A little specialized, but still my favorite:

Spectroscopists do it with frequency and intensity.

@jamesmason:

"I think religion on the whole is a positive force in the world."

I almost vomited when I read this.

Please tell all of the Israelis, Palestinians, Sudanese, Jews, Native Americans, homosexuals, and too many more to list here that religion is a positive force in the world.

You make me sick.

As for the new 7-deadly sins, "morally dubious" scientific research as judged by whom? Don't think the church is quite equipped to deal with scientific matters after that whole Galileo fiasco.

Gussy it up however you want, Trebek. What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?

"pray elucidate"

Some gadget chargers ("wall warts") will continue to use electricity- even when they are not charging something- if they are plugged into a wall outlet.

An easy way to test is to plug a wart in and let it sit "idly" for, say, half an hour. Did it get hot? If yes, then it is using electricity. (The heat is proportional to the current- more heat= more current.)

Admittedly, most modern warts draw very little electricity when only plugged into an outlet and not a device, but this is still some electricity that you are paying for and it is still some heat that can contribute to the flammable cardboard box in which you are potentially storing your charging station.

Best advice? Unplug those warts you are not using to reduce waste of electricity and reduce the risk of fire.

Very good idea, very bad implementation.

For one, this is a fire hazard. Cardboard + heat from charging = ruin your day.

Additionally, wall warts have a nasty tendency to drain power when they are not charging anything. True, you can turn the power switch off when its not in use, but odds are you aren't charging 5 gadgets at once, so your unused warts are draining while your iPod is charging.

Nice idea, though- if we could solve the fire hazard and juice draining issues, I'd make one this weekend.

I, and probably the other two posters, realize that the molecules in the crystals are on the nano scale. But this is exactly what I'm talking about, so allow me to reiterate my point:

Most molecules are on the "nano scale." A typical C-C bond is 1.54 angstroms or 0.154 nm. The point is that the word "nano" is used to describe things and instantly ups their cool factor (or fund-ability factor from the DoE, DoD, NSF, NIH, DGS, etc etc etc).

We're not looking at a bitchin rad pic of nanos here, as TFA implies. This is a picture of molecules that have recrystallized to form (very nice, I might add) crystals that are suitable for x-ray analysis, meaning they are on the order of MILLImeters, not NANOmeters. Yeah, the molecules that make up the crystals are on the nanometer scale- so are the molecules that make up your shaker of table salt. In fact, get this- the molecules in your table salt are SUBNANO! WOWEE THAT HAS TO BE BETTER, RIGHT?

But, the common misconception amongst most every John Q. Pubic is either (1) nanos are going to save the world or (b) nanos are going to take over the world and kill all humans.

Its likely that neither is actually the case.

Cool pic, but these crystals aren't on the nano-scale AFAIK.

The giveaway is the line "The finer specimens may be individually mounted and imaged using X-ray crystal diffraction." Ideally, to keep your crystallographer happy, you want a crystal that will take up the entire width of his or her beam of x-rays. These are generally on the order of 0.5-1.0 mm, so at least one dimension of your crystal should be in this regime. I'm not entirely sure, since nobody gives a scale in any of the photos (this is bad for scientific publications, btw!) but I'd guess that the crystals are fairly large if they are of x-ray quality. In fact, they are absolutely HUGE compared to anything "nano".

At any rate, like I said, nice pics- but we're not actually seeing "nano-porn" here, just really small stuff that you could see easily with a good pair of 20/20 eyeballs. Then again, you can make anything sound cool if you add "nano" to it.