Diet Soft Drinks Linked to Risk of Heart Disease - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/health/research/diet-soft-drinks-linked-to-risk-of-heart-disease.html


-Tom.

Voice algorithms spot Parkinson's | Digg Topnews

http://m.digg.com/newsbar/topnews/voice_algorithms_spot_parkinson_s_1


-Tom.

All-Carbon Solar Cell Harnesses Infrared Light | CleanTechnicaCleanTechnica

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/06/22/all-carbon-solar-cell-harnesses-infrared-light/


-Tom.

Wheat vs corn in a global warming future

"Wheat production generates less than half the fossil-fuel emissions of corn and returns 63 percent more protein."

""The digestibility of unprocessed corn to humans isn't very high," says Jerry Hatfield, a plant physiologist with the USDA. "We have to put it through processing of some sort, whether that happens in a factory or an animal." Set those problems aside, and a deal-breaker remains:modern corn is more sensitive to heat than any other major crop, and attempts to create drought- and heat-resistant corn through genetic modification are still unproven."

"Jones searches for drought-, disease- and flood-tolerant wheat strains that were grown in Washington a century ago (and which fell out of favor because they didn't consistently produce large yields) and breeds them with modern, high-yield varieties. Farmers sow the resulting seeds and, at the end of the season, collect the seeds from the best-performing plants to use for next year's crop. In as little as eight years, this process creates new wheat strains. And in a 2010 test in Washington's Douglas County, one of these new wheat strains outperformed all 59 competitors, including entries from genetic-engineering giants Monsanto and Syngenta"

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-06/adapting-three-top-crops-hotter-planet

Self-cooling soda can

http://westcoastchill.com/


-Tom.

Who's making plug-in electric vehicles - up-to-date list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_production_plug-in_electric_vehicles

And the timeline for hybrid vehicles:
http://www.hybridcenter.org/hybrid-timeline.html
-Tom.

The 6 Creepiest Lies the Food Industry is Feeding You | Cracked.com

http://www.cracked.com/article_19896_the-6-creepiest-lies-food-industry-feeding-you.html


-Tom.

The Earth Harp

A giant harp with strings dozens of yards long. He barely touches the strings so the sounds must be highly amplified.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ-hukZW8Sk&feature=youtube_gdata_player


-Tom.

Lose yourself in your work.

flow, the notion developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "me-high chick-sent-me-high"—perhaps the most fun name to say, ever). This Hungarian-American psychologist holds that there is a very satisfying state of mind that occurs when one is totally absorbed by an action. ... One might experience flow while painting a complex landscape or painting the front porch...

Its commonness is why we have so many phrases for this pleasant state of existence: being in the zone, losing ourselves in our work, being on the ball, in the groove.

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/guess-whats-cooking-garage?page=1

Doug's reading list of classics

 Some of you have asked me for a list of books that would be appropriate for 7^th and 8^th Grade English Literature students (and for parents who might wish to reacquaint themselves with the classics). The canon is so rich and diverse that this just scratches the surface, but it's a start:

 

Emily Bronte—"Wuthering Heights";   Alexander Pope—"The Odyssey";   Jonathan Swift---"Gulliver's Travels";   Charles Dickens---"Oliver Twist" or "Bleak House";   

Isak Dinesen---"Out of Africa";   Thoreau---"Walden";  

 E.M. Forster---"A Passage To India";  Rudyard Kipling---"Captains Courageous";   

Virginia Woolf---"To the Lighthouse";   Anthony Trollope---"Barchester Towers";  

Willa Cather---"O Pioneers!" or "My Antonia";   

William M. Thackeray---"Vanity Fair";   George Eliot---"Middlemarch";   

George Orwell---"Animal Farm" or "1984";   

Ernest Hemingway---short story collections, "In Our Time" or "Men Without Women", or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" or "A Moveable Feast" or  "The Sun Also Rises" or "A Farewell To Arms";  

Mark Twain---"Huck Finn";    

Jane Austen---"Pride and Prejudice";  T.H. White---"The Sword in the Stone";   Herman Melville---"Typee";  

 Joseph Conrad---"Heart of Darkness";   Oscar Wilde---"The Importance of Being Earnest" or "The Picture of Dorian Grey";  

John Steinbeck---"The Red Pony" or "Of Mice and Men";   

Walt Whitman---"Leaves of Grass";  Robert L. Stevenson---"The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or "Treasure Island";   

William Shakespeare---"The Sonnets" or "Romeo and Juliet" or "Macbeth" or "Julius Caesar";  

Theodore Dreiser----"An American Tragedy";  

P.G. Wodehouse---"My Man Jeeves";  H.G. Wells---"The Time Machine";  Evelyn Waugh---"A Handful of Dust";  

A selection from the poems of Longfellow, Tennyson, Dickinson, Larkin, Keats, Plath, T.S. Eliot, Hardy, Frost, Burns, Emerson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake. 

Well, that's a beginning.  Happy reading and regards,  Doug 

Ambitious amateurs

"America has always been a place of ambitious amateurs." "They've started to form 'synbio' clubs in the way radio enthusiasts did in the early 1900's, or computer programmers did in the 1970's or robotics amateurs in the '00's."
From an article 'Garage Biology' about a new breed of garage tinkerer that is making scientific advances in their garage.

http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/guess-whats-cooking-garage

-Tom.

How to grow trees in the desert.

An effort to combat desertification in the third world - plants are grown with minimal maintenance and effort in a reusable shield that protects and stores a reservoir of water. It shades the roots from evaporation and keeps the seedling warm at night and cool during the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRF2bUBPA90&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Foldit: Biology for gamers - protein folding online game

I had no idea this existed. Researchers developed an online computer game about protein folding, based on the premise that proteins often fold into the conformation with the lowest energy. Out of millions of possibilities, the human brain is better than a computer at solving this. The program simply shows the amino acid chain as red when it's in a Hugh energy state, and players manipulate the structure to find the lowest energy state. Ultimately, the way they do this is teaching the computer how to solve the puzzle more efficiently. Watch mid-way at 2:16  for a time-lapse of someone solving the puzzle where a protein gradually turns green. Incredible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axN0xdhznhY&feature=youtube_gdata_player


-Tom.

hapax legomenon - Wiktionary

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hapax_legomenon


-Tom.

Can Treating Your Life As a Game Make You a Better Person? | Popular Science

Surprising how much incentive there is inherent in earning a score for the most mundane things...
http://m.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-01/can-treating-your-life-game-make-you-better-person

-Tom.