Winds of Change has posted its regular New Energy Currents round-up of alternative energy news. One item that particularly caught my eye was this: A new thermal depolymerization plant in Carthage, MO that converts turkey waste into oil products smells really BAD. So bad, in fact, that the plant is being shut down by the …
Ron Fedkiw is an assistant professor in Stanford’s computer science department. “My research is focused on the design of new computational algorithms for a variety of applications including computational fluid dynamics and solid mechanics, computer graphics, computer vision and computational biomechanics,” he says. Don’t know what that means? Doesn’t matter. Just check out these amazing …
…literally. Twenty pigeons will take to the skies above San Jose, California, this summer and send data back from tiny backpacks about the levels of air pollution they encounter to a blog–along with aerial photographs taken from tiny cameras around their necks. The scary thing is, it sounds more interesting than 90 percent of the …
I love airships. I loved Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn, and his sequel Skybreaker. I’m currently reading Karl Schroeder’s Sun of Suns in Analog, which features very airship-like vehicles (with the difference they operate in a weightless environment inside a vast atmosphere-filled sphere). And so I was very interested to read Joe Katzman’s round-up of the blimps …
I just received copies of my newest non-fiction children’s book, Fires and Wildfires: A Practical Survival Guide. It’s part of “The Library of Emergency Preparedness,” a series from The Rosen Publishing Group, an educational publisher in New York. Chapter headings include “Fire on the Loose,” “Home Fire Prevention and Prepareness,” “Wildfire Prevention and Preparedness,” “Escaping …
Now that Western Union has stopped sending telegrams, does that mean sports commentators will no longer speak of athletes “telegraphing” their moves?
As Saskboy pointed out in his comment on my post about the “10th Planet” that’s in the news today, other objects have been found beyond the orbit of Neptune besides Pluto and Xena. He mentions Quaoar, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg (or a fraction of the iceball, if you prefer). From the …
It’s not quite Dr. McCoy’s no-contact medical scanner, but it’s close: it’s a contactless thermometer.
The recently discovered body known as Xena, which lies even further from the sun than Pluto, is bigger than Pluto–and therefore has as much or more right to be called a planet as Pluto does. Guess I’ll have to tack “Xena” on to my “Mother Very Eagerly Made A Jelly Sandwich Under No Protest” method …
Harlequin and NASCAR have teamed up for a series of romance novels with stock-car-racing backgrounds. Insert your own jokes about oil changes, lube jobs, dipsticks, rubbing paint, overheating, etc., etc., here.
No, that’s not a mis-remembered lyric from the opening of Laverne and Shirley (those of you of a certain age will understand the reference; those of you too young to get it–well, you’re not missing much). As of yesterday, Hassenpfeffer is part of the SaskBlogs Aggregator, a fine initiative by Lance Levsen of Catprint Computing. …
…has been developed by scientists at UCLA. It goes by the catchy name of confocal laser scanning microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, and it has implications not only for studying fossils here on Earth, but for searching for fossils inside rocks retrieved from Mars–without destroying the samples in the process.
