My wife swears that MSG gives her headaches. Frankly, my wife gives me headaches when she starts whining about the level of MSG in her Chinese food…because for all the noise generated about MSG’s supposedly harmful effects, nobody has been able to definitively determine that MSG – eaten in normal amounts – causes any physiological problems. Despite this, many people [...]

Increased radiation levels detected by South Korean researchers lent a smidge of evidence to North Korea’s claim to have made a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology. I say a smidge, because nuclear fusion is something of a holy grail for energy researchers – a viable nuclear fusion reactor would create tremendous amounts of energy at little cost or harm to [...]

Biologists have located a species of monitor lizard on Luzon in the Philippines. Dubbed ‘Varanus bitatawa’, the critter sports gold spots and is apparently a vegetarian. Yeah, I was disappointed when I heard that last bit too…though probably not as disappointed as Roger Corman. The Agta and Ilongot tribes call the reptile “bitatawa,” which the new scientific name for it [...]

If anyone in the world could make clothing that repels the H1N1 virus, it’s the Japanese. And they have, or at least they claim they have. Anti-Flu Suit An added bonus is that when you put it on, you turn into a sharply-dressed Japanese man with pop idol hair.

My son will be thrilled when he hears about this – a team of paleontologists have discovered the T-Rex ‘missing link’, a 125-million-year-old miniature dino now dubbed ‘Raptorex kriegsteini’. Of course – ‘miniature’ in this case still equates to a 10-foot-long lizard armed with razor-sharp teeth. The really exciting thing about this find is that it bears out evolutionary extrapolations [...]

So someone gave us this little Fisher-Price mirror for Gohan that plays music. The music is nursery-rhyme stuff, and the tones are pretty damn strident, so I only turned it on once. And it drove our cat batshit insane. She attacked the mirror, claws out, fangs bared. I have no idea why; maybe the awful music hit a note only [...]

Wednesday marks the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century when a large swathe of Asia, including parts of China and Japan, will be without sunlight for over 5 minutes. The eclipse will appear first at dawn in India’s Gulf of Khambhat just north of of Mumbai. It will move east across India, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and China before [...]

…well, cloned dogs, actually. Incheon International Airport is now home to six cloned drug-sniffing dogs; their genetic stock was culled from a cham-peen Canadian narco-hound, and Korean fuzz claims that they all have their predecessors talents. “They showed better performances in detecting illegal drugs during the training than other naturally born sniffer dogs that we have,” said Park Jeong-Heon, a [...]

Japanese eggheads have determined that a 2007 dust storm that sprang up in China circled the globe in a mere 13 days – which is impressive, moreseo when you consider that a single concentrated mass of dust particles was able to stay airborne long enough to travel around the freaking planet. The dust cloud measured about 3 km (1.9 miles) [...]

Huh. After decades of scientific research pinpointing Africa as the so-called ‘Cradle of Life’, one scientist now points to Asia as the home of humanity’s common ancestor…which should do wonders for the demographics of this site, if you catch my drift. If Myanmar, formerly called Burma, is confirmed as being the ancestral homeland of higher primates, or close to it, [...]

12-year-old Clara Ma, who attends sixth grade in Lenexa, KS submitted the winning entry to name NASA’s new Mars rover. Her choice? Curiosity. Here’s the winning essay in question: Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day. [...]

  Why glowing dogs, you ask? Well – it seems that this is really just a proof-of-concept test drive, if you will – proving that genes can be successfully impanted to produce ‘transgenic’ offspring…presumably with traits that are a little more useful than finding your car keys at night.     A South Korean scientist who created glowing cats in [...]

Nothing to do with Asian Pop Culture, but I thought it worth noting the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, father of evolutionary theory! Happy birthday, Chuck…! Watch the rest after the jump…

More often than not, whenever someone labeled ‘World’s Oldest (man/woman/person)” dies, they’re Japanese. Usually this is attributed to a lifelong diet of fish, seaweed, and rice – but it also turns out that Japanese people harbor a specific gene that favors longevity. Now it turns out that very same gene has been located in some Europeans (and presumably their descendents [...]

Smoking minus the nicotine seems like non-alcoholic beer to me – what’s the point? I’m not a smoker (or a drinker, for that matter) but I don’t see the purpose in indulging in a vice unless it’s bad for you. Hey – I isolated the gene that makes strippers take off their clothes! Now we can have non-nude strippers! Professor [...]