwood was diagnosed as having cataplexy a year ago, but believes she has had it for about four or five years.

She said: "I think a lot of people, if I've told them about it and they've not seen it, would quite like to see me do it (collapse), so they try to make me laugh.

Today on Boing Boing tv, Austrian art collective monochrom return with a new episode of their subversive puppet show: "Kiki and Bubu and the Good Plan." Our socked crusaders explore the connections between Michael Bay, the military-entertainment complex, Web 2.0 business cocktail parties, and the impending collapse of the American economy.

* BBtv: Monochrom's "Kiki, Bubu, and the Self"
* Nazi Petting Zoo
* Fisch Interview
* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig