The peak of the flu season is here — along with body aches, fevers, chills, coughing and other unpleasant symptoms. An unusually rough flu season is filling doctors' offices, causing kids to miss school and, in general, rendering many of us completely unproductive.

Officials at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have attributed the virulence of this year's season to vaccines that are effective only about 40 percent of the time, and to mutating flu strains. The situation has even deteriorated since earlier this month when the CDC said the vaccine was protective against roughly half the circulating strains.

As of one week ago, 44 states reported "widespread flu activity," up from 31 the prior week.

That is why today's Light Friday is shorter than usual ... and why it was written in bed.

*sniffle* *cough* *snort* *hack* *death rattle*

I Hereby Claim this Ocean Floor as Russia's
Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday awarded medals to three men who planted a Russian flag on the ocean floor under the North Pole last year, staking a symbolic claim to the resource-rich region.

Reuters reports:

Global warming is melting the Arctic ice cap and governments now believe that it is only a matter of time before they will be able to start exploiting previously inaccessible energy supplies locked inside the seabed whose ownership is disputed.

Russia hopes to prove the Lomonosov Ridge, named after an 18th century Russian writer and scientist, runs for hundreds of kilometers along the seabed from Siberia, stretching beneath the North Pole. If Russia can prove the link, the Kremlin plans to claim the northern continental shelf and its resources as Russian.

About that Environmental Cleanup for the Olympics...
The 2008 Olympic games in Beijing have been dubbed the Green Olympics. Beijing's environmental program began in 1997 and became the centerpiece of the city's Olympic environmental commitments. Since then, many of those commitments have been met through the implementation of key eco-friendly projects that have been started to clean up the city.

So it's kind of surprising that an advertisement on Beijing's subway is so blatantly out of tune with environmental protection.

The advertisement proclaiming "Squeezed in?! Go and buy a car then!" has angered passengers, a state newspaper said a week ago (via Reuters). The advertisement is quite contrary to the Beijing city government's aim of getting more people to take public transport, the official Beijing Daily said.

Meanwhile...
General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz calls global warming a "total crock of sh*t."

Self-Healing Rubber
A new type of rubber reforms itself after being snapped or punctured, possibly paving the way for self-healing shoes, gloves and other products.

French chemists created the rubber that can self-heal at room temperature in around 15 minutes by simply pressing the damaged pieces together, they report in the British weekly science journal Nature.

Conventional rubber typically comprises long, cross-linked chains of polymers that can stretch and then recover to their original size and shape. The new formula achieves the same elasticity by using a mixture of two different kinds of smaller molecules.

It is made from simple ingredients — fatty acids like those found in vegetable oils, and urea, a waste compound in urine that can be made synthetically, says Reuters. The downside is that getting rid of covalent and ionic bonding means the material is weaker than regular rubber, according to New Scientist.

The material would be an asset to industry and might even help shed light on the physics of elasticity. The breakthrough could also lead to clothes that self-mend if torn and toys that repair themselves if damaged.

Bullseye!
The successful use of a Navy missile to destroy a defunct U.S. spy satellite late Wednesday night marked the first time that a U.S. missile designed to defend against incoming enemy warheads was instead used to bring down a satellite. It was a significant technical achievement for the U.S., which hasn't carried out a similar high-altitude strike against a space-based target since the Cold War.

Debris from the obliterated satellite was being tracked over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans but appeared to be too small to cause damage on Earth.

A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) is launched from the Pearl Harbor-based Aegis cruiser, USS Lake Erie (CG 70) on Nov. 6, 2007, enroute to an intercept as part of a Missile Defense Agency test. A similar missile was used to shoot down a crippled spy satellite this week. Credit: Reuters/U.S. Navy/Handout

The Messiest of the Messy
The folks over at MyFax are sponsoring a contest to find the messiest office in the U.S. or Canada. To enter, you simply fill out the form and provide a picture or video of your disaster area. The prize is a cool $10,000 in cash.

Entries will be accepted until Monday at noon. You can already see some of the finalist offices on the contest's Web site. That's some stiff competition.


Cheers.