1. PBS: Five Cook Stoves Used Around the World
2. Upworthy: It Used To Take Up 40% Of Their Daily Expenses. Then They Found A New Way To Cook.
3. Viral Forest: This is the Pallet Emergency Home. It Can Be Built in One Day With Only Basic Tools.
... Developed by the creative folks at i-Beam Design, this house plan makes use of commonly available materials, and is designed to be built by anyone, even without construction experience. ...
4. Upworthy: A Man Has Revolutionized Sanitary Pads For Women In India 'By Thinking Like A Woman'
5. Huffington Post: Global Food Waste Now At Shamefully High Levels
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - The world loses or wastes a staggering 25 percent to 33 percent of the food it produces for consumption, losses that can mean the difference between an adequate diet and malnutrition in many countries, the World Bank said in a report released on Thursday. ...
6. Wired: This Gigantic 3-D Printer Can Create an Entire Table
7. Mashable: Researchers 3D Print Blood Vessels Into Tissue for Artificial Organs
... Using a custom-built four-head 3D printer and a "disappearing" ink, materials scientist Jennifer Lewis and her team created a patch of tissue containing skin cells and biological structural material interwoven with blood-vessel-like structures. Reported by the team in Advanced Materials, the tissue is the first made through 3D printing to include potentially functional blood vessels embedded among multiple, patterned cell types. ...
8. SourceFed: Man Gets New 3D Printed Face
9. Reuters: Nine-month-old baby may have been cured of HIV, U.S. scientists say
A 9-month-old baby who was born in California with the HIV virus that leads to AIDS may have been cured as a result of treatments that doctors began just four hours after her birth, medical researchers said on Wednesday.
That child is the second case, following an earlier instance in Mississippi, in which doctors may have brought HIV in a newborn into remission by administering antiretroviral drugs in the first hours of life, said Dr. Deborah Persaud, a pediatrics specialist with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, at a medical conference in Boston. ...
10. Globe and Mail: How tiny robots could help make babies
... Microtechnology and nanotechology involve the manipulation of extremely small robots or bits of matter. To give a sense of the units of measure involved, a micrometre is one millionth of a metre, while a nanometre is a billionth.
The AMNL’s in vitro project focused on improving Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection, a process used to create test tube babies. Developed in the early 1990s, the procedure allows an embryologist to gather a single sperm in a needle and inject it into an oocyte (egg cell). Given that a sperm head is about five micrometres wide, doing this procedure by hand requires a tremendous amount of precision, dexterity and accuracy.
To make this process more efficient and precise, the U of T lab developed a robotic injection system. ...
11. BBC: 30,000-year-old giant virus 'comes back to life'
An ancient virus has "come back to life" after lying dormant for at least 30,000 years, scientists say. ...
12. MIT News: Bionic plants
Nanotechnology could turn shrubbery into supercharged energy producers or sensors for explosives. ...
... Plants have many valuable functions: They provide food and fuel, release the oxygen that we breathe, and add beauty to our surroundings. Now, a team of MIT researchers wants to make plants even more useful by augmenting them with nanomaterials that could enhance their energy production and give them completely new functions, such as monitoring environmental pollutants.
In a new Nature Materials paper, the researchers report boosting plants’ ability to capture light energy by 30 percent by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast, the plant organelle where photosynthesis takes place. Using another type of carbon nanotube, they also modified plants to detect the gas nitric oxide.
Together, these represent the first steps in launching a scientific field the researchers have dubbed “plant nanobionics.” ...
13. Economist: Happy birthday world wide web
14. Huff Post Impact: How Can We Balance the Risks and Rewards of New Technologies?
... That said, in today's complex and interconnected world, their sustainable development and use also hinges on understanding how they might harm people and the environment, and how people's perceptions and assumptions might affect their development trajectories. This is where an increasingly sophisticated understanding of sustainable innovation is needed. While scientists and engineers are masters at demonstrating what is technologically possible, it is society that ultimately decides which technologies succeed and which do not. ...
15. Scientific American: What the 1960s Got Right—and Wrong—about Today's Tech
In 1964—exactly 50 years ago—sci-fi author Isaac Asimov wrote up his predictions about what life today would be like. He had a lot of hits and a lot of misses, as I wrote in my Scientific American column this month.
But Asimov wasn't the only person to look into the technological crystal ball. Fifty and 60 years ago gee-whiz films depicting life today were a staple—a sure way to wow audiences. Today these fanciful visions of the future live on, on YouTube. Let them be a warning to anyone today who's inclined to make a prediction about life in 2064. ...
16. The Atlantic: This 13-Year-Old Just Became the Youngest Person Ever to Build a Nuclear-Fusion Reactor
... Edwards—a "young boffin," as the Post delightfully calls him—began construction of his makeshift nuclear reactor back in October in a science lab at Priory. He also kept a blog tracking his progress in the work of reactor-building, cataloguing his collection of a diffusion pump and a control panel and other components of the device that would eventually smash some atoms.
This morning, all that work paid off. Edwards smashed two atoms of hydrogen together, creating helium. Yep: From a little science lab in a school in Lancashire, a 13-year-old created nuclear fusion. ...
17. Business Insider: Global Warming: Who Pressed The Pause Button?
... If so, the pause has gone from being not explained to explained twice over--once by aerosols and the solar cycle, and again by ocean winds and currents. These two accounts are not contradictory. The processes at work are understood, but their relative contributions are not. ...
... The solar cycle is already turning. And aerosol cooling is likely to be reined in by China’s anti-pollution laws. Most of the circumstances that have put the planet’s temperature rise on "pause" look temporary. Like the Terminator, global warming will be back.
18. Library of Economics and Liberty - David Henderson: 1.6%, Not 97%, Agree that Humans are the Main Cause of Global Warming
Mark Bahner, a commenter on my previous post on global warming and on David Friedman's post, has sifted through the data behind John Cook's statement that 97% of climate scientists who stated a position believe that humans are the main cause of global warming. ...
... Here are the categories that Cook et al state. I have added the numbers that Bahner found beside each. ...
1,Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+% : 64
2,Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimize: 922
3,Implicitly endorses AGW without minimizing it: 2910
4,No Position: 7970
5,Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW: 54
6,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify: 15
7,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%: 9 ...
19. The Energy Collective: When Renewables Destroy Nature
... But in the first article from a forthcoming issue of Breakthrough Journal, Will Boisvert argues that bioenergy’s devastating impact on nature is typical of renewables, not exceptional. A world powered primarily by renewables, Boisvert writes, is unlikely to be environmentally friendly at all. ...
... Against the vision of renewables having a light footprint on the land, Boisvert notes, “The renewable energy paradigm requires an unprecedented industrial reengineering of the landscape: lining every horizon with forty-story wind turbines, paving deserts with concentrating solar mirrors, girdling the coasts with tidal and wave generators, and drilling for geological heat reservoirs; it sees all of nature as an integrated machine for producing energy.”
Ultimately, if we want to save more nature we must leave more of it alone, not harness it to power a human population of 7 going on 9 billion. “Stewardship of the planet requires that we continue to unshackle ourselves from ecosystems,” Boisvert writes, “and ecosystems from us.”
20. Forbes: Nuclear Energy Rising At The Expense of Renewable Power
...What now? Nuclear energy is getting off of its knees and it is perched to rebound, at least in certain parts of the world: In the United States, four reactors at two plants are under construction while the U.S. Department of Energy has been increasing funding for advanced nuclear research and development.
Meantime, China, Korea, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the UK are advancing nuclear production to address air pollution and climate concerns. China has 20 nuclear plants today and 28 more under construction — 40 percent of all projected new nuclear units, says the World Nuclear Association. A similar dynamic exists in the UK, which approved the construction of two reactors at Hinkley Point that will provide 7 percent of the UK’s electricity. ...
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