What women need are more bras that offer not just support, but life support. A while back I wrote about a sports bra that monitors your heart rate. Now there’s a bra with more immediate life-saving potential.

This bra turns into 2 gas masks. One for you, one for a friend.

Behind this at-first-glance-ridiculous invention is a seriously unpleasant event: the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine, usually described as the worst-ever. Scientist Elena Bodnar, formerly of Ukraine, the new bra’s inventor, says her design could have kept people from breathing in deadly Iodine-131. This radioisotope was a major contributor to the rise in cancer and other health effects among people in the vicinity. (Thanks to Elizabeth Anderson Moore, who blogs at cnet.)

Bodnar was one of the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes. The Ig Nobels are an annual comic-kaze and always one of the highlights of the year in science. The Ig Nobels honor scientific achievements “that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

The photo shows Bodnar demonstrating her bra to three real Nobel laureates. All are wearing her creation, which comes in pink and black. That’s the high-profile economist and columnist Paul Krugman on the far right–not his usual position.

Another of this year’s Ig Nobel winners is anthropologist Liza Shapiro, who developed a theory about why pregnant women don’t tip over: Women’s back curves are anatomically different from men’s. It’s an evolutionary adaptation to upright posture and the need to carry a fetus out in front instead of underneath.

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While Firefox 4.0’s sleek new looks won’t be hitting the web scene until late 2010, a beta of Firefox 3.6 should be made public next week. Inside, look for built-in bookmark synchronization, minor JavaScript and CSS improvements, support for lightweight themes, and a few other goodies. Want to get your browser’s looks aligned one step beyond, to 3.7? Try this Firefox 3.7 theme. [PC World]

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Clicking a PDF and waiting, waiting, waiting for it to load, or possibly crash your browser, is an inescapable web annoyance of bad-stand-up-comedy proportions. Unless you convert all of a page’s PDF links to open with Google Doc’s streamlined viewer.

Joen Asmussen coded the one-click bookmarklet converter because he himself was tired of waiting to see whether Adobe or another PDF plug-in would bring up a document, or force him to use his browser’s session restore feature.

It’s just as simple to use as any bookmarklet: drag it into your browser’s bookmarks or bookmark toolbar, click it on a page with any PDF links, and they’ll be converted to show you the document in Google’s own online document viewer, which then offers download and printing links. As Philipp at Blogoscoped notes, this would be a great candidate for a simple Greasemonkey script. Any takers?

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