According to Plastic Pals:

The Korea Institute of Science & Technology (KIST) held an open house Technology Exhibit, where some of their latest research and development projects were showcased . . . Mahru III, a humanoid robot co-developed by KIST and Samsung, copies the movements of a human wearing a special suit which senses muscle movements.

via Plastic Pals

These suede beauties are on sale at Payless for only 49.99. Not too shabby considering most movie themed kicks are horribly over priced.

These are amazing, and reasonable priced! But if you want some real Trek sneaker cred, go find the Enterprise Edition made by Airwalk. Just don't wear them around me, or I will rob you.

Talking to the Washington Post, Levi teased what to expect about Chuck's double life:

What I will say is one character will find out the truth this season, but I won't tell you who, and I think the plan is that next season there will be at least one more character that finds out the truth...

You know, someone discovering Chuck's secret spy secrets does sound kind of gamechanging... especially if it leads to someone else making the connection in the (still to be confirmed) third season. But which character finding out would change the game so much? The involvement of a second discoverer leads us to suspect Awesome (with Ellie following), but we have to admit that we'll be surprised if the writers could really pass up the chance to let Morgan in on a little spy action every now and again...

Nerd, Spy, Nice Guy [Washington Post]

And now, here is more awesome.

I am seriously without words. Perhaps you can provide some for me.

Images by Andy Park, who is awesome.

Firstly, you people need to get your minds out of the gutter. The holidays are a time for children, people:

resonanteye: "this chart is so outdated. everyone knows cock belongs right there, next to boobs. it's the 21st century, people. and I want my scientifically categorized cock!"

Daveina: "I think sex might be a little high. Although it *is* difficult to obtain, especially in its enriched form. That said, if sex is on there, but the blowjob is not? I'm sorry, sex is cool but blowjobs are *awesome*."

Klebert L. Hall: "Come on, guys - only former Presidents think that blowjobs aren't sex."

antmansbigxmas: "I was worried that "boobs" would be omitted, but science doesn't fail."

That said, even when your minds were on more "clean" matters, there was still dissent:

AlucardNoir: "WTF? sniper before assasin? asasin before vampire? i'll even let the ninja pass, nut Bacon before the bat and mr.t? wtf?"

ACyclicUniverse: "Well, remember, the PToA arranges Awesoments in increasing mass and complexity, so it's the other way around."

AlucardNoir: "also, hidrogen is the basic element and source off all other via stelar fusion and wow, for this one it's freaking BACON!!! am i the only one that find's this wrong?"

ACylcicUniverse: "Well, let's be honest, would Chuck Norris's beard really be so full and butch without copious amounts of Bacon grease? And how would any of the fine men and women whose discoveries/inventions are listed here have the energy and focus to reach for the glistening, dripping stars?"

Evil Tortie's Mom: "Bacon is the foundation of life."

Gann: "Also - Water, the source of all life on earth, is now two slices of bacon wrapped around a piece of cheese. That sounds about right."

There were, of course, many absences from the list (apart from blowjobs) that got people hot under their festive collars:

DavidPFarrell: "A bit of a cop-out to have "D" for Dinosaur as Velociraptors are worthy of having their own entry (VR)."

Mathmos: "No pizza?"

Auragon: "No Samuel mothaf*cking Jackson? man, this is crap."

wolfman-al: "What about Werewolfes?"

geekgrrl: "what, no vikings?"

bookwench: "Wolves representing the canid family, but no liger? Trillobytes, but no ammonites? No Cthulhu? And WHY are ninjas before pirates, pray tell?"

The best suggestion to remedy all these errors came from falconrugger06:

I think io9 should create it's own Periodic Table of Awesomeness...with fan/commenter votes included (as it will INCREASE the AWESOMENESS EXPONENTIALLY)...

Now, that sounds like an idea for next year... But if we did do it, I have to warn you; Samuel Jackson's appearance in The Spirit pretty much rules him out of consideration already.

Earlier in the movie, Carradine gets into a pre-gunfight stance with another guy, and they're both reaching for their guns and staring each other down. And the other guy sees David Carradine's cyber-glove and backs the fuck off. But the real usefulness of the cyber-glove comes up in this scene, where the ugly bald guy gets the drop on David (who's already kicked baldie in the crotch a few dozen times) and is about to slice him up. Helpful tip: Never ask David Carradine what he's going to do with his remote control.

From yesterday's Associated Press article, which described how NASA's Swift satellite caught the explosion on tape:

On Jan. 9, astronomers used a NASA X-ray satellite to spy on a star already well into its death throes, when another star in the same galaxy started to explode. The outburst was 100 billion times brighter than Earth's sun. The scientists were able to get several ground-based telescopes to join in the early viewing and the first results were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"A star exploded right before my eyes," lead author Alicia Soderberg, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, said Wednesday in a teleconference (emphasis ours).

She likened it to "winning the astronomy lottery. We caught the whole thing from start-to-finish on tape."

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• The Large Hadron Collider was conceived in the 1980s, and eventually approved by CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), in 1994.
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• Some of the questions the LHC hopes to answer are: What is mass? What is 96% of the universe made of? Why is there no more antimatter? What was matter like within the first second of the Universe's life? Do extra dimensions of space really exist? Are stars just pinholes in the curtain of night? Okay, we stole that last one from Highlander. Sorry.
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• The LHC uses the tunnel originally built for the Large Electron-Positron Collider between 1983 and 1988, although it has required massive changes, including the construction of giant underground caverns to hold the large detectors for the system. Construction on those began in 1998.
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• The total cost of the LHC is not known yet, but it is estimated to be somewhere between five and ten billion dollars, which is quite a range. They've suffered many overages and setbacks since the project became active, CERN had its operating budget scaled back, and there were inaccuracies during construction.
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• In 2005 a technician was killed inside the tunnel when a crane load was accidentally dropped on him. If there's a movie waiting to be written about a ghost in the machine, this is it.
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• In March 2007 a pressure test involving several magnets failed, and as a result they had to push the planned startup date from November 2007 to May 2008.
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• The circumference of the LHC is 26,659 meters, making it the largest machine in the world. It also qualifies as the largest refrigerator in the world, with over 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen being used to pre-cool the 9300 magnets to 80 degrees Kelvin. Then they get pumped full of 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them all the way down to 1.9 Kelvin. Just remember to write your name on your lunch.
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• When it's operating at full power, protons will zoom around the track at 11,245 times per second at 99.99% of the speed of light. It boggles the mind! Screw collisions, why don't they just shoot for some time traveling?
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• Speaking of time travel, the devices inside the LHC can measure the passage time of a particle to accuracies in the region of a few billionths of a second.
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• The tunnel has to be kept at a near-complete vacuum so the protons don't run into random gas molecules. As a result, the interior atmosphere of the LHC will be 10 times less pressure than on the surface of the moon.
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• While the interior of the tunnels are kept chillier than the vast reaches of deep space, whenever the protons collide they will generate heat up to 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun.
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• Each experiment conducted in the LHC will generate enough data to fill 100,000 dual layer DVDs every year, which is a heck of a lot of info. They've built a distributed computing network around the world called the Grid which will process all of this data.
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• The LHC could receive an upgrade after ten years, turning it into the Super LHC. This basically involves an extremely expensive upgrade to their Super Proton Synchrotron to increase the luminosity.
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• Some of the things that people think might go wrong with the LHC are: Miniature Black Holes - these exist for only fractions of a second and then decay, but naysayers worry that they'll form up into a massive black hole that will start chewing up France. Strangelets - these are hypothetical forms of strange matter that could possibly turn everything they touch into more strangelets, meaning the Earth would become entirely made up of strange matter. We think that's already happened. Magnetic Monopoles - another theoretical particle that only has one magnetic pole, and could cause atoms to change into different types of matter, causing another chain reaction that would overtake the Earth.
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• With any luck, everything will be switched on in May, and protons will start slamming into each other this summer. Of course, look for the movie version where Shia LaBeouf runs into the control room, mere milliseconds before startup, fights off the guards, and powers everything down and saves the planet. It'll be out sometime soon.