Filed under: International markets, Earnings reports, Press releases, Products and services, Starbucks (SBUX), McDonald’s (MCD)

McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD) continues to amaze investors.

The home of the Quarter Pounder today reported net income of $946.1 million, or 81 cents a share, compared with $762.4 million, or 62 cents, a year earlier, according to the earnings press release. Revenue increased to $5.61 billion. Wall Street analysts were expected profit of 70 cents on revenue of $5.44 billion.

Gains outside the U.S. helped off-set the weak performance of its domestic business

“For the quarter, Europe and Asia/Pacific, Middle East and Africa both delivered double-digit revenue and operating income growth,” the company said. “Europe’s revenues rose 23% (11% in constant currencies) during the quarter to almost $2.4 billion, fueled by an 11.1% comparable sales increase - the highest in the segment’s history.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. business saw comparable sales rise 2.9% and operating income jump 5.9%. Weak consumer spending is hurting the chain, though, as March comparable sales were negative. The Illinois company, however, anticipates sales to rebound in April to a 2% to 2.5% gain.

Let’s not forget about the coffee strategy, AKA “The Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) Killer.” That’s been a strong driver for breakfast traffic and should continue to do so for some time.

“Over the next 12 to 18 months, we’re going to see coffee as a catalyst for sales,” Thrivent Asset Management analyst Chris Scheurer told Bloomberg News.

This underscores why now is a good time for the great taste of McDonald’s.

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Ant points out a story spotted on Boing Boing in which NASA “shares a story that turns back the clock 36 years to reveal the “key roll of duct tape in the Apollo program.” The quality of the photographs from the moon always grabs me, and the duct-taped fender here’s no exception.

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H0D_G writes “The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that the world’s first cloned sniffer dogs have begun their training in South Korea. The dogs, cloned from a successful golden retriever sniffer dog, were the result of a $320,000 AUD project.”

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OMNIpotusCOM writes “Noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking thinks that alien life is likely, albeit primitive, according to a lecture delivered at George Washington University in honor of NASA’s 50th anniversary. It begs the question of if we need to take into account a Prime Directive before exploring or sending signals too far into the depths of space.”

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Ponca City, We Love You writes “The Department of Defense has announced the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to ‘harness stem cell research and technology… to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses and fingers.’ The government is budgeting $250 million in public and private money for the project’s first five years, and the NIH and three universities will be on the team. The military has been working on regrowing lost body parts using extracellular matrices and scientists in labs have grown blood vessels, livers, bladders, breast implants, and meat and are already growing a new ear for a badly burned Marine using stem cells from his own body. Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker explained that our bodies systematically generate liver cells and bone marrow and that this ability can be redirected through ‘the right kind of stimulation.’ The general cited animals like salamanders that can regrow lost tails or limbs. ‘Why can’t a mammal do the same thing?’ he asked.”

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Hugh Pickens sends us to Seed Magazine for an update on Earth’s defenses against collisions with near-earth objects (NEOs). The bottom line is that government is moving slowly on cataloging NEOs but private bodies are picking up some of the slack. “In 2005, the US Congress directed NASA to catalog 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs greater than 140 meters in diameter by the year 2020 but NASA has yet to allot funds to the project. Increasingly, coordinated private efforts are working to fill the gap in Earth’s NEO defenses. Earlier this year, Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi donated a combined $30 million to the Huge Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), keeping it on track for first light in 2014. LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy and by opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move, the LSST will also detect and catalog NEOs.”

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Scientific American is running a major article on Science 2.0, or the use of Web 2.0 applications and techniques by scientists to collaborate and publish in new ways. “Under [the] radically transparent ‘open notebook’ approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication… The time stamps on each entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a huge collaboration.” One project profiled is MIT’s OpenWetWare, launched in 2005. The wiki-based project now encompasses more than 6,100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. Last year the NSF awarded OpenWetWare a 5-year allow to “transform the platform into a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT… the grant will also support creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that other research communities can use.” The article also gives air time to Science 2.0 skeptics. “It’s so antithetical to the way scientists are trained,” one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert.

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