OS X Never Coming on a USB Drive Ever Again

We hope you aren't too averse to the Mac App Store, because it's going to be the only way to upgrade your computer from now on. That's right—no more USB option, Pocket-Lint reports. Forever.

After a bit of hand-wringing and whining last time around, Apple reluctantly offered a disgustingly-overpriced thumb drive copy of Lion for those unprepared for the download-only route. Tough shit, Mountain Lions! Says Apple:

"It was an interesting test, but it turns out the App Store was just fine for getting the new OS."

You hear that? It's just fine. And if you don't live in an area with suitable internet access, you'll just have to go to your local public library like some sort of street urchin and beg for the Wi-Fi password. Then again, if you're out in the boonies without decent internet access, what do you need a top of the line laptop for anyway? Good riddance, disks and drives and things.

Adding Mini Paper Plates To Pizza Boxes Is Unadulterated Genius

Winner of a much-deserved Red Dot Design Award, the Paper Dish replaces the greaseproof sheet found between a pizza and a cardboard box with an improved design that easily tears apart creating a miniature paper plate for each slice.

Mind = blown.

Created by Yu Kyung Ha, Won Min Jung, and Kwon Young Hee, the clever design helps keep your fingers clean, while also eliminating the stack of napkins usually required to share a pizza. Now if they find a way to incorporate red Solo plastic cups for soda as well, their design could very well revolutionize the fast food industry. More here.

Scientists Find the Bare Minimum Exercise You Need to Get Fit

We all know we need to exercise to stay fit and healthy, but sometimes it's difficult to find the time. Don't worry: scientists have worked out the minimum amount of exercise you can get away with in order to get fit.

The New York Times reports that a group of researchers are turning health and fitness studies on its head, by investigating just how little exercise we really need. Turns out, as long as you're willing to work hard during your exercise, you probably don't need as much as you think.

Most world-class athletes do intervals: short, sharp bursts of strenuous activity, interspersed with rest. Inspired by that, researchers at McMaster University developed a version of high-intensity interval training that involves one minute of strenuous effort, at about 90 percent of a person's maximum heart rate, followed by one minute of easy recovery. Their version sees that process repeated ten times, meaning a total exercise times of 20 minutes, and is supposed to be carried out just twice a week.

But can two interval sessions a week really get you fit? Well, despite the infrequent nature of the exercise, the researchers have shown that, after several weeks of practicing it, both unfit volunteers and cardiac patients taking part in the study showed significant improvements in their health and fitness. In the words of the researchers:

"A growing body of evidence demonstrates that high-intensity interval training can serve as an effective alternate to traditional endurance-based training, inducing similar or even superior physiological adaptations in healthy individuals and diseased populations, at least when compared on a matched-work basis."

So, if anybody says that when it comes to exercise you need to do a little and often, tell them where to shove it. A better maxim might be hard and fast.

Why Horses Make Good Glue

If you ever drive through Northern France, you'll see a lot of butchers that sell horse meat. You'll also see a lot of glue factories. The two are very definitely linked — but why is it that horses make good glue?

One word: collagen. Over at Slate, there's a great explanation about the long, and oddly fascinating, history of glue-making. But what it all boils down to is that one protein, collagen. You find it in cartilage and tendons, and lurking inside bones. If you boil enough of those body parts down with some water, you get a gelatin.

Yep: that's the stuff that makes Jell-O set and Gummy bears chewy. And it makes damn good glue, too. But it's not that horse glue is actually better than any other animal glue; it's just that historically horses were plentiful, so it made sense to use them. More here.

Sleeping Better Now Helps Prevent Memory Loss When You’re Old

If you're one of those people who battles through all-nighters, parties hard only to rise early, or has plain old insomnia, I have some bad news for you. Scientists have shown that sleep deprivation in early adult life is linked to memory problems when you're old.

According to a report by Science Daily, the amount and quality of sleep you get at night may have a profound effect on your memory in later life. The research, carried out by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 64th Annual Meeting in New Orleans in April.

The team of researchers has shown that disrupted sleep appears to be associated with the build-up of amyloid plaques—a hallmark indicator of Alzheimer's disease. Their study showed that people who spend less than 85 percent of their time in bed actually sleeping, or those who wake up more than five times per hour, were significantly more likely to have the markers of early stage Alzheimer's disease. So, if you're not sleeping well at the moment, it might be a good idea to change it. More here.

Firefox on Windows 8: Metro Build is in The Works

We all know that Windows 8 will have a split personality, with a Windows 7 style "Classic" desktop environment working hand-in-hand with a finger-friendly Metro UI. Given that Firefox has a significant market share in the PC web browsing market, it's only natural for Mozilla to accommodate both parts of Microsoft's new OS. 

According to its 2012 Strategy & Roadmap, the company has plans for a proof-of-concept Win8 Firefox release in Q2 of this year. In that document, Mozilla reveals that a "simple evolution" of its existing browser will work with the "Classic" environment, but brand new new front-end and integration code is needed for Firefox to play nice with Metro.

The plan is to build a Gecko-basedbrowser that brings full Firefox capabilities and can handle Windows 8's unique requirements like being suspended by the OS when it's not being viewed and supporting multiple "snap" states to ensure a good browsing experience when multiple apps are open. Looks like Mozilla's crew of coders has their work cut out for them, and you can peep for more here.

Raw Beef Bouquet: How to Land a Meat-Lover Lover

A box of chocolates? Yeah, that might be fine for omnivores, but what about that special carnivorous someone? How's about a dozen beef sirloin roses from this British butcher? Nothing says "Let's get carnal!" like a bouquet of carnage. More here.

Your Heartbeat Could Be Your Password

A technology in the works might soon allow you to unlock your hard drive by simply touching your keyboard. Your unique heartbeat, emitted through your fingertip, would be your password.

Chun-Liang Lin and his team at the National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan translated a human heartbeat into an encryption key using an electrocardiograph reading from an individual's palm. Their unique series of thump-thumpa generated a secret key.

The part that blows my mind is that your heartbeat is so unique that that pattern never actually repeats. You will never get the same exact timing of beats twice. So the encryption scheme is based on the math behind chaos theory, which dictates that outcomes are highly sensitive to initial conditions, leading to widely divergent outcomes (it's sometimes referred to as the butterfly effect). The research will appear in an upcoming issue of Information Sciences. If they're going to create a product, they better hurry up if they want to beat Apple, where engineers seem to have been working on something similar since at least 2010. More here.

I had no idea heartbeats could be so unique! Somehow the whole idea has awoken the romantic in me. Happy Valentines Day everybody!

A Ghastly Cloud Tsunami Creeps Up on the Beach

Earlier this week, Panama City Beach, Florida was overwhelmed with a sweeping wave of fog that was not unlike a cloud tsunami. It creeped onto the beach and rolled right over buildings, giving off an almost supernatural aura.

Meteorologist Dan Satterfield explains how the cloud tsunami phenomenon works:

Cool air offshore was very nearly at the saturation point, with a temperature near 20ºC and a dew point of about 19.5ºC. The air at this temperature can only hold a certain amount of water vapor, and how much it can hold depends heavily on the temperature. If you add more water into the air, a cloud will form, but you can also get a cloud to form by cooling the air. Drop the temperature, and it can no long hold as much water vapor, so some of it will condense out and a cloud will form.

The pictures were taken by Helicopter pilot Mike Schaeffer and JR Hott of Panhandle Helicopter. It seriously looks like ghosts sweeping over Florida. Or dementors looking for Harry Potter. Or a gigantic spiderweb covering the beach. Either way, it's so spectacular it gives me the heebie jeebies. More here.

Lot of People Thought Oprah Was Whitney Houston on Facebook

Whitney Houston, the diva of divas, passed away yesterday at the too young age of 48. It's a depressing end to her story of galaxy bending talent, sun magnifying limelight and cursed frailty. Anyone who has ever heard Whitney in her prime will always remember the singular power of her voice. I mean, we all have our own 'oh damn' Whitney-moment we hold dear, right?

The 19th Century Version of Facebook

Looks like Mr. Zuckerberg has some explaining to do—he clearly stole the entire idea for Facebook from this 19th century girl's "friend urn"—or, if you will, Vasebook.

The eBay seller says the vase is likely "a graduation present for the young lady in the center." Yeah, you see her? That's her profile picture, with a non-traditional circular Facebook wall surrounding her. Circles were in mode back then, before being briefly banned during WWI for rationing purposes. But there's something very sweet and sad about this! She carried this vase around, labeled "My Friends," as reminder of 50 people who presumably meant the most to her at that point in her life. It was indelible—sealed in ceramic. And now that she's been dead for a very long time, this is all that there is to prove she ever had any friends at all. Will you be able to say the same about your Timeline, Dr. 21st century fancy pants?

Why Updates for Your Android Phone Take So Long

Many of us point to custom UI skins as one of the main reasons Android updates take so long to reach certain phones. But according a Motorola exec, that's not really the case. It's the hardware itself.

PC Mag's Sascha Segan spoke with Moto Senior Vice President Christy Wyatt, who launched a full scale explanation.

"When Google does a release of the software ... they do a version of the software for whatever phone they just shipped," she said. "The rest of the ecosystem doesn't see it until you see it. Hardware is by far the long pole in the tent, with multiple chipsets and multiple radio bands for multiple countries. It's a big machine to churn."

Motorola understands that consumers want their Android upgrades sooner, but the process is complicated, she said. First there's hardware support, then the layering in of custom software from manufacturers like Motorola, and finally, phones must be re-certified by carriers, taking more time.

Long story short, handset manufacturers struggle have to code the drivers for all the different components themselves, and because there are very few hardware limitations on Android once it's gone public, there is a ridiculous amount of variation in devices, even if made by the same company.

Another interesting little aside from the piece is that from the sounds of it, it's possible that Motorola's future webtops (the ones which use phones like the Atrix to power them), will run straight-up Android instead of some other version of Linux. That could be interesting.

DIY Furniture Made Extra Easy With Foam Building Blocks

Since most of us are far handier with a pile of Legos than tools, lumber, and raw upholstery, Japanese design studio Torafu Architects has created these large scale foam building blocks that making assembling furniture easier than an Ikea bookshelf.

The Soft Blocks are designed to look like concrete cinderblocks, but they're actually made from a felt material packed with dense foam so they're comfortable to sit on while still being sturdy enough to support someone's weight.

Sadly, the Soft Blocks are unfortunately still just a design concept, but imagine how easy moving would be if all of your furniture was assembled from these blocks? Filling the U-Haul would be like playing a game of Tetris. More here.

Heat-Based Recording Could Boost Magnetic Drive Speed

Magnetic fields are pretty nifty for levitating stuff, carving sponge-like thingamajigs and, of course, data storage. But an international team led by the University of York in the UK has figured out a way to replace magnetic fields for the latter by using ultra-short heat pulses instead. Conventional thinking typically dictates that an external magnetic field is required to store data on a magnetic medium. By using heat, however, researchers were able to record terabytes of information per second in a way that is also more energy-efficient compared to current hard drive technology. As for the time it'll take for the tech to make it to market, well, we have a feeling it won't be as fast. More here.

Google’s Very First Employee Is Leaving

It's the end of an era: Google's very first hired employee is leaving the search giant. Craig Silverstein — the first Google employee, Page and Sergey Brin aside — is heading off to the new online learning concept, the Khan Academy. Before you ask: no, it's not acrimonious. " I am as passionate about Google's mission now as I've ever been," says Silverstein. More here.

Download the Entire Pirate Bay in Just 90 Megabytes

Users of Swedish piracy utopia The Pirate Bay have reason to be nervous, post-Megaupload. It's survived everything companies and cops have thrown its way, but you never know—so download thisarchive of every single torrent from The Bay.

Pirate Bay user "allisfine" ripped the text contents from the site, TorrentFreak reports, and luckily, that's all you really need to keep it alive forever. TPB doesn't actually host anything, and since torrent downloads are decentralized to begin with, a list of links that point you to other users is sufficient. That's what TPB offers now, in nicer packaging—and with the option to add more, of course.

But with one 90 MB .zip file, you'll have access to every single one of the 1,643,194 torrents that's ever graced The Pirate Bay. Keep it safe, for posterity. Maybe print it out and bury it in your back yard. We might need it someday. More here and here.

Microsoft Celebrating Leap Year Right by Launching Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Perhaps celebrating a push toward the mobile space with its traditionally desktop-bound OS -- or maybe just doing its best to further confuse the similar naming conventions with its forthcoming smartphone operating system -- Microsoft today sent out invites for a February 29th Mobile World Congress event that will see the launch of its Windows 8 Consumer Preview. More here.

Logitech Touch Mouse M600 Mouse Lets you Swipe and Scroll Sans Buttons for $69

Is your current wireless mouse not up to snuff? If that's the case, you may want to take a gander at the Logitech Touch Mouse M600 that lets you do your navigating via a touch surface instead of those ol' clicky buttons. The peripheral is outfitted with the company's Flow Scroll software that touts a similar feel to scrolling on your touchscreen smartphone of choice. From wherever your fingers contact the top of the mouse, you can scroll and swipe in order to keep powering through those Photoshop files. The M600 works just as well for lefties once click areas are reconfigured with Logitech's SetPoint software. If you're thinking about taking the leap, get ready to shell out $69.99 later this month.

Playing In the Sand Could Make You Pay On the Toilet

Some people go to the beach but eschew going into the water because it's "gross". If that's you, then you are a sucker. According to a new EPA study, playing in the sand more than doubles your chances of getting sick.

The study, which was a collaboration between the EPA, UNC Chapel Hill, and Johns Hopkins, found a relationship between sand exposure and gastrointestinal illnesses due to fecal microbial pollution in beach sand. Yeah, sandpoop. It was even worse than exposure to the ocean water. The researchers tested 144 wet-sand samples from beaches within two miles of a waste treatment-works outfall (testing for Enterococcus, Bacteroidales, fecal Bacteroides, and Clostridium, and others) and conducted nearly 5,000 interviews at the beaches with followup interviews two weeks later.

They found that, compared with beachgoers who did not dig in the sand, the adjusted odds ratio (OR) of illness among those who dug in the sand with the highest Enterococcus levels was 2.0 for GI illnesses and 2.4 for diarrhea (considered as a separate outcome).

In other words, they were between two and two and-a-half times as likely to get sick. And it was even worse for people who were buried in the sand. The EPA doesn't advocate avoiding the beach all together, but says people "should consider washing their hands or using a hand sanitizer after playing in the sand or water." Yeah, or maybe a Silkwood shower would do the trick.

Obviously, examining beaches that are near waste-treatment plants are liable to be nastier, but the EPA thinks wider conclusions can be drawn. Beaches with less nasty water are likely to have less nasty sand, but the sand is still likely to be nastier than the water. Way too much nastiness for my liking.

I'd never really considered this, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Sand is often used for filtration systems (y'know, they're called "sand filters"), because it's good at pulling contaminants out of water. Those contaminants don't just disappear. So basically, the beach is one big filter for the nastiness in the ocean. Which is, y'know, gross, but if you think that's going to keep me off the beach you've got another thing coming. If you need me, I'll be surfing in an biohazard suit. More here.

How Much Abuse Can a Blackberry Take?

RIM just put out a series of videos showcasing the durability tests a Blackberry has to withstand prior to its release. Pretty cool!

The featured victim is a Blackberry Curve, which is dunked in water, bent to excess, and dropped.