We’ve long depended on coal-fired and natural gas power plants to convert chemical fuel into electricity. Now, scientists have found a way to convert electricity into a fuel using excess power from renewables like wind and solar.
Scientists from Stanford and Pennsylvania State universities have discovered a process to convert electricity into methane, the main constituent of natural gas, using microbes. The fuel is carbon neutral and can use the excess electricity from renewable sources.
Can robots learn language? Is understanding a language depending on how we see the world and does a Spanish speaker see the world in the same way as an English one?
Linguistic and cognitive experts are going to argue those issues when they arrive at Northumbria University next week for the fifth annual ‘Embodied and Situated Language Processing 2012’ conference August 28-30.
This fall, California voters will be asked to vote on Proposition 37, a law which would require that all foods including “GMO Crop ingredients” be labeled as such. There are many reasons that this isn’t a good use of governmental authority for mandatory food labeling. A look at historical logic and precedents for labeling, and at the misleading messages this initiative would foster, should inspire Californians to reject it at the ballot box.
Labeling for a Known Hazard
San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera, coming off an an All-Star Game MVP award, had unusually high testosterone levels to go along with his .346 batting average and 11 home runs. These are not the days of Steve Howe (1), when baseball could try to ban players only to have the unnaturally powerful Player's Union block any efforts at a drug policy, Cabrera was suspended for 50 games.
Here is the bleak story of a seasick squid, a granted wish, and a horrible way to live life:
by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe, h/t to Squid.us
An ongoing legal battle regarding gene patents began in 2009 when the ACLU representing numerous clients sued Myriad Genetics and the USPTO. The dispute is over patents on two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, discovered in the 1990s which have a correlation to increased rates of breast and ovarian cancer.
The case subsequently went to the Federal Appeals Court that handles biotechnology patents, the Supreme Court, and was earlier this year remanded back to the Federal Appeals Court. On August 16, 2012 the Federal Appeals Court reaffirmed that gene patents are legal. So, why did the activists lose the legal battle?
A sociology paper claims that binge-drinking college students are having a much better time in school than their non-binge-drinking counterparts.
Binge drinking may be popular on campuses not simply because young people have no jobs yet don't live at home, but because binge drinkers are cool and therefore happy with their college experience. According to the surveys, students from higher status groups (i.e., wealthy, male, white, heterosexual, and Greek affiliated undergraduates) were consistently happier with their college social experience than their peers from lower status groups, i.e., poor, female, minority, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ); and not in a sorority or frat.
The world wastes 1.3 billion tons of food per year. If only scientists could create a "biorefinery" that could change food waste into a key ingredient for making plastics, laundry detergents and scores of other everyday products. Because wasting less food would just be crazy talk.
The food biorefinery process involves blending the waste foods with a mixture of fungi that excrete enzymes to break down carbohydrates in the food into simple sugars. The blend then goes into a fermenter, a vat where bacteria convert the sugars into succinic acid. Succinic acid is one of those key materials that can be produced from sugars and that could be used to make high-value products - everything from laundry detergents to plastics to medicines.
The start of the Universe may have been more like water freezing into ice than the popular conception of a Big Bang, say theoretical physicists from the University of Melbourne and RMIT University. They have a new hypothesis (conjecture?) which suggests that the secret to understanding the early universe is in the cracks and crevices common to all crystals, including ice.
Lead researcher on the project James Quach said their current ideas are the latest in a long quest by humans to understand the origins and nature of the Universe.
Transparency is the slogan of a new, heterogeneous movement. The demand for transparency unites very different orientations. Many conservatives feel that transparency is similar to anarchy. However, transparency is not primarily there to make it difficult for the powerful to hide their ways. That is just how transparency sells among liberals.
Transparency is stability! Opaque systems may fail entirely due to compromised secrecy. A transparent system is immune against that failure mode.
