Homely Scientist

Yeah I know lots of people think earthworms are yucky, but they are essential to plants and good soil.  The cool thing is that you can have worms in your kitchen chomping away at your veggie waste and all the while making kick-butt fertilizer for your garden!  It’s called vermiculture.  I had a worm bin for a while and it was pretty successful for a while (I got it and the worms from these folks), I had trouble keeping the stuff moist and such.  I think I bit off more than I could chew.
Well, worm poop is big business you …read more

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While we’re not the to point of Johnny Mnemonic, this is a step towards artificial human memory that could be implanted into your brain:
The journey to pack more (proverbial) internal storage into the human brain has been going on for years, but a recent development at Tel-Aviv University could actually bring us one step closer to storing rudimentary memories on a manmade device. Reportedly, a new experiment has shown that it is indeed possible to store said memories “in an artificial culture of live neurons,” which is a fairly significant step towards the “cyborg-like integration of living material into …read more

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 Every summer NASA flies over the Greenland ice sheet to determine its “health”–that is thickness, size, and height.  Essentially how fast is it shrinking:
This summer’s NASA expedition to Greenland has returned with fresh data. Now the analysis begins. One piece of equipment used is an ice-penetrating radar that can find bedrock up to 2 miles below the ice surface. NASA estimates an average drop of 9 inches in the height of Greenland’s glaciers would result in a 0.12-inch rise in global sea levels. Source:Greenland’s ice sheet: The annual checkup | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
 I’m sure when the …read more

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One of the weaknesses of science is the ability of others to take legitimate questioning of results and twist them to their own ends. For example, Global Warming. For a long time some scientists took the stand that all the data wasn’t in, etc. I think they thought they were doing a service to science, but in reality they did a disservice to humanity. The dissention and delay has made progress difficult until recently and well, maybe it’s too late.
I saw today this great YouTube video that illustrates how science can be perverted by others:

Granted, some …read more

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This Beyond the Beyond post really only the title, because the text is a letter from Dick Armey encouraging people to stop Al Gore, et al and their evil Global Warming hysteria.
Hysteria, hmm, stuff like the Northwest Passage once a fable now becoming a potentially viable sea lane? Like increasingly intense weather events? Like growing problems with consistently good weather in the major food-growing areas of the world?
Naw, nothing to worry about. Let me just shoo these tropical birds off my deck…in Canada.
 
Tags: Global Warming, Global Warming is real, global climate change

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We all know that TV and movies often don’t jive with science, as Star Wars turns 30 this week Bob MacDonald of the CBC reflects on how lots of Star Wars really didn’t jive with science.

Don’t get me wrong: Science fiction is wonderful. The imaginations of fantasy and fiction writers carry us beyond the ordinary to places where the good guys wear white, the bad guys are cloaked in black, good triumphs over evil, hero and heroine make a perfect couple … it’s Roy Rogers riding a white spaceship, the Three Musketeers with light sabres, what fun. But Star Wars, …read more

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Remember my coffee can racer from a while back? Well from GeekDad I got to a site where you can put all those dern, unrecyclable CDs to good use…turn them into racers!
Man I wish I had found that earlier, cause how many kids get to race a car with wheels made from beta builds of Ubuntu!
Tags: science for kids, cd racers

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We all know that cleaning a wound is essential to preventing infection. Infected wounds are also irrigated with sterile saline solution to clean them out and reduce infection. So what about water that actually help promote healing by killing pathogens? Pharma company Oculus thinks they are onto something here:

The firm’s Dermacyn topical wound care is an “oxychlorine formulation” using the company’s own Microcyn concoction, which is made by “taking purified water and passing it through a semi-permeable sodium chloride membrane to produce the oxychlorine ions,” and essentially contains “electrically charged molecules which pierce the cell walls of …read more

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Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species …
Love it or hate it, if you do anything related to living things, you know it. Today, then, is a special day:

Most scientists say that 272 years after it was introduced, the naming system works just fine. Evolutionary theory and molecular biology have transformed our understanding of life. Computers and digital media have more recently upended longstanding theories of information management. But, over nearly three centuries, the classification system used to organize much of our biological knowledge has remained remarkably arbitrary and ancient: The so-called binomial system of genus and species that …read more

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Satellite communications are essential in disaster areas, war zones, and many other places. The problem is that typically a satellite system with enough oomph to power reall communications (Internet, video, VoIP) were huge, heavy, and really didn’t like being dropped into rough terrain. Enter the GATR-Com:

“You just can’t do effective disaster relief without decent satellite communications,” says Eric Rasmussen, a U.S. Navy physician and commander whose relief experience includes the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the aftermath of battles in Bosnia and Iraq. “But when the mud is two feet deep, if you can’t pack a dish on …read more

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