…that armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets.  (Thanks Hanna!)

…and that there are audio clips on demand on the internet of President Obama saying awesomely profane things.  These aren’t fake — they’re excerpts from the audio recording of his best seller, “Dreams from My Father.”  I wish I could embed these, but WordPress has some annoying restrictions on scripts.  All I can do is give you this link to where I found them — it has the recordings (language NSFW),  text transcripts, as well as the author’s suggestions as to when he should use that quote throughout his day-to-day presidential business.

…that there’s no such thing as cello scrotum.

Go figure, right?  I had no idea.

…that physicists have made a major breakthrough in what is known as quantum information science, and it’ll make you go a little Trekkie (as I’ve been known to cause in the past).

Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland have successfully teleported information from one atom to another at a distance of about a meter — something that has never been done before.  Successful teleportation of information, accomplished using quantum-mechanical phenomena like entanglement, has occurred over great distances, as well as over atomically small distances using an intermediary, but never at this human scale.  While this doesn’t mean that we’re one step closer to “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” it does represent a significant step forward in the field of quantum computing.

For more, check out the article @ livescience.

…how to total my car.  It’s very easy, actually.  Just have the car two cars in front of you stop at a green light because they missed their on-ramp.  Then plow into the Volvo in front of you.  That pretty much does the trick.

Nobody was hurt except for the Tardis, which is pretty much done moving through time and space under its own power.  More details coming as they warrant.

…where the term “tip” comes from.  It is /not/, as my coworker Livy insisted, an acronym for “to insure promptness.”  This is probably a backronym of some kind (and incorrect, as it does not use the grammatically correct “ensure”).  According to Wikipedia, the word comes from the 16th century German verb tip, which meant “to give, hand, or pass” and “to tap.”

Also interesting is that the current German word for a tip is the unrelated word Trinkgeld, which literally translates to “drink money.”  That’s exactly what many of us are using it for.

For more info, and information on tipping customs around the world, check out the Wikipedia article.

…that the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals will meet in Tampa on Feburary 1st in Super Bowl XLIII.  While the Steelers will be going for their sixth Super Bowl title (which would give them more than any other team) and second in four years, the Cardinals will play in the first Super Bowl in franchise history and have not won a championship in 61 years — the second longest such streak in North American professional sports (behind, duh, the Cubs).

I’m a little sad that the Baltimore Ravens didn’t win yesterday, because if the Cardinals had beaten them in the Super Bowl, I believe they would have become the first team in NFL history to beat four other teams with bird mascots in a single season, as they already beat the Eagles, Falcons, and Seahawks this season.  That would have been kind of funny.

…from my boss (via her “contacts” in the military) that the phrase “Roger that” is only actually ever said facetiously.  As in, “Participate in the Charge of the Light Brigade? Roger that.”

Can anyone with authority confirm or deny this?

…about a bunch of things that coffee can do besides keep you awake!  (Thanks to slashdot.)

First of all, coffee has been shown to reduce risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.  A team Swedish and Finnish scientists kept tabs on the coffee habits of over 1,400 people over the course of several decades.  Those who reported that they drank between three and five cups of coffee a day during middle-age were found to be 60-65% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease or dementia later in life.  It is unknown how exactly this protection comes about, but hypotheses center around the high levels of antioxidants in coffee and by lowering cholesterols which attack the blood-brain barrier.

However, don’t go all crazy with the java.  Another study has just come out from Durham University which has linked excessive caffeine intake to a higher risk of both audio and visual hallucinations.  This effect manifests itself at fairly high levels:

‘High caffeine users’ – those who consumed more than the equivalent of seven cups of instant coffee a day – were three times more likely to have heard a person’s voice when there was no one there compared with ‘low caffeine users’ who consumed less than the equivalent of one cup of instant coffee a day.

…so the fact that I just thought I heard my doorbell ring while my dog was barking is probably just the regular kind of crazy — I don’t drink quite that much coffee.

Oh, and also:

…that in his first few days in office, President-elect Barack Obama will enact several changes that will, symbolically and otherwise, undo some of the injustices and wrongs committed during (and even before) the W. Bush administration.  He is reportedly going to close down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, ban all interrogation techniques that could be described as torture, and rescind Bush’s bar on funding going to the creation of stem cell lines and to overseas public health organizations which provide abortion counseling (as opposed to the woefully inadequate abstinence-only programs).  What’s more, and this is what made me the happiest, he will end the Clinton-era “compromise” policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which bans gays and lesbians from openly serving in the United States military.

And people wonder why I voted for the guy.  Actually, nobody really wonders that.  But I appreciate his commitment to making these changes, even if they are nowhere near the most pressing issues facing him as he takes the oath of office on Tuesday.  Obviously the economy and the war are going to be the top priorities.  That goes without saying.  But there were so many little injustices that have taken place and root over the last eight years (and yes, I realize that DADT was put into place under Clinton that get less attention then illegally invading a sovereign nation and destroying perhaps the most robust economy in the history of the world through negligence and legalized theft.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I did not provide a link to where I found this information.  So here you go.  What?  You thought it would be an American news outlet?  How silly of you.

…that not only am I not very good at keeping promises about my blog, but that British scientists have invented a new kind of cement that absorbs more carbon as it hardens than is burned in its production.  This is a major breakthrough in materials science, and stands to be a big step in combating global warming as the two billion tons of cement produced every year account for 5% of the world’s total carbon emissions (!) — more than the entire aviation industry (!!).  For more information, check out this article at EcoWorldly and written for The Guardian.

For those of you who are interested in lowering your own carbon footprint, check out TerraPass, which gives you the ability to offset your emissions with monetary donations as well as lower them with different techniques and products.  My car’s emissions for the past year have been offset, and yours could be too!