This week we bring you another mad (and by “mad,” we mean “brilliant”) scientist who turned up in the research for our upcoming cover story on “The Future” — Amy Smith, an engineer at MIT.

Smith has developed a cleaner-burning, perfectly-efficient charcoal briquette made from the fibrous leftovers of a sugarcane harvest. If it makes it to market, the product could be a huge hit in countries such as Haiti, which has not only plenty of sugar, but also lots of pollution. Smith’s students are also working on versions made from peanut shells and sawdust.

You can read more about Smith and her other ingenious inventions — “a microscope slide warmer which uses phase change technology to diagnose tuberculosis; a clamp to regulate the flow of intravenous fluids which enables nurses to serve more patients during an epidemic; and her first patent, the Smart Canister, an automatic dispenser which assembles all the dry ingredients for a particular recipe” — here.

A couple weeks back we gave you some tips for saving money at the pump in our IQ-tips, mentioning Gasbuddy.com as the best website to find the best prices in your town.

Don’t ask me why, but I clicked over to the state of Missouri today and was shocked to see one station was selling gas for about $1.80 a gallon. What are we, suddenly in 1996?

If that wasn’t reason enough to move to Missouri, check out these fun factoids, courtesy of LegendsofAmerica.com:

The first successful parachute jump to be made from a moving airplane was made by Captain Berry at St. Louis, in 1912.

The first ready-mix food to be sold commercially was Aunt Jemima pancake flour. It was invented in St. Joseph, Missouri and introduced in 1899.

St. Louisans consume more barbecue sauce per capita than any other city in America.

The ice cream cone was invented at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 when an ice cream vendor ran out of cups and asked a waffle vendor to help by rolling up waffles to hold ice cream.

Frightening a baby is in violation of the law in Missouri.

What is your town best known for? We’d love to know

Earlier this month, our YouTube Hunter found some riveting rock-paper-scissors footage. Today, Rocketboom has more, including classic interviews with the world’s best RPS athletes.

(That’s right, I said RPS. If you want to sound like an insider at the upcoming World RPS Championships, you should too.)

Want to play like a champion, and compete for the $10,000 prize? From the World RPS Society:

Contrary to what you might think RPS is not simply a game of luck or chance. While it is true that from a mathematical perspective the ‘optimum’ strategy is to play randomly, it still is not a winning strategy for two reasons.

First, ‘optimum’ in this case means you should win, lose and draw an equal number of times (hardly a winning strategy over the long term). Second, Humans, try as they might, are terrible at trying to be random, in fact often humans in trying to approximate randomness become quite predictable. So knowing that there is always something motivating your opponent’s actions, there are a couple of tricks and techniques that you can use to tip the balance in your favour.

The top secrets to winning at RPS — courtesy of Graham Walker, Director of Management of the World RPS Society — are after the jump.

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Reader Maddy nominated a classmate as today’s example of what not to say when trying to impress science buffs (or for that matter, anyone else):

From the mewling spastic who sits in front of me in chemistry… “Sir! What’s the chemical formula for wood?”

Now, in this idiot’s defense, there is one type of wood that has a chemical formula — the petrified variety, which of course isn’t really wood at all but a fossil in which all of the wood’s organic matter has been replaced by minerals. Usually, the mineral that seeps into the wood is a silicate such as quartz. So, to answer this unfortunate student’s question, the chemical formula for (petrified) wood is usually SiO₂.

My friend Fred just wrote a story about a bill stiffening the penalties for animal fighting that made me want to taunt the opposing Congressmen a la Spaceballs: “What’s the matter, sir? Chiiiickkkeennn?” Dogfighting is already banned in all 50 states (I assume the same goes for bear-baiting, conger-cuddling, goose-decapitating, et al), and cockfighting is illegal everywhere… except, apparently, for Louisiana and New Mexico. The bill would make it more costly (in a jail-time sense) to transport animals over state lines.

Now, Louisiana, I would have guessed, but New Mexico? (And you’re telling me the crazy state of Florida actually doesn‘t allow this?) Also, I found this tidbit intriguing:

[The legislators] cited their concerns about animal cruelty, violence and criminal conduct associated with animal fights, and the spread of bird flu in cockfights as reasons to pass the bill.

The bird flu! Apparently, cockfights (as well as backyard mini-farms and the popularity of a dish made with duck blood) contributed to the disease’s initial spread in Asia last year. Now that’s a penalty that ought to scare the ch—-ns–t out of cockfighting fans.

My alma mater made the news last week when Star Wars impresario and fellow graduate George Lucas gifted it — the USC school of Cinema — a whopping $175 million. That’s the largest single gift in USC’s history, and more than the entire endowment of my undergrad alma mater, respected but kind-of-poor Kenyon College. Which got me to wondering — how much money is floating around out there in America’s many-towered ivory landscape, and at a time when tuitions are high and rising, what’s being done with all this bounty? Here are some facts.

• The most expensive college in the country, as of the ‘05-’06 school year, was George Washington University, charging $36,400 per year — a 7% increase from the previous year.
• GW’s endowment totals more than one billion dollars.
• The richest school in the nation, unsurprisingly, is Harvard, with a stunning endowment of $29.2 billion — more than the GDP of Turkmenistan. The second-richest is Yale, with $18 billion.
• Because colleges prefer — and are often required to — spend an endowment’s interest to improve educational quality, obscenely large endowments rarely translate to lower tuitions.
• In fact, because wealthy institutions can pump money into new buildings, programs, professorships and (sometimes) financial aid packages, they can enhance their academic brand — allowing them to justify tuition increases.

You’ve probably heard of the Sports Illustrated Curse, which hangs over the heads of many pro athletes featured on the mag’s cover — but if you aren’t completely obsessed with sports-related video games (like, say, my husband) you may not be as familiar with the Madden Curse. Maybe you should be, ’cause I’m gonna just come out now and say it’s real. Witness: The following is a list of players who were on the cover packaging of Madden NFL in previous years, and how they performed during the seasons they served as cover boys:

• Madden 2006 - Donovan McNabb. Asked about the curse before the season began, he said he didn’t believe in it. Oops. In his first game he developed a sports hernia and played in pain for the rest of the year until finally cutting his season short and having surgery after game 11. The Eagles went 6-10 (and let’s not even get into the T.O. debacle — especially given the news of his possible suicide attempt last night).
• 2005 - Ray Lewis. His year wasn’t terrible, per se — but the next year, an injury ended his season by game 6. His curse may have come early anyway; you may remember that in 2000 he was arrested for murder.
• 2004 - Michael Vick. He broke his leg in the preseason, and by the time he came back (for the last five games of the season) the Falcons’ record was so abysmal that they were already out of contention for the playoffs.
• 2003 - Marshall Faulk. An ankle injury contributed to a poor season, and he never rushed more than 1,000 yards again.
• 2002 - Dante Culpepper. A knee injury ended his season, and the Vikings went 4-7 while he was playing.
• 2001 - Eddie George. One of the rare exceptions, he had the best season of his career — although it’s worth noting that in the playoffs, he fumbled the ball, which was promptly picked up by future Madden cover boy Lewis and taken all the way into the end zone.
• 2000 - Barry Sanders and Dorsey Levens. The first NFL player featured on the box (previous editions pictured, well, John Madden), Sanders abruptly retired a week before training camp started that season. Levens, who was featured on fewer versions of the game, was cut from the Green Bay Packers in 2001 and is no longer playing football.

As for this year, the cover boy is last season’s NFL MVP, Shaun Alexander of the Seattle Seahawks. He just broke his foot.

The Cellar’s Image of the Day has another pic I simply had to share with you guys. Here’s the explanation/quote from the family:

“Calabrese – loving husband, father and grandfather, house painter extraordinaire and well-known local hot-rod collector – may have been dead.

But he still had style. Friends and family tricked out Calabrese’s gunmetal gray casket with chrome and aluminum parts from his beloved 1958 Chevy Biscayne, complete with license plates and dangling dice.“

This article on 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Death (woo hoo! fun and games, everyone!) has been floating around the blogosphere for some time and we just didn’t feel like we could ignore it any longer. It’s a fascinating list, actually, but in case you’ve already seen it, allow us to add Thing #21:

The first known identification of a dead body based on teeth was made in 1776. The deceased, one Dr. Joseph Warren, had been killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill and buried there in a doublewide grave (yep, with some other guy) by the British. Ten months later, his body was removed, examined, and identified by a wire and ivory bridge made to replace a missing canine tooth. The forensic genius doing the IDing was a fellow named Paul Revere — who, in addition to being a midnight rider, was also Warren’s dentist.

Dog ownership has taught me many lessons, most of them profound. But not all of them.

Soon after we brought Bailey home, I started to notice a distinct popcorn aroma. Since this aroma wasn’t unpleasant, and far preferable to certain other dog-related odors, we just accepted it. Today, however, my wife stumbled across the answer:

“Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not sweat by salivating or drooling. They sweat through the pads of their feet. If you notice a curious popcorn smell coming from your dog’s pads, that’s just canine sweat.”

So dog feet smell like popcorn. Another lesson learned. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of popcorn in my dietary future.

By the way, I spent way too much time deciding which picture to use (this, this, and this were the runners-up).