Happy Manhattanhenge! 
So what the hell is Manhattanhenge, you might ask?
On May 29 and July 12 every year, the sunset lines up with Manhattan's street grid which, as the Hayden Planetarium puts it, simultaneously illuminates "both the north and south sides of every cross street of the borough."
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Today's space-weather report tells of a different kind of sunny sky: Two flares, including the second biggest of the Sun's 11-year solar cycle, hit earth early this morning and could cause the biggest solar storm in five years, NASA says.
Now, what the hell does this mean, exactly?
Every so often, a chunk of charged particles -- called a coronal mass ejection -- spirals earthward, which can cause problems with electronic devices.
So, if your GPS, computer, or cell phone is in a funk, it might very well be the Sun's fault.
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Last week, Runnin' Scared brought you news of Leif Percifield, a Parsons grad student who's working diligently to develop a phone app, DontFlushMe, that could prevent 27 billion gallons of shit from flowing into New York's waterways yearly. A lot of this raw sewage enters the City's harbors as overflow -- concisely, when the system gets backed up and people continue to flush. So Percifield's basic idea is this: He wants to hook up sensors to the plants where this excess travels, that would send text alerts to people notifying them of potential overflows. That way, they can change how they use water, preventing pollution. We had a chance to catch up with the Bushwick resident and chat a bit about his aqueous ambitions. 
Percifield
Shit just got real in the world of genetics. Like Jurassic Park -bringing-monsters-back-from-extinction real, just without Jeff Goldblum.
www.opencage.info
Scientists have determined that a sub-species of Galapagos Islands tortoise -- long thought to be dead and gone -- might actually still kinda exist.
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On Tuesday, scientists at Cern will reveal the latest results of their search for the elusive Higgs boson particle. Some are expecting the researchers, who have been working at the Large Hadron Collider, to announce that they have found the particle. If they have nailed down the Higgs boson, it'll basically explain why things have mass. If they don't, it means the way many physicists have been explaining the universe has been a bunch of peer-reviewed mumbo jumbo. In the Guardian, theoretical physics professor Jeff Forshaw can barely hold in his excitement: "This means that whatever happens we are going to need to dream up something new about the world."
via Wikipedia A theoretical Higgs boson event or Laser Floyd
According to the latest scientific smell-study, you can actually smell crazy (neurotically crazy, that is) people. You -- and we mean the universal you, not you in particular, don't be neurotic -- can smell the personalities of all sorts of people, from outgoing to anxious to dominant. The study elicited 30 men and 30 women to wear white cotton T-shirts three nights in a row, abstaining from using soap, deodorant, or perfume, and from drinking, smoking, or eating "oderous foods" during that period. They also took personality tests. 
Despite the character-defaming rumor that men think about sex every seven seconds of every day, a figure that would make for "more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours," scientists have determined that actually, guys don't think about sex that much! According to a recent study that asked men and women to track their thoughts about eating, sleep, and sex in a golf tally counter every day for a week, the median number for thinking about sex was 19 times a day for guys and 10 per day for women. 
Here is your bizarre yet enlightening scientific knowledge of the day. According to research published in the Journal of the American Dental Association, a gene that occurs frequently in redheads (a/k/a, gingers) makes them experience "heightened anxiety" when they visit their dental professional. The study involved 144 people, 77 brunettes and 67 natural redheads; researchers asked them questions about dental anxiety and tested them for gene variants common in redheads. 
O.K., let's get something straight. To be human is to die. It WILL happen. The best thing to do is to enjoy yourself until it does, or, at least, that's our philosophy. However! There is a new study out that may worry some of you who are a bit less footloose and fancy free. After analyzing data from 45,000 participants in 29 countries, the researchers determined that if you're younger than 65 and you live alone, you may have a greater risk of dying. 
A report by a couple of fun-loving sociologists in Germany may have you concerned. They say that happy couples get fat because there is no longer the same pressure on them to look good. Thus, when your wonderful boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, or husband announces he or she is only eating egg whites, and spending a lot of time in the gym, and how about this raw food diet program he or she has heard so much about?, you should be very worried that they're not going to be much fun to go to dinner with. And also, they might want to ditch you for someone else. (The alternative, non-science view: They may just want to get healthy so as to enjoy life with you as much as possible for the rest of your glorious years, and you should really stop being so irrationally paranoid.)
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