my brother inlaw
LOL
Lets Keep Score
After conversations with several friends, including my Dad, there’s a sense from the right side of the room that the world is going to end now with Obama as pres. elect. This seems odd from the same people who were saying that the president really doesn’t have that much impact for the last eight years. From the left, there’s a realization that there’s been a lot heaped on to his shoulders. Now we’re tempted to parrot the same “not much impact” argument. Screw that, lets keep score. Read more…
From my iphone
Holy crap! Wordpress from my iPhone.
Memriwhat?
News around the discovery/invention at HP of the memristor has finally tipped my WTF scale into the red. Any article that uses words like “memristor” (apparently the 4th, long postulated, passive component type in electric circuit theory) and “hysteresis” (the phenomenon that causes the memristor to function) is automatically going to probably show up on the radar. But when they start comparing the discovery to the replacement of Aristotle’s Law of Motion with Netwon’s work, it goes well over the top. Read more…
Biodegradable
A canadian kid has isolated a microbe in nature that munches down on polyethelene. In other words, he found bugs that think plastic bags are a yummy, yummy treat. Besides more microbes, the by products are water, heat, and a little CO2 (insert microbes that turn CO2 into fuel). Read more…
Live Nano Brain Surgeons
So, a couple of weeks go by without anything that forces me to write a post, then I come upon a virus that can kill your brain cancer. Apparently, they had identified this as a possibility years ago and have been working to bread the terminator version of the strain for some time. After getting it sufficiently deadly, they injected the virus into mice with brain cancer and watched it literally explode the tumors. Not sure how well that will play in human trials, but damn. Seriously (unrelated but seriously bizarre), where do they come up with this stuff.
Fake Life
Life created by humans is here, well almost. Scientists have just created the first substantial genome. They also recently took a genome from one cell and inserted it into another. The next step is the last, put the engineered genome into another cell and boot it up. Read more…
Too Weird…
Slime apparently has a memory, can learn, and can apparently solve puzzles. This is quite possibly the strangest thing I’ve ever heard of. Goo thinks… sort of. It doesn’t actually have a brain, or even neurons. Its made of unicellular organisms apparently, so that might be somewhat difficult. Here’s the link to the original abstract of the article. Frick that is just weird… cool… weird…
Mad Science Gone Awry
Scientists genetically modify the ebola virus, one of the most deadly known to man, for study. Science is run amok. They create genetically modified foods, cloned cows, chemicals that eat the ozone, and generally f-up the natural balance. Right? That’s bad, wholly and totally disturbing. Keeps us up with nightmares of the nano “grey goo” that eats all life on the world and leaves a dead, barren planet. Right? Read more…
Weeds for a better tomorrow…
Absolutely brilliant. We’ve heard that corn may not be the best solution for biofuel for some time now. SciAm just published an article that outlines how switch grass stacks up against corn. This isn’t genuinely new, but its fantastic to see actual evidence (test plots) and comprehensive statistics to support the amazing resource potential of this native crop.
There is a class of ideas that fall into “Perfect World”. If they pan out and actually are implemented, they solve major problems, they help make a better world (okay, maybe not quite perfect). I put things like Democracy, economically viable sustainable ag, the Enlightenment, Wikipedia, and full on behaviorally target advertising in this category. We’ll add energy independence through grass to the list.
