Universal Studios’ Jaws ride may be closed and gone forever, but a well-shot, simulated tour of the entire experience — including the walk through the midway leading up to the ride — forever lives on thanks to InsideTheMagic’s YouTube account. The video tour, and nostalgia, after the break.

A new study has found that tornadoes seem to have an overwhelming preference toward forming in the middle of the week. This isn’t necessarily because the hyper-destructive funnel clouds are dedicated workers that live for the weekend, but rather because of the pollution created by humans commuting to work. Just another example of human beings sowing the seeds to their own destruction.

Remember that ridiculous Slide Pad thing Nintendo is releasing for its maligned 3DS handheld? Well, some enterprising soul managed to snag one of the devices early in Japan, where the peripheral went on sale yesterday, and made a startling discovery. Apparently the manual for the device claims that although the Slide Pad runs on a separate AAA battery, it will last some 480 hours before needing to be replaced.

For better or worse, Zynga is a powerhouse in the gaming industry. Thankfully, though, not powerful enough to gobble up other popular gaming studios. A recent piece in The New York Times states that Zynga tried to buy Rovio, developer of Angry Birds, for $2.25 billion, as well as tried to buy PopCap, developer of Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies, for $950 million. Both studios said no, and The New York Times claims they refused because of what they felt were negative company practices over at Zynga. Remember, Zynga is evil.

Though there have been only some 500 reported human cases of the avian flu H5N1, it is often regarded as one of the most dangerous viruses in the world. Apparently capable of killing 59% of infected people, the virus has been limited mostly by its inability to move easily from human to human. At least that was the case before virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre modified the virus to be extremely contagious. Now, he’s facing harsh criticism over creating the virus in the first place, and whether or not his work should be published.

According to the Navy Times, the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) has been struggling with some critical technical difficulties since it began its first deployment. Namely, that it has been extremely hard to keep all the $6.2 billion carrier’s toilets functioning. According to sources onboard the ship, there have been times when none of the carrier’s 423 toilets have been available for use. The horror of this situation is brought into sharp focus when you remember that the ship carries some 5,000 sailors.

Internet Explorer has finally dipped below 50 percent global browser market share for the first time in over a decade, causing web developers everywhere to smile a bit before they realize that the number hasn’t dipped far below 50 percent, sitting at 49.59 percent. Internet Explorer still leads the desktop browser market share at 52.63 percent, but what carved away at its overall lead is the emergence of the mobile market. Though desktop browsing dominates the browser market with around a 94 percent hold, that other 6 percent of browsing was enough to take knock Internet Explorer’s share down a peg.

The debate about whether cellphones cause cancer has gone back and forth as conflicting studies are released on the topic. Indeed, things looked decidedly grim when the World Health Organization declared that the matter warranted further investigation. Now, a massive Danish study encompassing hundreds of thousands of subjects over 15 years has found no link between mobile phones and instances of cancer.

The study used the medical records of some 360,000 cellphone-using Danes over the course of 15 years — roughly the point when cellphones were introduced to Denmark. The researchers compared this group’s incidence of cancer against the medical records of millions in a control-group. The study found no observable link between cancer and cellphone use.

The study has been published on the website of the British Medical Journal.

For the uninitiated, Scribblenauts and its sequel Super Scribblenauts both released on the Nintendo DS once upon a time, and provided a unique gameplay experience in which the player has access to a magical dictionary that can summon objects of words that he or she enters, then use said objects to solve each level’s puzzles with the ultimate goal of collecting a level’s star. The first Scribblenauts restricted the allowable words to nouns, while Super Scribblenauts added adjectives, so one could summon a “gentlemanly velociraptor,” which would then appear wearing a top hat. The games are very fun, even though both had their flaws — anyone who played will remember the first game’s levels being easily solvable most of the time with the simple use of some rope and a jetpack.

Owners of iOS devices can now join in on the fun, summoning “gentlemanly vampires” to fight “ridiculous God” (a thing you can do in Super) or trying to see what words the dictionary doesn’t recognize (generally what everyone does for the first few days), for only five bucks, with Scribblenauts Remix. The iOS game seems to be a mashup of both the original Scribble and Super, taking the best levels from both, while including Super’s adjectives, and will also come with some exclusive iOS levels that no one will ever play because they’ll be too busy seeing if a “shy octopus” can fly a “tiny blimp.” The game is out right now, so get to it.

Voltage Pictures, the creators of Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, has dropped about 90% of the defendants in their lawsuit against those they claim illegally downloaded the hit film. The original suit listed 24,583 defendants, nearly all of which were as yet unidentified and listed only by IP address. Though 90% is a huge reduction in the scope of the lawsuit, it still lists over 2,300 individuals.

The dismissal seems to be connected with Voltage’s inability to identify most of the persons they believe downloaded their film. Of those roughly 2,300 still listed in the lawsuit, Voltage has yet to identify about 2,278. It seems some defendants have filed motions with their ISPs, preventing their names from being revealed and further hampering Voltage’s attempts to serve them as part of the suit. Voltage is now seeking additional time from the courts to identify those individuals.

As if this lawsuit didn’t have enough strange twists, it’s worth noting that those thousands of defendants were dismissed “without prejudice.” This means that charges could be brought against them at a later date.

(via Torrent Freak, VentureBeat)