Homely Scientist

While coastal upwelling is generally a good thing, like many things in nature, you can have too much of a good thing.  In this case the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich deep water causes not only a plankton bloom, but the death and decomposition of the buggers have a dark side:
Unlike the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is caused by fertilizer washing down the Mississippi River, the Oregon dead zone is triggered by northerly winds, which create an ocean-mixing condition called upwelling.
This brings low-oxygen waters from deep in the ocean close to shore, and spreads nitrogen and other nutrients …read more

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Nice to start off the week with some good news:
The wind power industry made big strides last year, according to a Worldwatch Institute report released late Thursday.
15,200 megawatts of new wind turbines were installed around the world last year, representing a 26 percent jump in global wind power capacity, according to the study.
By year’s end, total wind power capacity exceeded 74,200 megawatts, enough to offset 43 million tons of carbon dioxide, the institute said. Source:Study: Wind power soared in 2006 | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

Large-scale deployment and adoption of any alternative energy is the key.  Once it hits …read more

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 Microsoft is in the midst of building a new data centre.  Building, of course, means trucks and in this case trucks of cement.  One problem, when those trucks use petroleum diesel, they spew all kinds of garbage into the air.  Those chemicals and particles aren’t just bad for the planet in the long term they are bad for people in the short term.  Solution to the potential workplace hazard?  Biodiesel!
The construction company working on the new data centers approached Steve Verhey, the chief executive of Central Washington Biodiesel, with a problem earlier this year, he said. The company had built …read more

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 Okay raise your hand, who hates bugs?  Yeah I figure everyone’s hands went up.  I’m not fearful of bugs (much), and am often called on for insect removal duty, but mosquitoes, yellow jackets, and flies are certainly pests we all would like to keep at bay.  In the segment below talks about Ultrafobos which is supposed to emit sounds from your computer speakers that will repell bugs (and other animals as well)…more after the jump..

 Seems like this could work.  Sound is a very powerful thing.  Sound waves can destroy buildings, glass, and if your a parent of teenagers, drive you batty.  …read more

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I don’t know anyone with a severe allergy to peanuts, but I do know that people who are live in a world where just about any food could make them sick, or worse.
News from North Carolina might give them some hope:
People with life-threatening allergies to peanuts might be able to rest easy at their friendly neighborhood Thai restaurants soon, if research announced this week proves true. A release from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University says researcher Mohamed Ahmedna has developed whole, roasted peanuts in which the allergen is completely inactivated and that serum from people with severe …read more

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Replacement limbs have generally been somewhat useful objects.  Sure, there are hooks, and some bio-mechanical hands, and much better legs now, but true bionics have eluded us, until now:
Touch Bionics announced Tuesday what it calls the world’s first commercially available bionic hand, a prosthetic hand that moves more naturally than traditional prostheses and can hold awkward or delicate objects. While most prostheses today can open and close, allowing people to grasp some items, they lack the detailed movements of a natural hand. The i-Limb Hand gets one step closer to that natural movement, with motors in each finger that make …read more

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What do you think happens to a species when some kind of pathogen targets it and is extremely successful at killing it off?  Extinction is pretty much what will happen.  If not extinction, decimation is likely.  Well a tropical butterfly beat the odds and set a new record of evolutionary adaptation:
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and elsewhere have documented the super-swift recovery of tropical Hypolimnas bolina butterflies, also called blue moon or great eggfly butterflies, from the onslaught of a bacteria that killed only males. The bacteria had reduced the male population to about 1 percent of …read more

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 In the Andes, the Incas and modern-day descendents have been gathering water from the fog for centuries.  The process there is simple, the fog hits some kind of cloth or sheeting and the water condenses on it.   Then the water collects and rolls down into a container.  These work amazingly well, but they are also huge and need pretty heavy fog to work well.  Max Whisson has taken the idea that there is always (pretty much) water in the air and uses condensation to make a water gathering machine:
There’s a lot of water floating around in the air everywhere, and …read more

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Ever wonder how your brain works?  Maybe how sometimes it doesn’t work?  So do the folks at Lifehack:
I think the brain is most interesting when it doesn’t work the way you expect it should. psychology often confirms our intuitions about how our minds work, but it offers quite a few surprises as well. Although some psychology buff’s will have heard a few of these before, here’s a list of quirks in your brain you probably didn’t realize you had: Source: Nine Brain Quirks You Didn’t Realize You Had – lifehack.org
Visit the page for the details on these nine quirks:
1) Your …read more

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This caught my eye on Read/Write Web:
A new project from the University of Oxford (UK), the University of Portsmouth (UK) and Johns Hopkins University (US) aims to harness the power of the human brain to identify and classify galaxies and stars. On the Galaxy Zoo website, users are asked to identify the objects in photographs as spiral or elliptical galaxies, the direction of rotation, or if the photo depicts a star or merger of galaxies. The site launched yesterday and says they have already had an “amazing response.”
“The human brain is actually better than a computer at pattern recognition tasks …read more

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