Our Weekly List of Top 10 Twitter Posts — Week 48

It's out first Twitter wrap-up of the month! Happy Friday and welcome to December, everyone! We're beginning to think about holiday gift ideas, so you'll see a few of our faves sprinkled throughout the next few top ten lists. Not following us on Twitter yet? No excuses! Come on now, here's our handle: @BWCnews. We talk about more than just linear actuators, guides and slides!

Credit: Laughing Squid

1. Doctor Who Glass Holiday Ornaments on LaughingSquid.com: Heck yes! All you hardcore Doctor Who fans probably already ordered them off the BBC Shop with your six-DVD bundle of the British sci-fi series. They're sold separately per set — so buy two, give the extra CDs away to a friend and keep both ornaments for yourself. Because they're that awesome and your friend won't know what he's missing. Happy holidays to me!

2. Stephen Hawking on Time Travel via LettersofNote.com: In 1995, a magazine asked the renowned genius for a time travel formula. Hawking had his personal assistant fax over this very brief response: "Thank you for your recent fax. I do not have any equations for time travel. If I had, I would win the National Lottery every week." Doesn't hurt to ask, I guess!

3. Chewing Gum Aids Focus on Wired: Hey scatterbrain, need a little focus pocus? Chewing gum evidently helps you concentrate on the task at hand, according to this study. Maybe we knew this intuitively because there's definitely always a pack of gum at this desk!

4. Hackers Can Set Your Printer on Fire via our Bishop-Wisecarver Daily: If your HP spontaneously combusts, it may be a targeted attack and not a freak accident. That's according to this Wired article, which says HP laser printers are vulnerable because of a feature that allows you to upgrade the firmware remotely. Great, something else to worry about!

5. Self-Driving Cars Swarming to Future Roads on the Bishop-Wisecarver Daily: Swarm behavior helps fish, birds and even Tour de France bicyclists save energy. Well, according to this Australian industrial engineer, the same principles could drive transportation in the future. Thought-provoking concept there! 

Credit: National Geographic

6. Top 10 Weirdest Life Forms on National Geographic: Ooh yeah, we love end-of-the-year top 10 lists (well, weekly ones, too, for that matter). Here's a look at some of the most bizarre-looking creatures, including a freak-of-nature cyclops shark and a big-lipped amorphous sea worm. They're so weird, they look like made-up animals!

7. Welcome to Robot-ville, Population 20 on New Scientist: Sweet! A zoo just for robots! Turns out a science museum in Europe has a pretty robust exhibit of automatons, including some with a little personality, like iCub the robot toddler. Neat!

8. Entangled Diamonds Bridge the Quantum-Classical Divide again on New Scientist: Two earring stud-sized diamonds got linked in the trippy quantum state the experts call "entanglement." That's when the fate of two or more particles intertwine despite a distance between them. It's observable in very tiny matter, but not on a macro scale (your coworker's coffee mug won't jostle if you pick up your own, for example). That's why scientists made a big to-do out of this pair of diamonds sharing a vibrational state even though they were separated. A case-in-point of science being stranger than fiction!

9. Rebuilding American Manufacturing on the Bishop-Wisecarver Daily: We caught this story on MIT News about how a bunch of bigwigs gathered in Washington D.C. earlier this week to talk about what they called the "innovation gap," where new advances and technologies in the U.S. rarely cross over to become a viable business. The whole discussion is pretty interesting, so be sure to check out some of the video clips along with the article!

10. On the First Day of Christmas, My Geek Friend Gave to Me ... an Evil Squirrel in a Tree! on Redeye.com: No, not the actual rodent — we're talking about purveyors of pulp fiction Evil Squirrel Comics, the first gift idea for geeks on this wish list. Love it!