Aug 20
No one has started working on an ark just yet (that I know) but Norway is working on a different backup plan for world wide catastrophe:
Norway is starting construction on a “doomsday vault” in the Arctic which is designed to house all known varieties of the world’s crops.
Dug into a frozen mountainside on the island of Svalbard, it is hoped the project will safeguard crop diversity in the event of a global catastrophe.
More than 100 countries have backed the vault, which will store seeds, packaged in foil, at sub-zero temperatures.
Aug 16
I saw this story on Slashdot a while back and loved it. One man’s treasure is another man’s …
“A New Zealand company has successfully turned sewage into modern-day gold. New Zealand Herald is reporting that a Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds. It is believed to be the world’s first commercial production of bio-diesel from ‘wild’ algae outside the laboratory - and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April.”
Jul 04
OK, it came about as close as the moon according to the story in Boing Boing but that’s close enough.
More than three dozen asteroids have flown closer to Earth in the past few years, but scientists believe 2004 XP14 is among the largest. The asteroid, discovered in 2004, is estimated to be up to 800 metres wide based on its brightness. Late Sunday and early Monday, it was expected to be visible as a small moving dot to amateur sky watchers with good telescopes in North America and as a fainter object in Europe. Its closest approach was over the U.S. West Coast.
I suspect as we get better at seeing these asteroids we will have more of these stories… hopefully next time not mentioning my neighborhood.
May 12
Boing Boing had this story today:
A new scientific study reports that monkeys housed alone drink more alcohol than those living in groups. Also, monkeys overall tend to drink after “stressful periods,” according to research from the National Institutes of Health Animal Center. From Discovery News:
The study, recently published in the journal Methods, also found that booze affects monkeys much the same way it affects people.
“It was not unusual to see some of the monkeys stumble and fall, sway, and vomit,” (researcher Scott) Chen added. “In a few of our heavy drinkers, they would drink until they fell asleep…”
Lower-ranked monkeys and males tended to drink more overall, but certain individuals consistently drank more than others, regardless of status or housing conditions.
“Similar to humans, rhesus macaques have individual differences in taste preference, stress levels, drug tolerance and genetic background that lead to differences in alcohol intake,” explained Chen.
Aren’t we missing some big questions here like:
- When did monkeys start drinking?
- What drove them to drink?
- Do they have proper ID to purchase alcohol or is someone selling monkeys illegal booze?
- Is it possible they are making their own alcohol?
- If they are making their own alcohol, would you call that “monkeyshine”?
May 07
It looks like Douglas Adams was right all along according to this article from Seed Magazine
But the important role played by the number 42 has recently persuaded even the deepest skeptics that the subatomic world might hold the key to one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics.
read more | digg story
