Caffeine wakes you up, rock stars die young and long ambulance rides aren't ideal. Sound obvious? You bet. But there's more than meets the eye here. On this week's episode of Cocktail Party Science, the writers and editors of PopSci's "Science Confirms the Obvious," talk to host Chuck Cage about the studies that make you say "duh" and why they're worth a second look.

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Sure, external hard drives aren't exactly scarce these days, but while the price point has come down a lot, they're still not cheap. Enter the hard drive case. For just a fistful of dollars, you can pick up a case that (almost) instantly transforms your old internal hard drive into a new storage unit. As Deputy Editor Jake Ward demonstrates here, putting it together is a piece of cake. In the end, you'll have a great-working hard drive, not to mention a few dollars more. Just, keep an eye out for the tiny screws.

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You've never seen a group of programmers and designers flip out over someone like they did over Peter Semmelhack, CEO of open-source gadget company Bug Labs, at SXSW this morning. (That is, unless you were at Jonathan Coulton's show at the PopSci.com party last night. Grown men pulling their thinning hair and jumping up and down, that sort of thing. But Semmelhack's crowd came close, and they were sober.)

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There's just no nice way to say it: You're stupid with your money. You may fancy yourself a shrewd investor, but if you have normal human instincts—if you stand up and cheer at sporting events, if you follow the crowd toward the exit at the theater—then you have the instincts that make investors alternate between delirious greed and inconsolable fear. Like most of your peers, you are wired to buy high and sell low, and that's why Richard Peterson is about to become one very rich psychiatrist.

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The New York Times reports today that Google and IBM are sinking $30 million into a two-year project to build remote data centers that can handle sophisticated computing research remotely. No World of Warcraft player will again be safe now that students can crunch probabilities with the 1600+ processors Google is installing in an undisclosed location.

But seriously: the two companies—along with six universities (Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington)—are cooperating to get an inadequately funded area of research off the ground. The Times succinctly defines "cloud-computing" as a "new kind of data-intensive supercomputing" that "often involves scouring the
Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and
insights." It's typically used by major corporations to analyze web traffic and refine big systems, but now any university kid with a password will be able to create programs and software that can take advantage of the horsepower Google and IBM are providing. —Jacob Ward

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Sure, it's easy for some independent health panel to poo-poo what turns out to be a high incidence of pre-flight cocktails among NASA astronauts. (The study, obtained by Aviation Week & Space Technology and published on their website, found that on at least two occasions, astronauts were so intoxicated that flight surgeons warned that the crew members were a risk to the safety of the flight.)

NASA's standard 12-hour "bottle to throttle" minimum evidently isn't as
strictly observed as the space agency would like (NASA said it will
issue a reaction to the findings on Friday), but here's the thing, Mr. Health Panel: You try facing a Monday spent atop 47,000 gallons of rumbling jet fuel, and see if you don't need an extra Bloody Mary before reporting for work. —Jacob Ward

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With the demise of the Concorde fleet, spare parts from the scrapped fleet are to be auctioned at the Hotel des Ventes Saint-Aubin in Toulouse, France, from September 28th to October 1st of this year. Interested in buying a piece of history? Have a look through the catalog, and bone up on your aviation French to avoid accidentally buying an arbre dentrainement (drive shaft), when you really wanted the machmètre (mach meter). The iconic instrument (which tells you the airplane's speed relative to the speed of sound), sold in lots 310, 568, and 791, respectively, is estimated to fetch between 1500 and 2500 euros, but you can bet some aviation nutcase is going to drive the price higher than that. Even if you cant attend personally, you can send bid orders online.—Jacob Ward

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