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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

The Stanford researchers’ genetic logic gate can be used to perform the full complement of digital logic tasks, and it can store information, too. It works by making changes to the cell’s genome, creating a kind of transcript of the cell’s activities that can be read out later with a DNA sequencer. The researchers call their invention a “transcriptor” for its resemblance to the transistor in electronics. “We want to make tools to put computers inside any living cell—a little bit of data storage, a way to communicate, and logic,” says Drew Endy, the bioengineering professor at Stanford who led the work.

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In a referendum election on March 4, [Brooksville] residents voted 112-64 to approve the “Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance,” which states that producers or processors of local foods are “exempt from licensure and inspection,” so long as the food is sold directly by the producer to a consumer.

The ordinance also makes it “unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights organized by this ordinance.”

Looks like a grass-fed roots revolution.

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An anthem for those of libertarian persuasion everywhere.

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Nothing like being on the receiving end of Communist ICBMs to concentrate the mind.

Rythym of the Night

Why, yes, I do like disco. Why do you ask?

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Magpul Industries, which manufactures firearms accessories and ammunition magazines, said on its Facebook page that it would have “no choice” but to leave if the magazine bill was signed, causing an opening for states eager to prove they’re more gun-friendly.

Grassroots Facebook pages have popped up – some, before the Colorado bills were even signed – encouraging Magpul to settle in places like Alabama, West Virginia or Texas. Alaska state Rep. Tammie Wilson’s staff created a Facebook page, too, called “Magpul Industries – Alaska Wants You.”

One of the advantages that the United States have over unitary states like Britain is that, when one jurisdiction gets panicked into passing a stupid law, people have someplace to go. Hence the loss of population to places like Texas that California and Michigan are experiencing.

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Why on these eight days does the soda taste different than on all other days? Cane sugar.

Roy’s favorite.

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Sell it Forward encourages users to sell their used clothes and donate half the proceeds to Goodwill. The pilot program is currently only available in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin, though the company is going out of its way to make the process as painless as possible for those in eligible areas. Instead of creating listings for each item, wannabe auctioneers need only fill the pre-paid mailing bag (provided by eBay) with the clothes and accessories they wish to sell. Everything else will be taken care of for them. Employees will decide if your wares are in decent enough condition to sell, create a listing and, if the item is sold within 14 days, split the proceeds between the “seller” and Goodwill. If the item remains unsold for 14 days it becomes a straight donation to the charity.

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Attaching a quart-sized device with a camera and sensors to a squid presents some technical problems. The trick is to find a big enough squid and fix the Crittercam onto a child’s bathing suit so that it can be slipped over the creature’s fins like a spandex sleeve, Stanford biologist William Gilly explained in a video.

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Google’s PageRank algorithm has forever changed the way we access information by putting the best stuff first, and now researchers are using the same mathematical models that Google uses to fight the spread of lung cancer within the human body. While there’s no “best” when it comes cancer cells, the aim is to identify tumors more likely to metastasize and then hit them with targeted treatment before the cells have a chance to spread.

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And that’s the sort of American entrepreneurship that Democrats are constantly trying to crush.

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 That’s essentially the message Hulu’s sending in making the entirety of the Star Trek series free for everyone, starting today through the end of March. That’s not just Shatner-era Star Trek, but literally all of it: the Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. Normally this bountiful selection of space operatics would only be available for Hulu Plus paid subscribers, but Hulu’s going crazy in celebration of Shatner’s 82nd birthday. With all those hours of medium-octane space drama ahead of you, you could just go crazy and marathon until the offer expires come April! We wouldn’t suggest that, though.

Check it out.

Girl’s Guide to Guns is a website dedicated to women who dig fashion and fire power. Think of us this way: if one day Vogue and Guns&Ammo Magazine fell madly in love, got married and had babies, we would be their favorite child. Whether you’re a champion shooter or have never picked up a gun in your life, we’ve got something for you.

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Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly, his lithium silicate had transformed into a milky white plate. When he tried to remove it, the sample slipped from the tongs and crashed to the floor. Instead of shattering, it bounced.

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The river as whole also serves as a single divider, surprisingly enough in the realm of radio – a medium that, on the face of it, is not as bound by the strictures of territorial demarcation. West of the Mississippi, all radio stations have call signs beginning with K. East of the river, all call signs start with W.

Read it. And watch the video.

I’m talking to my daughter’s preschool class about Passover tomorrow, and in preparation I’ve been looking for appropriate Youtube videos to show them.

I was completely unaware of the genre ‘Passover videos’ until now, but there it is.

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Thirty-five years after its launch, Voyager 1 appears to have travelled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study appearing online today.

The heliosphere is a region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles, and which is thought to be enclosed, bubble-like, in the surrounding interstellar medium of gas and dust that pervades the Milky Way galaxy.

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I love these guys.

Would I Lie To You

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4. The city of Midland in the Permian basin was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country during the last year, posting a 4.6% gain to 151,662 people (see yesterday’s report from the Census Bureau). Soaring demand for energy workers there has driven up wages, and not just for jobs in the oil and gas fields. “You can make $15 an hour washing dishes at Wendy’s,” said Karl Gulick, a Midland banker. “If you can pass a drug test and get a commercial driver’s license, you can get $80,000 in one phone call.”

Plenty of room for unemployed people from, oh, say, Michigan.

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Although Clotworthy was off the mark in predicting that his vision of an electronically stored human would come to pass by 2000, many of his other predictions are surprisingly close to what technology is actually like today.

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Thanks to the revolutionary extraction technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, it’s taken less than five years to reverse the previous 16-year decline in US oil production, and most of that gain has come from increases in shale oil output in Texas and North Dakota.  US oil production gradually declined from 7.2 million bpd in 1992 to 5.0 million bpd in 2008, that 16-year decline was completely reversed in less than five years, as domestic oil production went above 7.15 million bpd last week for the first time in more than 20.5 years. That amazing, and unprecedented turnaround in America’s oil production in the last five years happened only because of the breakthrough drilling technologies that have accessed the oceans of oil trapped inside shale rock miles below the ground in Texas and North Dakota that were previously inaccessible with traditional extraction technologies. The impressive increases in US oil production in recent years are a tribute to the efforts of private investors and “petropreneurs” who developed the innovative, revolutionary drilling technologies that were able to access shale oil, and in the process, create an energy revolution in America.

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Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have created the first ever graphene audio speaker: an earphone. In its raw state, without any kind of optimization, the researchers show that graphene’s superior physical and electrical properties allow for an earphone with frequency response comparable to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones.

Read it. And check out the slideshow.

I really like Boldt Castle.

Katmandu

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By now, using your smartphone for check deposits has almost become old hat. U.S. Bank is looking to take the next step in conjoining gadgets and financial accounts with the launch of Mobile Photo BillPay. The feature, which the bank says is the first of its kind, lets customers snap a photo of a bill, after which all payment fields will automatically be populated with the proper information. The underlying technology has been developed by Mitek, with extracted data including the intended payee, address, account number and total amount due. Of course you’ll get a chance to review this data before authorizing a bill’s payment; that’s a good thing, since we can’t imagine Mobile Photo BillPay will be flawless each and every time out. Nonetheless, U.S. Bank cites one study that expects the feature to reach a 33 percent adoption rate within the US by 2018. Mobile Photo BillPay is available now for U.S. Bank’s iPhone, iPad and Android mobile banking apps.

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Want to wirelessly upload hundreds of movies to a mobile device in a few seconds? Researchers at Georgia Tech have drawn up blueprints for a wireless antenna made from atom-thin sheets of carbon, or graphene, that could allow terabit-per-second transfer speeds at short ranges.

“It’s a gigantic volume of bandwidth. Nowadays, if you try to copy everything from one computer to another wirelessly, it takes hours. If you have this, you can do everything in one second—boom,” says Ian Akyildiz, director of the broadband wireless networking laboratory at Georgia Tech.

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Medical researchers announced today that, for the first time, a child born with an HIV infection appears to have been cured. Doctors are hopeful that the results may be replicated and used to treat infants infected via pregnancy or delivery in the first few days of life.

Yet another milestone on the road toward saving children from the mistakes of their parents.

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The American love of peanut butter is as mystifying to many Britons as the British love of Marmite (yeast extract on toast?) is to me, but, as Jon Krampner writes in “Creamy & Crunchy,” his enjoyable and informative new history of peanut butter, there are plenty of other countries that adore the crushed goober pea.

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A Houston-area soldier was rewarded for his service with a brand new home for him and his son from a non-profit group that wanted to show their appreciation.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Chris Maust and his 7-year-old son Dylan were given the keys to a fully furnished home in an event attended by a good number of military friends, FOX26 reports. The Friday ceremony, held by the Texas Sentinels Foundation, took place in Fort Bend County.

Hey, that’s Texas for you. Won’t see anything like that in Michigan or the Left Coasts, that’s for sure.

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I love how-to videos. Have ever since I was a kid.

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Mayor Bloomberg was booed yesterday as he walked in the annual St. Patrick’s Parade in the hurricane-ravaged Rockaways.

The jeers grew so loud toward the end of the Queens parade that mayoral candidate and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn appeared to break away from the mayor to march separately.

Heh.

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Amazon is good at sorting and ranking things—we understand that. It knows exactly how many boxes of diapers my kids have ever used. It knows every book I’ve considered. It’s also clear that Amazon doesn’t care about what it sells; it just cares about the selling. To Amazon, a book isn’t really a book. It’s the result of a database query that Amazon will seamlessly transmit over its Whispernet or via USPS to your doorstep, if that’s still your thing. To the shopper, Amazon, with its records of browsing and buying, is not a store nor a website, but more like a ghost limb, for grabbing whatever is needed or wanted.

Which is one of the reasons I own stock in the company. They make my life (and the lives of a lot of other people) much easier.

Evidently this puzzles some people. Like Walmart, Amazon is one of the favorite whipping boys of the Voices of the Crust and their politically activist cousins, who would much rather reduce American shopping to the era of The Music Man, where the epitome of modern times was riding your Model T Ford to the county seat. Cheap prices that help the poor stretch their dollars? What’s up with that?

“Everything about them,” said one indie publisher of Amazon in a Salon article, “is still evil.” But that view is countered by people like Will Wiles, who took to the Huffington Post to describe the process of publishing his novel, Care of Wooden Floors, with New Harvest. “Ascendant companies always seem most threatening,” he wrote, “at the moment when they’re becoming indispensable parts of the scenery of an industry.” He had reason to show his loyalty, of course. But consider: When he was promoting his book after the birth of a child, Amazon did something that few publishers would. They sent him a box of diapers.

And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Amazon — and its critics.

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Grand Rapids has discovered beer tourism.

Those tourists come there because it’s where many of their favorite beers come from. Fifteen of the 21 craft breweries in West Michigan are in metro Grand Rapids.

Bedphones

ShadowHawk UAV

MyScript Calculator for iPhone

Bed Glasses

A Ring to Help You Think

The Travel Halo

The Darth Vader of Space Heaters

Handcuffs of the Future

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On a sponsored media trip to McDonald’s US headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, Barbara J. Booth, the company’s director of sensory science, told Kim Bhasin of Business Insider that Chicken McNuggets come in four carefully designed shapes: the “bell,” the “bone,” the “ball,” and the “boot.”

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In this video, we are reminded that spiders are weird little assholes and that we probably shouldn’t model our superheros after them.

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They ought to have given him five stars.

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Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

And nary a Union worker in sight. Nirvana. Cheap Nirvana.

Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper. The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours.

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The nanorobots mimic a cell’s receptor system in order to communicate with cells. The cells can carry materials — a “payload” — to cancer cells, and when the nanorobot detects the cells it’s hunting for, it will spring into action.

Patrick Rothfuss, one of my Recommended Writers, undergoes a life-changing experience.

Because you only get wrapped in duct tape so often in your life, (this is #2 for me) I figured I might as well take some pictures.

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What FarmLogs offers is a one-stop farm management destination loaded with features such as profit forecasting, risk management, expense and crop tracking, and even weather monitoring. “FarmLogs helps farmers plan their year to maximize profit and track what they’re spending during the year,” says co-founder Jesse Vollmar. “We have the tools and do the math to see what the profit per acre will be, which helps with forward contracting and how much risk a farmer is willing to take.”

Vollmar, the son of organic farmers, grew up in the thumb of Michigan in the tiny town of Caro. He was always much more into software than seeds, he explains, so he and his co-founder, Brad Koch, started a business in high school helping people in the community build websites. “It became a real business,” Vollmar recalls. “We went from building websites to building custom software.”

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And about time, too.

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Prince Edward sheriff’s deputies are investigating a deadly home invasion that happened early Sunday morning in Prospect. Two of the three suspects are dead, shot by the homeowner in self defense, according to investigators on scene. Meanwhile, the search continues for the third suspect.

Old Time Rock and Roll

Bob gets all the good stuff.

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Researchers have discovered a stunning new process that takes the energy from coal without burning it — and removes virtually all of the pollution.

The clean coal technique was developed by scientists at The Ohio State University, with just $5 million in funding from the federal government, and took 15 years to achieve.

Prediction: The enviro-nazis will tie it up in the courts for the next hundred years because coal ‘isn’t a renewable resource’.

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Presumably the existing ban on using roadkill for meat was intended to prevent motorists from running down deer and suchlike with their cars, out of season.

Lavin originally drafted the bill to allow generic “game animals, fur-bearing animals, migratory game birds and upland game birds” to be salvaged, but that raised concerns with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials.

Bighorn sheep, for instance, are frequently killed by vehicles in the Thompson Falls area, and their potentially valuable carcasses might become the focus of profiteering. Same goes with bears, mountain lions and other animals that would be desirable for their heads, claws or furs.

God forbid that actual citizens of the state might do something that isn’t in line with what their rulers in the state government allow.

“I took out anything that might be a concern to them,” Lavin said of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Good, good — legislators are sensitive to the concerns of their bureaucratic masters. The System Works.