By using ultra-fine polymer fibers, military researchers have been able to regrow damaged or missing organs and limbs. They will announce their findings officially next month at the 26th Army Science Conference in Florida.

One example given by John Parmentola, a director of research and lab management, involved a man who lost the entire tip of his finger while starting up a model airplane.
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Man also doesn’t lose virginity until age 30 when it’s with a strange, small woman he paid $50 in a park. In his memoirs, written in vi, he calls her a love gnome.

Blizzard released Wrath of the Lich King last night at midnight, and while I didn’t do a live UStream.tv stream of the installation—chill out, WoW Insider—I’m now prepared to give y’all a quick “here’s what’s up” of sorts.

Thankfully, the game ships on a DVD. No more “please insert disc 87” nonsense when installing. So that’s good.

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Heads up, World of Warcraft players. There’s a few of you out there.

Not only does the game come out at midnight tomorrow—I’ll probably pick it up over the weekend—but that crazy SteelSeries keyboard comes out tomorrow, too. (The SteelSeries mouse doesn’t come out till the end of the year.)

The keyboard, which has several game-specific keys, costs $70.

CNN is cool. In addition to the huge touchscreen “Magic Wall” (which was originally military technology), CNN’s Wolf Blitzer gets to play with Holograms today during their coverage of the presidential elections.

CNN’s Jessica Yellin is the guinea pig, appearing virtually with Blitzer.

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After months of watching from the sidelines, Sony seems to have come out with a winner in the console wars with this LittleBigPlanet. Aside from amazingly detailed gameplay, you can program your own minigames into the game like this odd mechano-Gradius that looks like a puppet show.

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Flickr’d

I know at least some of you are looking forward to the release of Wrath of the Lich King in just a few weeks. Please be advised that Blizzard is holding some sort of launch extravaganza at four locations in the U.S.: the Best Buy at 529 5th Ave. in New York; the Fry’s at 3370 E. La Palma Ave. in Anaheim; the GameStop at 151 Powell St. in San Francisco; and the GameStop at 10000 Research Blvd. in Austin.

Game devs and execs will be on hand at these stores to sign copies of the game.

Blizzard also says the numerous other stores around the country (and world for that matter) will be open at midnight.

Now, will I be waiting on line to buy the game at midnight? Absolutely not—I’m more than happy to wait for the UPS guy to bring it to my door after ordering it on Amazon. Though I wouldn’t mind seeing a bunch of cosplayers live and in person.

Pay close attention to this video, citizens of Azeroth! It shows just how divisive this presidential campaign has been: Human against Dwarf, Tauren against Orc. It’s madness. And this, in a time when all of us should be focused on eliminating the Scourge.

But seriously, folks, it’s a fun video that will definitely be appreciated by World of Warcraft fans. That McCain has a stamina of 100 is pretty genius.

There’s nothing wrong with playing World of Warcraft occasionally. It’s when you start to picture yourself—not your character, but you yourself—as The Defender of Azeroth or some nonsense that we have a problem.

Take the recent Zombie Infestation. In order to goad players into hating the Lich King (he’s the main antagonist in Wrath of the Lich King) and wanting to “invade” Northend (the continent that debuts in the expansion pack), Blizzard devised this in-game event wherein zombies are running all over the place, infecting you and yours with some disease that turns everyone into zombies.

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I have no words. This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. I get pretty diffuse light in my apartment, so this wouldn’t really be necessary — plus, my place is the size of a postage stamp and this thing would probably trip me up or crawl in bed with me at night. I guess that wouldn’t be so bad.

I love everything about this little robot. Oh my god, how can you not?
[via MAKE: Blog]
By the way, if you ever have to resize an animated gif in a hurry, this is great.

Doug Beaver over at a Facebook Engineering blog casually mentions that they have just had their ten billionth photo uploaded. Not only that, but since they keep 4 copies of each in different sizes, that’s 40 billion files just for the photos. Then he drops these little nuggets:

• 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
• They have just over one petabyte of photo storage
• They serve over 15 billion photo images per day
• Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

Kind of puts things into perspective, right? I remember I was pumped when I got my 100,000th visitor to my mp3 blog, Robosexual. A year of my own traffic, tripled in a single second by Facebook. Nick at Roughtype notes,

“I did a quick scan of the 10 billion photos and found that 3 billion of them included an image of beer, in keg, can, bottle, or pitcher form, 1.5 billion included an image of a bra, and 675 million included both beer and a bra.”

I’m… I’m just so proud!

Blizzard named yesterday’s gigantic World of Warcraft patch “Echoes of Doom.” How prescient.

Right, so Blizzard “dropped” patch 3.0.2 yesterday. Servers were done for a good 24 hours while the company’s elves did their magic. The full patch notes, as always, are available online. Among other things, Stormwind now has a harbor and my Hunter, Fredfresno, has a new hair cut; hints of the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King abound. Life is grand, in a horribly depressing sort of way.

But my God in Heaven, after four years of running this game, Blizzard still has a hell of a time keeping everything up to speed on patch day. Servers went up and down; character lists were incomplete (“hey, didn’t I have two alts on this server?”); and the lag, once you were able to log in, was marked. Call pet, wait four minutes, feed pet, wait three minutes, log out and read an old copy of Proust you’re so annoyed.

General chat was filled with people (for a change) expressing their frustration. You know, “This patch sucks,” “F-ck Blizzard,” “We’re trapped in Shatt.” The gold farmers had even stayed home. That’s defcon right there.

Right now, a little before 1:00pm EDT, the game (several servers) seems to be running better. It’s just weird to see Blizzard still have such a hard time not completely shanking it on patch day.

World of Warcraft players, prepare to take November 13 off from work or school, for that’s the day that Wrath of the Lich King goes on sale. The $40 price tag is about what I expected.

We’ve covered the game here and there, mainly some of the bigger features (because we all know the level of minutia we could get into when talking WoW), but this is it.

And if the game itself isn’t enough for you, there’s a $70 collector’s edition that includes a 208-page art book, an in-game pet, a behind-the-scenes DVD, the soundtrack on CD, a mouse pad, and some exclusive trading cards.

I can’t say how happy this announcement just made me, especially since I wasn’t expecting to see the game until at least the Springtime.

Just a quick note to you World of Warcraft players. Blizzard will now let you transfer your PVE character to a PVP realm. Keep in mind that you still have to pay $25 per transfer.

Now, how wise it is to transfer from PVE to PVP, I don’t know, especially if you plan on engaging in any serious PVP combat. Odds are you’ll have to re-spec, find new gear, etc. just to be competent against other players. Plus there’s the whole, “Oh, that’s a living, breathing person I’m playing against, not some cheap AI mob.”

But I guess it’s better than trying to level all the way up to 70 again.

via videogaming247

Despite being some four years old, the userbase of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft continues to grow, if only at a so-so rate. One of the game’s lead designers said as much at the Games Convention, allaying fears (well, message board banter) that maybe, just maybe, interest in the game had peaked.

The game had some 10 million subscribers as of last January.

Now, that may not be completely indicative of how many people actively play the game—I keep paying for my account but seldom actually play—but that doesn’t much matter to Blizzard. As long as you’re paying your $15 a month, Blizzard’s as happy as an Orc in Orgrimmar.

And who knows what’ll happen when Wrath of the Lich King comes out. I imagine there will be folks who buy it, install it, and play for like an hour then let the account continue to collect dust. That’s my plan.