What can I say? Kevin Kelly rules. I can't decide if he slid one by me or just bested me, but consider me beaten.

A few weeks ago, Kevin, founding editor of Wired Magazine and world-class gadget geek, made me this bet:

I bet, he said, "there is no species of technology that's gone globally extinct on this planet." By which he meant — or I took him to mean — there is no tool, no invention ever manufactured by humans that isn't still being made new today.

That's what he said on NPR's Morning Edition. Which is where I told him, "You're wrong. I will find a technology that has gone extinct, some bronze helmet, or chariot part or quill pen, something that definitely isn't being made anymore anywhere."

I appealed to you, my readers, to come up with suggestions. You gave me 2500 ideas. We sifted through them together. Then I chose these three:

He responded that very afternoon.

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A couple of months ago we explored this question: "Why Can't Humans Walk Straight?" This month, I'm revising the question for ants, because ants have a more serious problem. Why, I wonder, do some ants fall into circles that never end, causing them to starve and eventually die?

Circling in humans is a modest puzzle. Circling in ants raises more profound evolutionary questions.

First, let me show you what I'm talking about. Should we walk down a street in Uruguay, or Argentina, we might see — right on the sidewalk — what is called an "Ant Death Spiral":

This is a species of army ant, Labidus praedator. These ants are completely blind so they get about by sniffing trails left by the ants in front of them. They, in turn, leave chemical trails of their own. The system works smoothly when everybody's going in a straight line in one direction...

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What do you say when you pick up the phone?
You say "hello," of course.
What do you say when someone introduces a friend, a relative, anybody at all?
You say "hello."
Hello has to have been the standard English language greeting since English people began greeting, no?

Well, here's a surprise from Ammon Shea, author of The First Telephone Book: Hello is a new word.

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Here's a nerve-wracking notion. Let's say you have an illegal plant in your garden or even in your home. And let's presume this plant (because it's marijuana, or some genetically altered vegetable that's illegal in Europe) will get you in trouble if the police find out.

Now imagine that your local police have their own bees, bees they release each morning to scour the neighborhood looking for illegal plants.

Getting nervous? Now look at this interview with a man who appears to be some kind of London Police Inspector with their "Genetics Surveillance Unit":

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Robert: What is this?

Adam: This?

R: Looks like some kind of medieval space man.

A: Hey, since it's Valentine's Day, focus on the heart.

R: That circle-ish thingy?

A: Yep. That's how folks in 13th century England drew the heart. Look at how it's at the very center of the body, and everything radiates from it. The blood vessels are all one-way — they just reach out to the limbs and organs, and stop there. See, they thought that the heart was the physical home of the soul, supplying the rest of the body with a sort of life force.

R: That's nice. But did everybody think the Heart was king? Or was it just the English?

A: No, no, take a look at this anatomical watercolor from Persia.

The Persian version is very similar (and not just because peoples' heads seems to be a lot more spherical back then): the heart is still at the center, still the seat of the soul, the blood vessels still spread outward from it, supplying vitality to the rest of the body.

R: But why the similarity? These drawings are separated by 3,000 miles — did someone important announce that the heart was the most important organ in the body?

A: Yep — a guy named Galen.

R: Galen, the Roman?

A: Yes, that Galen. The father of anatomy. Even though he never examined human organs (he dissected pigs and goats and the occasional monkey) Galen's ideas about how our bodies work became classic learning. Doctors relied on his ideas for the next thousand years.

R: Was Galen right about us?

A: Well, not always. For example, he said the brain did the thinking, but another organ was in charge of the baser "appetites."

R: What organ was that? (If you can say it in polite company.)

A: It's not what you think — it's the liver. The liver, Galen said, had its own system of blood vessels. Here's another drawing from that same Englishman this time concentrating on the liver.

So there you have it — one system for the liver, with its blue veins and its appetites, and one system for that noblest of organs, the heart. Galen thought the heart was so important it made sense for it to be separate.

R: And when did people stop thinking of the heart as our most noble part? Because today everybody's stuck on the brain, neuroscience is the hottest thing going, and hearts are ... well, not exactly cutting edge.

A: Well, the change began when scholars, first Persian surgeons, then Europeans, started questioning Galen's claims.

R: Why'd they do that?

A: Because, for the first time in a long while, they began opening up humans and looking inside .

Dissections became more and more common. It became the fashion to dissect the cadavers of criminals as a sort of public entertainment, with the dissector pointing out the major sights.

And so, as artistic observations became scientific discoveries, we went from this:

...to this:

...to this:

R: Which looks more like a pump than a home for the soul.

A: Yeah, but what a beautiful, terrifyingly complicated pump.

R: ...But still a pump.

A: Well, I guess some people might say that going from Seat of the Soul to a hydraulic body part feels like a downgrade. I know what you're saying. Maybe that's why, on Valentine's Day, it's easy get nostalgic about a time when our heads were shaped like beach balls and we truly followed our hearts.

R: Geez. With lines like that, Adam, I'm surprised you don't do better with the ladies.

A: Happy Valentines Day to you too, Robert.

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Adam Cole is an intern at NPR's Science Desk.

I can't not show you this. It doesn't matter if you've never played soccer, if you don't like sports, it really doesn't matter. Very simply, if you've ever had to get somewhere fast, here's how it's done.

Let me set the scene.

We're at a match between Manchester United and Manchester City. Both are world class soccer teams, watched by the whole soccer loving universe (which is why this video is narrated in Arabic). Look for the man in green. A kind of leafy green. He's Joe Hart, one of the great goalkeepers in the world.

The first 31 seconds are prelude. You will find Green Guy playing way forward, as his team, City, makes an offensive push at the United goal. All of a sudden, the play turns and United takes the ball furiously down field heading straight for Green Guy's Totally Undefended goal...

Watch what happens next...

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Last spring, a website called Helium reported breathlessly that BP's release of methane gas into the Gulf of Mexico would not only poison the water, the fish and the neighborhood, but it also very possibly could trigger "a world-killing event" — perhaps releasing a "mammoth undersea methane bubble" that would destroy much of life on Earth.

Nobody gulped. Yes, BP's oil and methane leak was gigantic. Dangerous amounts of methane were concentrating in Gulf waters. But "world-killing"? That silly story was largely ignored. Strangely, so was the story that broke a few weeks ago, which was just as surprising, just as improbable, just as astonishing — but this one was true.

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Where's The Gas?

Last June, oceanography professor John Kessler of Texas A&M; University visited the accident site and found methane concentrations below the surface that were, "on average about 100,000 times greater than background [usual]." He told Living On Earth, "We even saw a few locations that were starting to push the limits of a million times above background."

That's a lot of methane. Which is not a good thing. Because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, more potent than CO2. What's more, it's lurking everywhere, not just in the Gulf, but under the Arctic Ocean, the Black Sea. Should large quantities escape into the atmosphere, that would make our warming problems even worse.

And more concerning, as the Earth warms, what if methane trapped under ice loosens and rises to the surface? Alaskans see this. Their permafrost is softening. Often the methane is just below, as you can see here, when this gang from the University of Alaska pokes a hole in some ice and sets the gas on fire. It doesn't end well.

What can we do about the methane threat? Is there a way to get rid of the gas before it escapes? How much time do we have? Professor Kessler, reporters, almost everybody predicted that the Gulf methane (like the Alaska methane) would hang ominously below the surface for years, "like a massive planetary fart" (in the memorable phrase from one of my favorite bloggers, Ed Yong).

But guess what happened?

In August, Kessler sailed out on the NOAA ship Pisces to check on the gas plume. Three months had passed. 120 days. He looked. He looked again. The gas was gone.

The enormous concentrations he'd seen in June had disappeared.

Where'd the gas go?

They Came, They Cleaned, They Went

Kessler was dumbfounded. But he now has an explanation. The gas, he thinks, was eaten.

There are ocean bacteria called "methanotrophs." They hang around, usually in smallish numbers, but because they love chewing on methane, when the accident happened, Kessler figures they got their chance to be fruitful and multiply — and multiply they did.

We should be careful. Kessler didn't witness the feast. He came back too late, so all he saw was the missing methane and a lower than normal amount of oxygen.

Kessler's new paper, co-authored with David Valentine, points out that many methane eaters use oxygen to break down the gas, so, says blogger Ed Yong:

Kessler reasoned that the microbes had done away with the methane. He even found the bacteria in question. In September, Kessler recovered several species of methane-eating bacteria from seven different sites. In some areas, these [methanotroph] specialists made up a third of the local bacteria. Back in June, the methane-eaters were nowhere to be found ...

If Kessler's theory is right, this is very, very good news. Even if the world gets warmer, all of that methane gathered under the oceans, trapped under ice, may never make it to the surface and into our atmosphere. Instead, it could become lunch for the methanotrophs.

Ed Yong quotes a string of leading oceanographers who say Kessler's paper is surprising and persuasive. "[It's] likely to become a classic reference," says Richard Camilli of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

But not everybody was celebrating. NPR's excellent Richard Harris found an oceanographer at Florida State University who says these ocean bugs don't usually eat so fast. Maybe, just maybe, says Ian MacDonald, a big ocean current just swept through the Gulf and carried the methane off to the Atlantic Ocean?

Maybe. But maybe this is just plain old good news, and a summer-long disaster has just taught us a happy secret about Mother Nature: that when bad stuff happens, She still has little friends in low places who will clean up our messes. Thank you, methanotrophs.

You're not going to like this. I didn't. Nobody I've shown it to has. But the designers who thought it up, James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, are provocateurs, so they don't mind if you hate what they've done.

So here it is: meat-eating furniture.

Let's begin with their digital wall clock, which doesn't need a battery or a plug because it gets its energy from eating flies.

This carnivorous clock ("8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days," says co-designer Professor Chris Melhuish, of Bristol Robotics) is just a prototype. It doesn't catch enough flies to power the motor on top and the digital clock. But this is just a first step.

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If you've been visiting here this week, you know we've been obsessing about writer/technologist Kevin Kelly's bold claim:

He says there is no human invention, no tool that has totally vanished. Once something has been invented, he says, you will find it, or something very much like it, still being made today.

I said: "You're wrong. Inventions, like dinosaurs, can go extinct."
He said: "Prove me wrong."

So I asked you, my readers, to nominate tools/inventions that you think are no longer being made anywhere. We received something like 2,500 suggestions.

Some of them, like the automated bowler hat-tipper (that mechanically tips your hat in a gentle salute) are almost certainly not being made today, but we wondered if they ever got made. The automated hat tipper has a U.S. patent, No. 556,248 (thank you, Alex Milton), but we have no reason to think anyone actually built it, or used it. So inventions that were more fanciful than real, we decided to ignore.

But some of your suggestions, we think, survived close scrutiny.
We have three winners.
We will slap them on Kevin Kelly's desk and say: Definitely Dead, Kevin.
Now you prove us wrong.

So here is our first nominee, the radium suppository. We definitely don't think anyone is making these any more.

There was a time, back at the start of the 20^th century, when radioactive products didn't seem dangerous; they seemed life-enhancing. They were picker-uppers. (Thank you Christian Long, for submitting this product, which is literally a picker upper, in the x-rated sense. It's addressed to "Weak, Discouraged Men! Now Bubble Over with Joyous Vitality.")

There is a whole class of products (Radioactive crockery — thx, James Neil Reeder; Radium toothpaste — thx, Lockhart Beecham) that were manufactured before people, including Pierre and Marie Curie, realized radiation can harm or kill. Ditto for any number of asbestos products, not to mention lead cups and dishes. So here is a whole class of extinct inventions: Invented in innocence but now too dangerous to make any more. Can Kevin find us radium suppositories, made new?

Next come ancient technologies that stayed ancient: Bronze weapons, Greek Fire, Antikythera Mechanisms, Damascus Steel...we sorted through those and (thanks to Melissa Feimster Lido) came up with one that was crucial in its day, but too boat-specific to be made today, anywhere. It is the Roman "corvus," a military boarding device used in naval warfare in the First Punic War against Carthage.

Basically, this was a little bridge that would drop onto a neighboring enemy ship with a kind of ker-plunk. That way, you could dash across instead of swinging through the air like Johnny Depp in the Pirate movies. Not as flashy, but very effective. We don't think anybody is still making these contraptions. Why would they? Prove us wrong, Kevin.

The third category is something that was once part of a famous product, like the on/off switch in a Commodore Computer, or the casing inside a hydrogen bomb. When that product was improved, discontinued or changed, the little part inside went extinct. Nobody makes it any more. Nobody needs to. In that spirit, (thank you, Gregory Vincent), we nominate the "ferrite core" of a Seeburg Jukebox, circa 1950's. This gizmo, made of little ferrite rings threaded with wire, stored data inside the jukebox so that when you dropped a dime into the slot and punched B6, The Everly Brothers would automatically sing "Bye Bye Love." Core memory devices got replaced with semiconductor memory. So who would make a juke box ferrite core now? We say...nobody.

So that's our answer to Kevin Kelly: if Kevin says human inventions never disappear, let's see if he can find us a radium suppository, a Roman Corvus and a ferrite core fit for a Juke Box — all being made today.

Good luck, Kevin. (And, I should add, thanks for letting me subject you to a tornado of happy abuse.)

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Kevin Kelly's new book is What Technology Wants, (Viking/Penguin 2010).