An interesting, and no doubt terrifying, look at one of the massive tornadoes that ripped through the southern U.S. this past week. The bright white dot in this radar image is not only the funnel cloud, but a mass of flying debris caught up in the vortex. Paul Douglas with the On Weather blog explains:

Here’s a reflectivity view from Birmingham (NWS) Doppler around 6:30 pm Wednesday, showing a 1/2 to 1 mile wide tornado. The energy beam from the Doppler is actually reflecting off debris swept up in the tornado.

(On Weather via TYWKIWDBI)

After way too much rumor and speculation than a device releasing in a different color deserved, the long-rumored white iPhone 4 released yesterday, making customers who wanted a white iPhone and bloggers who didn’t have to write about its rumored existence happy the world over; that is, until people brought home their new white toy and found their previous iPhone case didn’t fit on the thing.

iPhone cases are manufactured to tight Apple specifications, which means most cases are the smallest a case can be while still fitting around the phone. It turns out the white iPhone 4 is .2 millimeters thicker than the regular iPhone 4, which doesn’t seem like a noteworthy amount, until one tries putting their favorite case over their new white device only to find the case doesn’t fit.

Last year, 205 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In his info-tastic video Oil’d, Chris Harmon poses a provocative question: What would we have done with the oil if it had never been spilled? His answers are staggering, but also underline human dependency on oil. Sure, we could have done a lot with those 205 million gallons, but maybe we could have done even more — or less.

(via Reddit)

Apparently, with this week’s release of Action Comics #900, “a blockbuster issue filled to the brim with guest talent from all corners of the world of Superman adaptations,” Superman will renounce his U.S. citizenship.

In the issue, Superman gets in some hot water with the president’s National Security Advisor for showing up in Tehran in support of Iranian protesters. Just showing up, non-violently. Since Superman is an American hero, Iran’s Government construes his actions as being with the tacit permission of the US Government. This desire to remain autonomous from whatever administration exists in Washington is what motivates the Man of Steel’s decision (panels above). Controversial comics stuff, treating superheroes like they exist in greater world full of regular human beings and their governments! … if you’re Superman in 2011 and not, to pick one example, The Authority in 1999.

Our sister site The Mary Sue has a nice analysis.

(via The Mary Sue. pic via Comics Alliance)

Most people try to hold on to their memories, but for those suffering from trauma or drug addiction, memory is a terrible burden. In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers think they have made great strides in targeting and destroying memories. Their work focuses on the protein kinase M (PKM). By blocking the activity of PKM, the researchers found they could erase long-term memories.

And here’s where the snails come in: When attacked by a predator, they become acutely sensitive to outside stimuli, learning about the situation. By targeting individual neurons, scientists say they were able to erase these memories. David Glanzman, who authored the study, says that the snails are a valuable analogue for the study.

Almost all the processes that are involved in memory in the snail also have been shown to be involved in memory in the brains of mammals[.]

The researchers hope that their neuron-by-neuron approach could give them greater control over memory erasure, perhaps one day helping those whose memories continue to hurt them.

(Livescience via io9, image via Wikipedia)

Though the growls and roars of death metal lend themselves to parody, it’s actually serious musical business, as the warmup exercises in the video above illustrate. The performer is Olle Ekman, vocalist for Volturyon and Deals Death; you can here him performing on stage here.

Previously: Deathcore cover of Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

(via /r/music.)

Michael Arrington will invest however he wants, thank you very much (TechCrunch)

Apple may have snapped up iCloud.com (GigaOM)

Trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II (The Mary Sue)

Facebook shoots first, ignores questions later on account lockout claims (Ars)

RIP Keith Aoki (The Public Domain)

The cheapskate’s guide to getting free Dropbox space (Lifehacker)

What did news websites look like in 1999? (SportsGrid)

(title pic via Albotas)

This is the question being considered by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and it could mark a new, potentially problematic trend in higher education. Under this system of “differential tuition,” schools can charge a students a tuition rate based off their major. For Nebraska, the plan would allow a much higher rate of tuition for engineers than the standard rate of $198.25 per credit hour all students pay.

Other schools have already begun such tuition programs. According to the Omaha World Herald, 57% of 162 public research universities employ some form of differential tuition. In 2008, Glen Nelson studied the practice and found that business students pay 14% more tuition and engineers 15% more than average. Many schools require special lab fees for certain classes, or higher tuition rates for upperclassmen taking more challenging courses. Charging by individual major is somewhat different, as it is not tied to specific courses or seniority.

Agree or disagree? According to a staffwide editorial in the Journal of Animal Ethics, a new academic publication devoted to “the exploration of progressive thought about animals,” the word ‘pet’ “is surely a derogatory term both of the animals concerned and their human carers … The word ‘owners’, whilst technically correct in law, harks back to a previous age when animals were regarded as just that: property, machines or things to use without moral constraint.”

(Telegraph via TDW)

Fun, super-clever video by Matteo Negrin.

(via Dude Craft | Artist’s page)

While today’s youths probably think of Microsoft as having more indie cred than a megalithic, secretive tech company like, say, Apple, it was not always so: In the ’90s, Microsoft was hounded by antitrust accusations, culminating in the landmark United States v. Microsoft case filed in 1998.

While the judge in that case ultimately prescribed that Microsoft be split into two separate companies, one to produce the Windows operating system, one to produce other software, Microsoft’s lawyers successfully appealed, and one component of the compromise reached was that the Department of Justice would stringently oversee Microsoft’s activities via a three-person committee. This oversight commenced in 2002, following the final judgment on United States vs. Microsoft; on May 12th, it will come to an end following a meeting today at which the DoJ, 17 states, and the District of Columbia declined to object to that date.

Ars: “There are unlikely to be any immediate implications for Microsoft, with the company saying that it will continue to abide by most of the terms of the settlement anyway … Nonetheless, the removal of court oversight may allow the company to respond a little more quickly, and a little more aggressively, to the actions of its competitors.”

(via Ars Technica)

One of the greatest obstacles in space travel is fuel, especially when you’re launching off of a planet. Take the Space Shuttle, NASA’s work horse for many decades. When it lifts off, the Orbiter is coupled to two booster rockets and one massive fuel tank — it’s the big orange thing in the middle. It takes all that just to get one craft into orbit. And fuel is a double-edged sword; the more you have, the more it weighs, and the more thrust you need to lift it all. In an attempt to solve this lingering problem surrounding space travel, NASA is now accepting proposals for space-based refueling stations.

The plan is simple to explain: Put unmanned craft in orbit that holds huge amounts of fuel that can replenish the supply aboard larger craft that have further to go. This could lower the size — and cost — of existing space missions, and even support larger, more ambitious ones. For instance, in a Moon or Mars mission, refueling stations could be placed at key points along the flight path, lowering the amount of fuel the spacecraft would have to carry.

Today sees the release of Ubuntu 11.04, a popular flavor of the open source Linux operating system. The new version, called “Natty Narwhal,” contains numerous tweaks and changes, but the biggest change comes to the Unity user interface.

Originally developed for netbooks, Unity uses smaller screen real estate to the utmost. The refresh of the UI seen in version 11.04 breaks from the predecessors with a desktop version of Unity. Still retaining its smartphone-like usability, Unity is meant to bring greater ease of use and more polish to the desktop user experience. It’s also been bolstered with greater support for larger screens with the greater reliability and power that desktop users would expect.

Unity appears much the same as it did in previous versions — dock-like launcher to the left, menus along the top — but there are some important changes.

Armed with genetic sequencing machines, federal researchers have recently confirmed that armadillos are not only capable of transmitting leprosy to humans, but account for a full third of the 150 to 250 documented leprosy cases in America each year.

This knowledge may help inform doctors in Louisiana and Texas, where most armadillo-borne leprosy cases take place: Previously, it was a common rule of thumb that patients would only be screened for leprosy if they had traveled to a select few hotspots overseas or come into contact with someone with leprosy, but now, armadillo contact will have to be considered as well.

Now, for the really weird part: Armadillos apparently first contracted leprosy hundreds of years ago from … humans.

One of the interesting aspects of leprosy is that transmission seems to have gone in both directions. Leprosy was not present in the New World before Christopher Columbus, and armadillos are indigenous only to the New World.

“So armadillos had to have acquired it from humans sometime in the last 400 to 500 years,” said Dr. Richard W. Truman, a researcher at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, La., and an author of the armadillo study.

(NYT via Consumerist. pic via Shutterstock.)

A company called Barrier1 Systems makes a variety of terrifying vehicle-stopping devices, the most formidable of which, the Vehicle Arrestor, consists of a net that can be deployed across a roadway up to 250 feet wide in less than two seconds. Watch as it utterly destroys a 15,000-pound truck traveling at 50 miles per hour.

There’s plenty more insanity in this video, but of particular note is the Crash Beam, which makes its first appearance at 1:15: It looks just like a typical security gate of the kind you’d see at a highway tollbooth, but if you’ve seen the Vehicle Arrestor in action, you can guess what kind of stopping power it has.

(via Reddit.)