Let me state right up front that this thing is useless, a bad idea in search of a problem. I don’t care, because it’s also super cool and a herald of some crazy cool stuff yet to call. That out of the way, here’s the Magicscroll (via TechCrunch), a research product from scientists at Canada’s Queen’s University Human Media Lab. It’s part smart-ish phone, part tablet, and part wonky, because it rolls into a cylinder, thanks to a 7.5” 2K resolution flexible display. Watch the video, and you can see how they use the ends to navigate and unroll the screen to use it as a tablet. Ish. Here’s why I’m excited about it: it’s that rolled up display. While “displays” are eventually headed towards holographic projectors (I’m telling you now), an intermediary step is going to be displays that roll up into tight little cylinders we can take with us. Again, I’m telling yo now. The Magicscroll is an early step towards much more useful iterations, and you have to start somewhere. Also, I love to see anyone trying to think about different ways to do things, even if those ways seem absurd. You know, like this one. So, check it out!

Most of have heard about the big asteroid (6 miles long) that smacked the Earth 66 million years ago and created a nuclear winter that killed the dinosaurs. It’s pretty accepted, though it remains a theory. Well…maybe not. Professor Gerta Keller is leading the charge gathering mounting evidence that the timeline doesn’t match up. According to her, the Chicxulub asteroid hit 200,000 years before the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. And what she thinks did it is the same thing blamed for other extinction events, massive volcano eruptions that lasted—in this case—60,000 years. There in a part of India called the Deccan Traps today, though we don’t know what the dinosaurs called them. Those eruptions do line up with the extinction event nicely. Apparently, all this evidence is causing quite the hubbub in academia, and The Atlantic has a very long and detailed story about the whole thing. It’s fascinating. The image included is from the Deccan Traps.

I have two little nuggets for you. The first is that Microsoft has an undersea data center its experimenting with called Project Natick. The second is that they now have a webcam—two webcams, actually—for you to get a gander at the operation, as well as all the oceanic wildlife also checking it out. How they don’t call those cams Finding Clippy is beyond me, so I just took care of it for them. UR WELCOME. In any event, this whole thing is a giant experiment to see if Microsoft can save money by using the chilly ocean waters off the coast of Scotland to cool a data center. And yeah, my kneejerk reaction is that this will help heat the oceans, and don’t we want to avoid that? Plus, you know, the law of unintended consequences, but whatevs. They didn’t ask me, and they do have proper scientists working on this, so maybe it’s just an awesome idea. It’s certainly outside the box thinking. I found this, BTW, from a piece on The Verge that is full of cheezeball puns that had me snorting out loud in my office.

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. Let’s start with the bad news: blue light (such as light from our devices) can accelerate macular degeneration in our eyes, something that can cause blindness over time. The good news, or at least better news, is that a group of scientists have discovered how that process works.  They told The Guardian UK, “Our experiments explain how this happens, and we hope this leads to therapies that slow macular degeneration, such as a new kind of eye drop.” To me, this emphasizes the importance of shifting our displays red at night. I use the f.lux app on my Mac, and Apple has a similar feature baked into iOS. In addition to theoretically helping me sleep, seems it could be good for my eyes, too. There are more details about the scientists’ experiments in the full article, and it’s an interesting read.