Homely Scientist

Although this sounds like something out of Star Trek, or a bad horror movie, scientists in Israel have developed a robot small enough to travel through your bloodstream:
Two Israeli scientists may have created the catalyst for a medical revolution with their new project: a tiny, 1-millimeter-diameter robot which is capable of crawling through human veins and arteries. The bot can cling to vessel walls using small, powerful arms which protrude from a hub in its center. Manned control is accomplished by using a magnetic field outside of the body, and the robot is able to swim against the flow …read more

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I was reading through my b5 feeds and found Tony’s post about the reason for his son’s less than stellar (pun intended) grade this year in science:
BUT, he couldn’t organize his science notebook.
“I’m sorry, he can’t organize what?’, I asked.
“His science notebook. He failed the notebook checks. They were worth 100 points each, almost 80 percent of his grade.”, the science teacher calmly explained with a huge smirk on her face.
“What does that have to do with science?”, I asked, but by then I knew what was going on and that I wasn’t about to get anywhere. I left the …read more

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Last week I talked about how we could be looking at a disaster of Biblical proportions (think Noah) if some of the major ice sheets melted, now comes word that the largest of the world’s ice sheets, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, is safe for the time being:
While studies of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show they are both at risk from global warming, the East Antarctic ice sheet will “need quite a bit of warming” to be affected, Andrew Mackintosh, a senior lecturer at Victoria University, said Wednesday.
The air over the East Antarctic ice sheet, an ice …read more

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Creepy crustaceans Batman!  Those bugs are destroying that island!
HIGASHIHIROSHIMA, Hiroshima — An island off the coast of Higashihiroshima is crumbling away due to countless crustaceans that have made holes in its rocks and caused its highest peak to completely disappear.
The rocky Hoboro Island has become a breeding ground for huge numbers of creatures known in Japanese as nanatsuba-kotsubumushi, a type of isopod. The surging number of insects has caught the attention of local researchers. Source: Crustaceans eating away island off Hiroshima – MSN-Mainichi Daily News

Amazing huh? Isopods are a type of crustacean more commonly known as pill bugs or wood …read more

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Insulating buildings is one of the most important aspects of the building process.  Insulation not only has to, well, insulate, but it also has to not grow nasty things and last for a long time (who wanted to rip open all their outside walls every few years–if ever).  Insulation, which is typically fiberglass now, does take resources to make and isn’t recyclable (although it is made from recycled glass).  Now, what if you could grow insulation?  Yeah, grow.  Couple smart guys figured out how to make a growing medium for oyster mushroom spores that could become suitable insulation material:
Placed in …read more

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 When I’m ranting and raving about alternative energy and lauding companies like Google, I talk about being able to feed into the system and get credit for it.  Looks like the Province of Ontario is finally getting it:
One of the key elements in the incentive programs is a solar “feed-in” tariff that pays people and organizations with solar panels cash for any electricity they feed into the grid. In the United States, utilities offer credits for solar power; a homeowner or business can reduce their electricity bill with these credits, but at best end up owing nothing to the utility.
With …read more

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 Besides using your laser pointer to entertain your pets (and yourself) or presentations. did you know you could do magic with a laser?  Me neither.  If you have any doubt about this watch this video:

Was that coolio amazing or what?  OMG!  Of course you do have to be careful when using lasers.
Little safety lesson here folks, don’t ever, EVER, point a laser at someone’s face (let’s include animals in this okay?).  Even the cheapo laser pointers you can get just about anywhere can seriously damage someone’s eyes.  Yeah, yeah it’s fun playing laser gun sight with people.  Uh huh.  Well …read more

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The big announcement from Google a while ago that they were going to cover the roofs of Googleplex with solar panels has come to pass:
It’ll still be quite a while before that free electricity offsets the initial cost of the system, but at least the panels have earned Google a little positive PR.  The Earth Times Online, for example, states, “The Google system is also now the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the United States.”
To help people grasp the size of this development, Google has even created a new performance monitoring site; I’m told that, over …read more

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LOL!  Not really, but learning from how gecko’s stick to walls and even glass, scientists are working on better and better adhesives.
Unbundled, their nanotube tape was nearly as adhesive as a live gecko, but as these same tubes were clustered into bundles, their strength went up. By the time the authors optimized the combination of fiber length and bundle width, their tape was over four times stronger than a gecko: a square centimeter was sufficient to support nearly four kilograms. Although this was weaker than the initial strength of a standard piece of adhesive tape, the “gecko tape” had staying …read more

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What am I nuts?  Nope, while you might scratch your head at this, read what this C|Net article wraps up with:
With an infrastructure already in place due to commercial trucks never leaving the diesel fold, diesel seems like an obvious solution to help fulfill automakers’ immediate needs–to sell more vehicles while meeting emissions standards and consumer demand to save on fuel.
Today’s diesel engines and diesel fuel itself have come a long way. Advances in turbocharging and fuel injection have boosted performance. New kinds of particle traps and low sulfur diesel fuel have reduced the emissions and soot-producing byproducts. Source: And the …read more

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