Our friends at Mondo share a sneak peek at a brand-new poster for the wonderful animated series ADVENTURE TIME. The poster is by artist Olly Moss, and goes on sale today at Comic-Con, Booth 437. Size: 18" x 24", in an edition of 380, for $50.

About Mondo, and their gorgeous posters:

Read the rest

James Losey from New America Foundation sez,

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal, who has estimated how long it would take to read every privacy policy you encounter highlights an interesting bit from the "Linking Policy" in the Terms of Use for the London 2012 website:

"a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner."

Hey, LOCOG! I think you're a bunch of greedy, immoral corporatist swine who've sold out London to a bunch of multinationals and betrayed the spirit of athleticism and international cooperation. You're a disgrace. And I'm linking to you. In a most derogatory manner.

What are you going to do about it?

(Thanks, James!)

Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday is tomorrow, July 14.

A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it or it could be

who's hungry and where their mouth is or

who's out of work and where the job is or

who's broke and where the money is or

who's carrying a gun and where the peace is.

"Woody Guthrie Centennial: 1912-2012"

"At 100, Woody Guthrie Still Resonates" (NPR)

"Woody Guthrie: Photos of An American Treasure" (LIFE)

I'm not a fan of listicles, but I'll stoop to link to this one on Buzzfeed because it is highly relevant to my interests: the 27 best "Breaking Bad" memes.

A few months back when I was in chemo, we made a few of our own. The oncology nurses loved my Héctor “Tio” Salamanca impression, above. Or, maybe I just thought so when I was hopped up on all that Benadryl. The bell is for real, btw, not a prop: nurses place that near each chemotherapy infusion station in case a patient has an emergency and cannot verbalize an emergency call for help.

I re-watched season one, two, three, and four, in bed on my iPad during recovery from chemo and surgery.

I was only half joking when I tweeted that the anticipation of Season 5 is what kept me going through this difficult time. I CAN NOT WAIT for Sunday.

(thanks, @sfslim!)

Jessy Suicide tells Boing Boing, "We are so excited to be at Comic-Con San Diego that we are bringing you the full NSFW pin-up set of Radeo for free." NSFW Link. Also: Dork alert.

The creator of The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman offered up this quote concerning the end of the series:

We have talked about an ending that we’d do if we ever got to that point, right before our joint suicide, but with the popularity of the comic, and now the show, I don’t see an end anytime soon.

So, that's a "No" on the end of the comic, right? Good to know.

Watch in awe as CNN's Carol Costello tells Bill Nye, a respected scientist, engineer, and science educator, that he's a "kooky guy who doesn't know what he's talking about" when he asserts the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.

Bill Nye - Could climate change be wildfire cause?

Through my early (and brief) curiosity about neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques, I learned that when a person looks up and to their right, it's a good sign that they may be lying. Turns out, that probably isn't true. From the BBC:

The idea was tested by filming volunteers and recording their eye movements as they told the truth or lied.

A second group of volunteers was then asked to watch the films and try to detect the lies by watching the eye movements.

Co-author Dr Caroline Watt, from Edinburgh University, said: "A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organizational training courses.

"Our research provides no support for the idea and so suggests that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit."

"Academics say 'no truth' to lying eyes theory"

And if you really do want to be able to read people's facial expressions, you might start with legendary psychologist Paul Ekman's amazing books about the secrets revealed by microexpressions, such as "Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage" and "Emotions Revealed."

Holmes from Fight for the Future sez, "The Internet Defense League is a post-SOPA network of sites that use their reach to defend and improve the web. Because it can sound the alarm quickly to millions of people, people are calling it a 'bat-signal for the Internet'. The league is launching on July 19th, the same night that the new Batman movie. And the plan is to have actual spotlights beaming actual 'cat-signals' across buildings and clouds in cities around the world. We just launched a crowd-funding campaign. Help plan a party or pitch-in to make them happen."

So on Thursday night, as Hollywood’s latest superhero movie opens in theaters for a midnight showing, IDL members in select cities can celebrate the launch around powerful spotlights rented for the occasion. The spotlights will beam the IDL’s “cat-signal” into the stratosphere, across obliging clouds, or onto neighboring buildings.

Plus we've got a bunch of other cool items for league members who donate.

The Internet Defense League - Protecting the Free Internet since 2012

Xenophobia is neither the fear of Xeni, nor of Xena. Rather, it's more about knee-jerk mistrust, dislike, and hatred for people who aren't part of your group. We've come to associate it with not liking people from other countries, but it applies to smaller-scale, less formal tribalism, as well.

Over at the Scientific American blogs, science writer and biologist Rob Dunn talks about some of the theories for why something as seemingly antisocial as xenophobia could have been beneficial to our ancestors—at least under certain circumstances. The key, he says, might be disease. Not cooperating between groups, refusing to share resources, and generally going out of your way to avoid strangers makes sense if those strangers are infected with something that could kill you.

If I'm understanding Dunn correctly, the research and theorizing on this topic isn't saying xenophobia is good. Nor is it saying that all xenophobia grows out of a conscious, reasonable fear of disease. It's more like, the times when xenophobia did turn out to be coincidentally beneficial happened to reward people who were more likely to pass on xenophobic tendencies to their offspring (whether those tendencies were genetic or cultural is hard to say). Thus, the tendency continues, even in situations where it's actively detrimental. And Dunn points to an interesting recent study that showed deadly white-nose syndrome is causing xenophobic-esque changes in the behavior of bat populations.

Although it looked as though the little brown bats and several other species might soon face extinction, at least in some regions and perhaps even in North America, the little brown bats have begun to rebound in some places, albeit modestly. A new paper out this week takes notice of one of the reasons they appear to be rebounding, the bats are avoiding each other. Little brown bats (at least historically) tend to roost in large, groups, one next to the other, bumping fuzzies as it were. But not anymore. More and more, this new study, led by Kate Langwig, a graduate student at Boston University, suggests, the bats are spreading themselves out in their roosting caves, their hibernacula. Once, they clumped, warming themselves around the tiny fires of their bodies. Now, they go it alone.

Langwig’s results are preliminary, as she and her colleagues are the first to admit. She has measured the change in the bat roosting (and abundance) before and after the arrival of the disease, but she has not really studied the behavior of the bats and how it is they come to be spaced apart. Yet, the bats the are important from the perspective of the basic biology and conservation of the bats and so there remains much to do and much that can be done. For example, it would be good to know if the probability of transmission of the disease really goes down when the bats are further apart. It would also be interesting to figure out if the same individuals that were once nuzzling up next to each other, are now hanging out on their own.

Read the rest of Rob Dunn's post on xenophobia and disease

Uber, a spunky startup that's made a name for itself by using mobile devices to hook up people with rolling stock -- starting with an app that let idle limo drivers in San Francisco know about people who couldn't get a cab due to the city's notoriously dysfunctional taxi regulations -- has a great new stunt. They're giving ice-cream truck drivers and people who want ice-cream the ability to understand each others' needs: if you're willing to buy five or more ice-creams, you can signal that and nearby truck-drivers will see and respond to your desire. The service is available in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington DC.

* You can request ice cream by selecting the ‘ice cream cone icon’ in your Uber app.
* Set the location where you want the ice cream truck to show up and tap ‘request ice cream delivery here.’
* You’ll receive an ETA and be able to communicate with the driver.
* The ice cream truck will deliver five ice creams (you will have the option to order more when the truck arrives).
* We’ll bill your credit card card on file $12 for each bundle you order and hook you up with some sweet Uber swag.

#OMGUBERICECREAM (via Hacker News)

Last January, at the Science Online conference, I noticed that there was a research group collecting swabs taken from the bellybuttons of scientists, science bloggers, and science journalists. That culture above? It's made from the bellybutton of Anton Zuiker, one of the organizers of that conference.

Beyond personalized petri dishes, what is the point of all this? Turns out, the goal is to learn more about the bacteria that lives on us. Some of the data from analyzing all those bellybutton samples is starting to come back, and it's turning up some interesting facts about the tiny ecological niches on our tummys.

About 18 months ago, researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Dunn, a North Carolina State University professor, came up with an idea to explore the ecology and evolution of daily life and wanted to find a spot on the body that could provide an understanding of the natural skin microbiome. They needed a place that was infrequently disturbed, avoided the scrubbing of daily wash and was common to all humans. There was no better choice than the bellybutton. Dunn and his clan of navel gazers then invited people from two conferences, 60 in total, to swab their bellybuttons and provide him with the samples, which he took back to his lab and cultured. The next several months were spent not only growing the bacteria, but also typing them to identify the species.

The first set of data is in review, but the results suggest that the bellybutton offers far more to our understanding of life and our journey through it. From these 60 people, Dr. Dunn identified close to 1,400 species of bacteria. From these, a number were predictable, such as the ever-prominent Staphylococcus epidermidis and the corynebacteria, both of which give off that "eau de germs" scent when we don't wash frequently. But others, such as those found on volunteer Carl Zimmer, were completely unexpected, such as species that are found only in the ocean or the soil or in faraway lands.

...The navel bacteria were related to where the person has lived over the course of their lifetime. The tiny anatomical vestibule was actually a museum of lifetime experiences.

Read the rest of this story by microbiologist Jason Tetro at Huffington Post.

Learn more about the Bellybutton Biodiversity Project