Tag: news

A moon base by 2024?

On July 20 of that year, I will turn 65 years old. On my 10th birthday, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Fifty-five years between one and the other. Am I supposed to be impressed by this?

Nothing about Hassenpfeffer, alas, but…

…here’s a local news story about Saskatchewan bloggers. (Via small dead animals.)

There’s no metal in a metallic smell

The distinctive smell you get from a pocketful of change held in your hand or a bunch of keys doesn’t come from the metal at all: it comes from you.

Cotton: it’s what’s for dinner

Or, at least, it could be soon: “The exciting finding is that we have been able to reduce gossypol – which is a very toxic compound – from cottonseed to a level that is considered safe for consumption,” said Dr. Keerti Rathore, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station plant biotechnologist. “In terms of human nutrition, it has …

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Heck, I do this all the time:

Not the getting-lost-in-the-woods-while-picking-mushrooms part, but the using-an-electronic-device’s-glowing-screen-as-a-flashlight part.

A science fiction legend is no more

Sad news: Jack Williamson, who has been writing science fiction for almost as long as science fiction has existed as a genre (his first story was published in 1928, his last novel was published in 2005), died today. He was 98. His last novel was The Stonehenge Gate, published last year. I read it and …

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Talk about a chill down your spine…

From Live Science: “…a team headed by Dr. Moshe Shoham of Haifa’s Technion has created a novel propulsion system for a miniature robot to travel through the spinal canal, powering through cerebrospinal fluid.”

"Aliens could attack at any time"

That’s what the former head of Britain’s Ministry of Defence’s UFO project says.

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prizes

Scientists have a pop-culture reputation as either a) boring or b) mad. That they are not necessarily the former (although, based on the evidence, the jury is still out on the latter) was proven once again last month with the annual awarding of the Ig Nobel Prizes “for research which first makes you laugh, then …

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This sounds very promising:

From Scientific American: Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a new, carbon-neutral way to convert vegetable-based fuels to syngas, a breakthrough that could allow producers to power hydrogen fuel cells or create a replacement for America’s dwindling supplies of natural gas, all without relying on fossil fuels. Read the rest. (Via Transterrestrial Musings.)

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