Well, I’m off to Saskatoon tomor–er, later today (gee, how did it get to be so late?) to promoted Genetics Demystified with a reading and signing at McNally Robinson Book Store. If you happen to be in the area, drop by at 7 p.m.! I might blog some more before I leave (around noon), but …
When I roll out of bed in the morning and stagger to the bathroom, normally stationary walls leap out at me, and an errant slipper becomes a deadly obstacle. Rather than having just awakened from a good night’s sleep, I look like I just came in from a good all-night party. There’s a word—two, actually—for …
Defense Tech points to a story about an entry in the race to build a giant blimp–something that caught my eye, since I love airships and since I’m currently reading Skybreaker, Kenneth Opel’s sequel to his tons-o’-fun Skyborn.
Tablets made from “miracle fruit” have gone on sale in Japan. After you take one, anything sour you eat for the next couple of hours tastes sweet. No, honest, that’s what the story says: One pink-colored tablet is made of three miracle fruit berries, Shimamura said. When people eat or lick the fruit’s red berries, …
Your first visor has come in.
“Bioreactors” filled with algae can clean smokestack exhaust on power plants–and then be processed to produce biodiesel fuel. For his part, Berzin calculates that just one 1,000 megawatt power plant using his system could produce more than 40 million gallons of biodiesel and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. That would require a 2,000-acre …
Two new studies suggest that planets can more easily form in multiple-star systems than previously thought–which is good news, because it’s estimated that two out of every three stars in the Milky Way galaxy are part of multiple-star systems, many of them binary. Not only that, the studies indicate that once gas-giants have finished forming …
Scientists have, for the first time, used a form of ink-jet printer to create jets of living cells. Suwan Jayasinghe of University College London and colleagues at Kings College London say their technique, which does not destroy the cells, could be used to grow biological tissue or even human organs. Boy, and you thought your …
Well, not quite: but the physicist who first reported on desktop fusion (more properly, “sonofusion”) says he has definitive proof that it works. Others aren’t so sure.
The European Space Agency and the Australian National University have successfully tested a new design of spacecraft ion engine that is vastly more efficient and effective than current designs: Once ready, these engines will be able to propel spacecraft to the outermost planets, the newly discovered planetoids beyond Pluto and even further, into the unknown …
…is the name of this fabulous website that takes a look at how the future (our present) was oh-so-wrongly imagined in the past. (Via Defense Tech.) It puts our current attempts at prognostication in perspective, doesn’t it?
I don’t often mention politics in my science column, but I feel it is urgent to bring to the attention of all candidates a new field of research in which Australia has taken the lead and in which Canada, I feel, could make important contributions. I’m speaking, of course, of the study of disappearing teaspoons. …
