Despite all the buzz, the geolocational social media features offered by Foursquare and other sites are slow to catch on with privacy-wary mainstream audiences.

And somehow, I don’t think that offering up an MTV-sponsored check-in badge for every visit to the STD clinic is going to hasten adoption:

The badge itself is lime green and black, with the letters “GYT” emblazoned in the middle.

Foursquare users can go to their own health care providers, or they can find nearby clinics by visiting [the Get Yourself Tested website] and entering their ZIP code. Once they’ve checked in, users will have to post — or “shout” in Foursquare lingo — the letters “GYT” to their friends.

The goal is laudable, of course. And at least Foursquare isn’t offering up mayorships for frequent testers — I imagine such a crown would cure this targeted younger generation of its inherent open-book lifestyle attitude (and lead to a lot fewer dates).

Although I guess that, if this confluence of digital and biological intimacy somehow catches on, it might revive the now-obsolete term for sexually-transmitted ailments. Thereby giving “social” a whole new meaning altogether.

Corning has gone through its R&D vaults to unveil something called Gorilla Glass — a super-strong yet flexible material ideal for televisions, touchscreens and other electronics.

Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor…

In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla. “Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business,” said researcher Ron Stewart.

Interesting that Corning felt the need to re-brand an industrial component with a snappier name. Does “Gorilla” sound more appealing to manufacturers than the technical-sounding “Chemcor”? Should that matter, when it’s performance that counts? This hints that business-to-business marketing resorts to the same tactics used for consumer-facing selljobs.

You can now buy it pretty cheaply by the roll, but once upon a time, aluminum gave precious metals a run for their money:

In fact, aluminum became more precious than gold and silver in the 19th century, because it was harder to obtain. The French government once displayed Fort Knox-like aluminum bars next to the crown jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a prized set of aluminum cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.) The United States, to show off its industrial prowess, even capped the Washington monument with a six-pound pyramid of aluminum in 1884.

But the aluminum market suffered a mighty crash shortly thereafter. Entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe finally figured out how to separate aluminum from minerals cheaply and also how to produce it on an industrial scale… In the mid-1800s, the first aluminum ingots on the market went for $550 per pound. Fifty years later, not even adjusting for inflation, it cost 25 cents for the same amount.

Presumably, had this elemental ore maintained its rare status, by now we’d be chugging down our beverages from pop-top cans made of tin, and oohing-ahhing whenever somebody whipped out a no-credit-limit American Express Aluminum Card.

If the prick of the flu vaccine keeps you from going through with inoculation, a few hundred tiny microneedles on a medicated patch might be more palatable:

The business side of the patch feels like fine sandpaper, [Georgia Tech researcher Mark Prausnitz] said. In tests of microneedles without vaccine, people rated the discomfort at one-tenth to one-twentieth that of getting a standard injection, he said. Nearly everyone said it was painless.

Some medications are already delivered by patches, such as nicotine patches for people trying to quit smoking. That’s simply absorbed through the skin. But attempts to develop patches with the flu vaccine absorbed through the skin have not been successful so far.

In the Georgia Tech work, the vaccine is still injected. But the needles are so small that they don’t hurt and it doesn’t take any special training to use this kind of patch.

Ingenious. But a micro-pricking is still a pricking, and so some selling might need doing:

Asked if the term “microneedle” might still frighten some folks averse to shots, Prausnitz said he was confident that marketers would come up with a better term before any sales began.

Leave it to the marketers to sugarcoat the medicine. How about “friction patch”?

If you’re from California, the slang-term “hella” is probably an unlikely candidate for use as a formal unit of scientific measure, i.e. 10 to the 27th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000:

“Hella,” a term many Southern Californians find as irritating as teary-eyed renditions of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” is used mainly to make adjectives more intense, as in: “This lentil pizza is hella healthful!” It also can convey simple exuberance: “That party at Sunshine’s house? Hella!”

“Hella” probably derived from “helluva” and, for reasons unknown, morphed into “hella” in the Bay Area before taking wing in the 1990s. In 2001, Gwen Stefani and her band No Doubt — out of Orange County — took it national with their mega-hit “Hella Good.”

“A lot of people around the U.S. know it comes from Northern California, where there have been so many contributions to science at Davis, Berkeley, Stanford and Lawrence Livermore,” [physics student Austin] Sendek says of “hella.” “It would be a really good way to immortalize this part of the state.”

I don’t know that “mega-hit” applies to that No Doubt song. Personally, I first came across “hella” in the 1998 “Spooky Fish” episode of “South Park”, wherein Cartman used it incessantly, to the extreme annoyance of his pals (“Stop saying ‘hella’, fat-ass!!”). Given such pop-cultural linkage, I fully endorse its adoption as a mega-number prefix by the International System of Units.

Besides, we need some sort of shorthand for things like the theoretical diameter of the universe, which, according to “hella” proponent Sendek, is 1.4 hellameters. I mean, how have we gone this long without it, right?

In Afar, Ethiopia, seismic activity will lead to some major map redrawing:

Dr James Hammond, a seismologist from the University of Bristol — who has been working in Afar — says that parts of the region are below sea level and the ocean is only cut off by about a 20-metre block of land in Eritrea.

“Eventually this will drift apart,” he told the BBC World Service. “The sea will flood in and will start to create this new ocean.

“It will pull apart, sink down deeper and deeper and eventually… parts of southern Ethiopia, Somalia will drift off, create a new island, and we’ll have a smaller Africa and a very big island that floats out into the Indian Ocean.”

In this case, “eventually” means 10 million years or so. Practically right around the corner, geologically speaking.

Budding social researchers need to get out of the classroom and into the high-end nightclub, where bouncers offer an up-close demonstration of the dynamics of power relations:

Through conversations and observations, [sociologist Lauren Rivera] found that bouncers ran through a hierarchical list of qualities to determine in seconds who would enhance the image of the club and encourage high spending. Social networks mattered more than social class, or anything else for that matter. Celebrities and other recognized elites slipped through the door. And people related to or befriended by this “in crowd” often made the cut, too.

Wealth is considered to be one of the strongest indicators of status, yet bouncers frowned upon bribes even though bribes are obvious displays of money. “New Faces,” as the bouncers called unrecognized club-goers, were selected on the basis of gender, dress, race, and nationality. Sometimes the final call boiled down to details as minor as the type of watch that adorned a man’s wrist.

Nothing earth-shattering about these intricacies. You don’t need field research to know that these gatekeepers are charged with maintaining crowd-controlled composition of nightlife enclaves. But who wouldn’t like to run up a bar tab for the sake of advanced people-watching?

Even taking into consideration the eminently-valid reasons for producing the rape-preventative apparatus known as the Rape-aXe, the concept is somewhat mind-boggling:

[Dr. Sonnet] Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.

The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man’s penis during penetration, Ehlers said.

Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it — a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.

“It hurts, he cannot pee and walk when it’s on,” she said. “If he tries to remove it, it will clasp even tighter… however, it doesn’t break the skin, and there’s no danger of fluid exposure.”

Between this device, and those ear-aching vuvuzelas, this has already been a more-memorable-than-usual World Cup. Appropriately enough, for reasons having little to do with soccer…

I pretty much get the science and specs behind the iPhone 4’s ultra-high-def display resolution:

By developing pixels a mere 78 micrometers wide, Apple engineers were able to pack four times the number of pixels into the same 3.5-inch (diagonal) screen found on earlier iPhone models. The resulting pixel density of iPhone 4 — 326 pixels per inch — makes text and graphics look smooth and continuous at any size.

Still, did they have to call it “Retina Display”? However accurate it might be, it sounds vaguely creepy to me — like that extreme micro-pixelation is somehow boring into your eyeballs, potentially causing damage. Better to leave the anatomical terms out of consumer technology pitches.

Being a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I was raised to Just Say No to drugs.

But you can make an exception when it’s over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, right? I never was crystal-clear on that whole concept. If so, I’m sure the free samples that Help Remedies just sent me pass muster.

Yep, on the strength of last month’s post about Help’s unique packaging and marketing presentation, the company sent me some freebies. An email from their CEO, Richard Fine, extended the offer and subsequently hooked me up. I had a choice in what to receive; since I don’t have any chronic ailments that need relief, I opted for Help’s preventative measures:

- The help, I’ve cut myself package of 12 large and small bandages

- The help, I have an aching body package of 16 ibuprofen pills

Better safe than sorry, right? I feel compelled to injure myself, just so I can make use of this first-aid windfall. But I’ll keep my self-destructive impulses in check, and likewise keep this minor stash in reserve.

I do appreciate the outreach by Help. Indeed, the unconventional packets are fun to hold and behold, and they conveniently take up minimal space in the medicine cabinet. I have every confidence that their contents will fix me up, whenever I need to crack open their biodegradable shells.

Included with the samples was a thin little booklet that details Help’s business-operating philosophy. I really wish a version of it was online, because it’s a real hoot: Quirky brand messaging that’s reminiscent, in tone, of 19th Century snake-oil medicine sales pitches. Only in Help’s case, it’s utilized to debunk the modern variations of those pitches. Here’s a prime passage:

In the world of drugs and pharmacies there are stories about technologically complicated pills that, after entering your body and gliding aerodynamically down your throat, proceed to detonate and break into thousands of pieces. Those pieces then proceed to seek out the various bodily organs they must attend to, like thousands of tiny intelligent tadpoles (see figure 5-1).

In fact, pills are composed entirely of non-thinking matter, so nothing like this could possibly happen. Our pills are as technologically complicated as a piece of bread.

It’s product language that’s consistent, and adorns Help’s packaging, making for a memorable product. I don’t know if Help really will change the way OTC drugs are marketed toward consumers, but they’re giving it a good go. I still expect to see these little pill-packs spread beyond New York (Help’s home turf, right out of their Broadway HQ), and into the Targets of the world.

A couple of days ago, I started taking a daily multivitamin. Prescribed by Dr. Yourstruly, of course. I’ve been feeling particularly run-down too often lately, and figured a supplemental boost couldn’t hurt (vaguely geriatric vibe aside).

The early result? My urine has gone from pale yellow to a greenish-yellow hue.

Let’s hope that that’s color-coding for forthcoming revitalization. Good thing green is my favorite color.

Top Hat. Junk Shot. Top Kill.

I’m starting to suspect that British Petroleum* is purposely whiffing on these attempts to plug up its undersea Gulf of Mexico oil well leak, just so it can keep its code-name conjurers employed. What’s the next snappy failure-label, “Crude Hole”?

While browsing through a Duane Reade last week, I noticed this odd-looking rack of wares on an end-aisle. The hanging unit invites you over with a simple exhortation: “What’s Wrong?”. The individual packets provide the guiding-tandem answer: “Help I have a headache”, “Help I can’t sleep”, “Help I’ve cut myself”, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t suffering from any of the addressed ailments. So I moved on. But I kept a mental note on the display, with its unconventionally simple and colorful packaging.

It’s the product of Help Remedies, a quirky little startup in generic pharmaceuticals. It’s a New York-based operation, which explains their Duane Reade placement (although the look-and-feel of their output put me more in mind of something you’d find in Target, so don’t be surprised to find Help products there soon enough). There’s a distinct philosophy at play here:

[Design firm] ChappsMalina was approached by Help Remedies, a New York City-based startup with a big idea: to revolutionize over-the-counter medication. The resulting line consists of 6 products that are designed to guide you through the medication aisle with ease and comfort. From “help, I have a headache” to “help, I can’t sleep”, instead of yelling “FAST ACTING!” and “EXTRA STRENGTH”, the brand whispers in lower case empathy.

The product approach was simple; keep it clean and minimal with enough coding to clearly articulate my needs in a moment of crisis as directly as possible. Instead of lab coats, ChappsMalina chose to communicate content through the soft topography of the packaging material, that is reminiscent of a soft white pillow. To reinforce the Help Remedies message of responsibility, we designed the packaging using a highly innovative combination of paper pulp and co-molded corn-based plastic, making it completely compostable and a first of its kind.

They’re not kidding about that compostable claim; in fact, they’re tracking the mold- and worm-filled bio-breakdown of the material online (and via Twitter, of course).

Help certainly got my attention, which is the primary point. Then again, I didn’t buy anything. Even if I had been in the market for some ibuprofen or bandages that day, the offbeat presentation struck me as just a little too un-drugstore. If I’m hurting, I appreciate the empathy, but also want the straightforward relief. I don’t get that by wondering what’s up with the kooky sales pitch.

High above our planet’s atmosphere, a solar-flare-fried satellite is orbiting amok:

As opposed to other zombiesats that just die and drift, Galaxy 15’s systems are fully functioning, with its telecommunications payload (the equipment that relays customer’s transmissions around the globe) fully “on.” And yet the satellite itself refuses to accept commands from Earth…

If Galaxy 15 drifts too close to other satellites, it can steal their signal, thereby interrupting other vendor’s services to customers on Earth. That’s not too good for business, hence the increasingly desperate attempts to “kill” the satellite’s power.

Such a turn of events is unprecedented. Especially the part about stealing other satellites’ signals — in effect, eating their brainwaves. The zombie analogy is complete.

Lidar is a sort of laser/radar hybrid technology used for precision measurement and mapping. Of late, it’s been used, via aircraft flyovers, on cityscapes that couldn’t be more different:

- New York City, for a detailed recording of the metropolitan topography, to use in future emergency planning and solar-energy optimization.

- The ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Caracol, which yielded detailed 3D renderings previously hidden in dense jungle cover.

It’s something of a juxtaposition, using the same hi-tech method to map out the future and the past.

Economics professor Bryan Caplan is writing a new book, to be entitled “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids”. And, as the following late-draft paragraph illustrates, he’s taking “selfish” to unprecedented levels:

I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet. Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I’m sure we’d share. I’m confident that he’d be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me. I’m not pushing others to clone themselves. I’m not asking anyone else to pay for my dream. I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone. Is that too much to ask?

Rearing your genetic doppelganger, thus (in some, perhaps undefinable, sense) becoming your own father? This can only be described as “replicative reproduction”. Which is a nicer way of saying “the ultimate vanity project/God complex”…

Caplan is considering cutting this cloning-confession graf because it comes off as off-the-rails controversial, even factoring in the irrational opposition to any sort of reproductive technology. I agree. After all, it’s one thing to clone kittens; but sub in non-furry test subjects, and all the copycatting doesn’t look so cute anymore.

The eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano has created a paradoxical situation in the skies above Europe: While the offending mass of volcanic ash compelled a near-total grounding of air travel across the Continent, it’s also caused unexpected climactic serendipity.

Southampton Airport has announced this morning, Thursday 15 April, that all Flybe flights have been cancelled for the day due to the volcanic ash drifting across the UK from Iceland – and yet the weather in Hedge End is beautiful and the sky a lovely clear blue!

Others have noticed the lack of ever-persistent vapor trails from the usual jet traffic. And because the Eyjafjallajokull spew is too high in the atmosphere to be seen from ground level, the expected billowing of vulcan clouds hasn’t happened. The result: Open skies, in all senses.

It’s ironic that a continent-sized spread of natural exhaust was needed to eliminate (temporarily) the unsightly man-made variety. A nice side effect of an otherwise disastrous event.

The ability to predict individual and group tendencies via credit card use and other electronic transactions is (or should be) old news by now. The fun comes in seeing how all that seemingly-disparate data interlocks, as Hunch, an algorithm-based recommendation site, reveals:

Hunch then looks for statistical correlations between the information that all of its users provide, revealing fascinating links between people’s seemingly unrelated preferences. For instance, Hunch has revealed that people who enjoy dancing are more apt to want to buy a Mac, that people who like The Count on “Sesame Street” tend to support legalizing marijuana, that pug owners are often fans of The Shawshank Redemption, and that users who prefer aisle seats on planes “spend more money on other people than themselves.”

There’s no accounting for taste, much less tangential taste. Your only hope of preserving anonymity is to be a contrarian oddball — which beats being a predictable consumer, I guess.

What’s 3 nanometers big and can switch on/off in a nanosecond? A memristor, the next stage of microchip development:

The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits.

Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, [electrical engineer Dr. Leon O.] Chua said.

“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”

As I’m understanding this, these memristors (or “memory resistor”) supplant transistors, on the strength of physical space-saving. The result is more and faster memory functions, so that things like Flash drives are overtaken. Good news, considering how much of our data — both institutional knowledge, and even transitory information like daily communications — are increasingly being outsources out of our heads and into digital media.

Of all the places you’d expect to find skepticism on climate change, the television weather-guy/girl is probably the unlikeliest:

Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology. A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.”

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

Why would those most prominently on the climatic front-lines break ranks with the greater scientific community? It’s a short-term versus long-term perceptional gap:

Climate scientists use very different scientific methods from the meteorologists. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who straddled the two worlds when she worked at the Weather Channel, noted that meteorologists used models that were intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but had little accuracy more than seven days out. Dr. Cullen said meteorologists are often dubious about the work of climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future.

Given the average (in)accuracy of boob-tube forecasting, along with a vocational reputation for wacky-weather screentime, I’m inclined to side with the climatologists. Knowing about these proclivities amongst the weather-map-pointers only reinforces my overall aversion to local TV news, on grounds of general fluffiness.

In the half-century since Stanley Milgram’s famed psychological experimentation on unwavering obedience to authority, it seems that little has changed about human impulses, other than the need for television cameras to go with the simulated electrocutions:

The producers of [the French television documentary] “The Game of Death,” set to air Wednesday night, wanted to examine both what they call TV’s mind-numbing power to suspend morality, and the striking human willingness to obey orders.

“Television is a power. We know it, but it’s theoretical,” producer Christophe Nick told the daily Le Parisien. “I wondered: Is it so important that it can turn us into potential executioners?”

In the end, more than four in five “players” gave the maximum jolt.

“People never would have obeyed if they didn’t have trust,” Nick was quoted as saying in the paper’s Wednesday edition. “They told themselves, ‘TV knows what it’s doing.’”

I’m a bit dumbfounded that none of the participants recognized the Milgram template, which was copied step-by-step. It should have been a dead giveaway that something fishy was going on. I consider that historic episode to be near-common knowledge to anyone who went to school in the States. Maybe it’s not as widely known in Europe? (Then again, I’m sure far too many Americans probably would whiff on this too.)

In fact, this is worse than Milgram’s experiments. Back then, the test subjects at least had anonymity to mask their actions — they could rationalize that no one outside of a Yale University lab would ever know what they had done. But adding in the modern-day convention of a (fake) reality show means that the French participants carried out their deeds knowing full well that millions would be watching. Draw your own conclusions on how that reflects current societal mores.

Despite the false-front this time around, Europeans seem to approach reality TV a bit too seriously:

In the Netherlands in 2007, a game show titled the “Big Donor Show” was branded as tasteless and unethical for offering a kidney as top prize. Its aim, to raise awareness about those awaiting for organ transplants, appeared to work: over 12,000 people registered as organ donors after the broadcast. That was at least three times the normal average – for a month.

Silly Euros! Don’t they know that true reality television, a la the American iterations, has no redeeming value? At best, it produces forgettable celebrity and even more forgettable gross-out spectacles. No additional electricity required.