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For edX, MOOC.org represents another step towards going beyond the boundaries of its current model, which includes partnership with institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other elite universities. In April, the organization merged with Stanford University-based startup Class2Go to build an open-source version of its platform that can be used by any institution around the globe. The goal has been to allow developers access to edX’s code to allow any institution to host and distribute digital courses for on-campus and distance learners — both online and offline — and create better ways to collect student data.

With today’s partnership, edX is expanding that mission, as its partnership with Google will enable any institution or business to post courses on MOOC.org and presumably open the doors to public access of edX’s content. It will also offer a more diverse range of content from non-profit institutions to higher education institutions and businesses, edX President Anant Agarwal said.

Unfortunately, this will suffer from the General Problem of the Internet: Sorting through all of the crap to fine the useful stuff. And, when it comes to education, what constitutes ‘useful stuff’ will differ from person to person. I have high hopes, but low expectations, for the success of this initiative.

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A cross-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and clinicians announced today that they have begun a Phase I clinical trial of an implantable vaccine to treat melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer.

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According to the sources contacted by Foreign Policy for a recent profile, NSA head Keith Alexander is a “cowboy,” a well-intentioned extremist, a blithely naive fan of big data. He is also, it appears, a huge fan of Star Trek. Foreign Policy describes Alexander’s data-processing “Information Dominance Center” in Fort Belvoir, Virginia as the site of a high tech homage to the Starship Enterprise. Alexander reportedly had his operations center redesigned to mimic the Enterprise bridge, “complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a ‘whoosh’ sound when they slid open and closed.”

Aye, keptin….

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Hey, it could happen.

 The Heineken World Bottle was designed by architect John Habraken. When then-CEO Freddy Heineken was visiting the island of Curaçao, he was bothered by the mass amounts of trash and the lack of housing. His solution? Make a beer bottle that could serve as a brick when it’s finished. It was a brilliant compromise, but Heineken’s marketing department rejected it as effeminate.

Spoil-sports.

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We have the technology.

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That would be … very interesting.

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 Why “Rent The Chicken”?  We provide all of the supplies you need with the rental:  portable chicken coop, two egg laying hens, enough food for the length of your rental, food & water dishes as well as instructions on how to keep your chickens happy! Within two days of the arrival, your chickens will lay eggs ready to use!  These eggs have 1/3 less cholesterol, 1/4 less saturated fats, and 2 times more omega 3 fatty acids than store bought eggs.  Your Rent The Chickens should lay 8-14 eggs per week.  You will know exactly what your chickens eat!

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O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Kaeding was performing ACL surgery on a woman who had hurt her knee while playing softball. Glass apparently didn’t hinder Kaeding’s performance or concentration in any way. “To be honest, once we got into the surgery, I often forgot the device was there,” he says.

Two, actually. Watch them.

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Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility announced Tuesday a successful test of its ultrapowerful laser system, which melds 192 laser beams into a single incredible burst of energy. On Aug. 13, the facility was activated for 14 billionths of a second and aimed at a tiny capsule of fuel. The result: approximately 350 trillion watts of power — hundreds of times more than the entire United States consumes at any given instant.

We have the technology … or soon will.

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We have the technology … and the indolence.

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We have the technology.

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Swintec, a New Jersey typewriter company, is one of the last manufacturers standing in a dying industry. What has helped keep it alive? Funeral homes.

Funeral directors in a handful of states must tap out death certificates on a typewriter, relics of the days when the machines represented a modern improvement over an undertaker’s handwriting.

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Until they ban it — which they will.

I’m thinking that you’d want fin-stabilized ammunition in a ‘real’ version.

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Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division is building a drone that will be able to transport cars, storage containers, and eventually even pods full of soldiers for DARPA. The drone, which will be called the Transformer TX, is currently in a $20.3-million “Phase 3” process, which means Lockheed is finalizing its design before building a working prototype. If DARPA finds that the prototype meets its needs, it can then opt to pay the defense contractor to produce the drones for flight sometime in 2015.

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Card slots. A bottle opener. Pepper spray. Defense against a .50 caliber bullet. Whatever you might need on the go, people are thinking of ways for you to integrate it right into your iPhone case.

But Y Combinator startup Graft Concepts is trying to cover all your basic needs with one case, using a simple latched frame and interchangeable backplates. Named Leverage, the case’s frame alone is meant to be a bumper for the phone and comes with either a plain backplate for $40 or a card holder (which fits about five cards) for $50. Additional backplates range from $7 to $30 based on design and material.

We have the technology.

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One of the pivotal innovations in the way we prepare and package ready-to-eat foods came with the invention of the puffing cannon, a machine for heating up and pressurizing starchy foods to the point where they would explode into substantially larger, puffier shapes. It was, in effect, applying the familiar popcorn-making technique to the full range of other starches: rice, wheat, corn, lentils, and the like. The puffing gun was later superseded by more advanced machinery, but it’s now being brought back — on the basis of a Kellogg brothers patent filed near the turn of the century — by Dave Arnold, the founder of a new Museum of Food and Drink in New York City.

I blame Obama.

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I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE National Rifle Association, nor do I collect rare firearms, attend gun shows, or subscribe to gun magazines. I am not, in other words, a “gun nut” and, in fact, can sympathize to a degree with the views of those who detest all such weapons and want them regulated. You can’t have lived in a large American city for any length of time, as I have, without seeing that such people’s opinions may have a certain amount of validity.

But I grew up in a time and a region that almost automatically sparked interest in not only guns but also the hunting of birds and beasts, in which pursuits such weapons were and still are central components. Nor did a war experienced in the U.S. Marine Corps and a functional country life during most of the past forty-odd years do anything to hamper the affinity.

Texas would be perfect if it weren’t so beastly hot during the summer.

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Carter’s Pills, here we come….

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According to CBS Denver, the institute will be a “100,000 square foot complex [with] a retail gun shop, five indoor shooting ranges, and a restaurant.”

In July, USA Liberty Firearms owner John Mason said, “This is going to be an upscale place to shoot your gun, to learn gun safety, and to be around people who know gun safety.” In a more recent statement, USA Liberty Firearms said it “will break ground in September and [hopes] to open doors next August.”

Don Boudreaux lays it out.

Competitive markets work so smoothly and silently that they fool us modern folk into thinking that the lives we lead are normal – fool us into thinking that poverty (rather than wealth) has causes; fool us into supposing that people my age (almost 55), because we still have all of our teeth and aren’t remotely yet decrepit, are “middle-aged” rather than old, ancient, nearly dead by historical standards; fool us into believing that possession by each person of several changes of clean, washable clothes is the norm; fool us into imagining that living under a solid roof atop solid walls joined to solid floors is natural; fool us into forgetting that starvation and malnutrition were in store for distressingly large numbers of our ancestors; fool us into worrying about the fact that someone has multiple more zeroes in his or her bank account than we have in ours rather than recognize that even the most ordinary of us today enjoy a material standard of living immeasurably higher than was dreamed of by any of our pre-industrial ancestors – and higher even, along many dimensions, than was enjoyed by the likes of Cleopatra, Louis XIV, and J.D. Rockefeller.

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Well, for one thing, it isn’t Michigan….

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“Call your representative!” We’ve all heard it before, but actually picking up the phone (or shooting over an email) is always harder than it looks. Infrastructure advocacy group Building America’s Future wants to make that process a bit easier so citizens can let their representatives know that the country’s transportation system isn’t as good as it should be. With a free new iOS and Android app called “I’m Stuck,” users can quickly send an email when the subway is letting them down or when traffic on the highway is a mess.

The app takes in a bit of info — like your address — when you use it the first time so it knows which representative or senator to send your complaint to. Then, when you get stuck in a transportation mess, you can choose the type of problem you’re having and then send a pre-generated or custom email to Washington. You can also send a photo of your problem. Smartly, the app uses your location so it’ll send your email to the right place if you have a problem while you’re away from home.

Now that has texture, and scope.

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Should that be what you want to do, of course.

The mercury-in-glass thermometer has served us well for the past 270 years, but sometimes you need something smaller — say to find the temperature inside a single living cell. Researchers at Harvard have discovered a new technique using lasers and diamond nanocrystals to measure temperatures of microscopic structures, recording temperature fluctuations as small as 0.05 Kelvin (0.09ºF) in size.

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What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.

The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Levitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.

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Like blood circulating through the human body, a new system out of Harvard harnesses channels of running water to cool windows that receive a lot of sun. The water carries away heat, leading to less work for air conditioners and a lower electricity bill.

The channels are ultra-thin and encased in a sheet of clear silicone rubber that is stretched over a window. They crisscross to create a mesh-like pattern. While the channels are visible when empty, they become transparent when they contain water.

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If you were to nuke San Francisco, how much better off would the country be?

Note that the pre-sets are all in Blue states….

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We have the technology.

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In back-woods America the government isn’t too popular, but the tiny town of Deer Trail, Colorado (population 546 – deer not included) may be taking this sentiment to extremes with a proposal to open an official hunting season on government drones.

“We do not want drones in town,” said the proposed ordinance’s author David Steel told ABC7. “They fly in town, they get shot down.”

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The “wood” is actually microscopic wood fibers that are fashioned into thin sheets. The sheets are then coated with carbon nanotubes and packed into small metal discs.

The wood batteries use sodium ions, rather than the lithium ions that are found in the batteries of cellphones and laptops. In this case, the charged particles move around in the wood fibers, creating an electric current. It turns out wood is a good medium for sodium ions to move around in.

We have the technology.

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How to survive the coming apocalypse.

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Airman 1st Class Mary Howe is one of the few women qualified as an aerial gunner aboard Air Force special operations AC-130 gunships — the warplanes with accurate cannons unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan to support troops on the ground.

Airman Howe is the daughter of retired ArmyMaster Sgt. Paul Howe — featured prominently in the best-selling book “Black Hawk Down” about a Delta Force operation in Somalia — and Connie Beckwith Howe, a former Army Reserve major and one of the colonel’s three daughters.

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… the US Navy’s next-generation autonomous drone, the X-47B, successfully landed on the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush today during a milestone test run off the coast of Virginia. Following another historic test which took place in May, the feat makes the drone the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to both take off and land on an aircraft carrier, opening up frightening new horizons for the world’s most powerful military.

Read it. And watch the video.

An Oklahoma City surgery center is offering a new kind of price transparency, posting guaranteed all-inclusive surgery prices online. The move is revolutionizing medical billing in Oklahoma and around the world.

Dr. Keith Smith and Dr. Steven Lantier launched Surgery Center of Oklahoma 15 years ago, founded on the simple principle of price honesty.

“What we’ve discovered is health care really doesn’t cost that much,” Dr. Smith said. “What people are being charged for is another matter altogether.”

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Jason Everman has the unique distinction of being the guy who was kicked out of Nirvana and Soundgarden, two rock bands that would sell roughly 100 million records combined. At 26, he wasn’t just Pete Best, the guy the Beatles left behind. He was Pete Best twice.

Then again, he wasn’t remotely. What Everman did afterward put him far outside the category of rock’n’roll footnote. He became an elite member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, one of those bearded guys riding around on horseback in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

…

In Everman’s cabin, I saw medal after medal, including the coveted Combat Infantryman Badge. “Sounds kind of Boy Scouty,” he said. “But it’s actually something cool.” I saw photos of Everman in fatigues on a warship (“an antipiracy operation in Asia”). A shot of Everman with Donald Rumsfeld. Another with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. And that’s when it hit me. Jason Everman had finally become a rock star.

Surest thing you know.

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It generally takes a decent-sized particle accelerator to produce antimatter, but a team of physicists working at the University of Michigan says they’ve developed a table-top system that can create short bursts of positrons – anti-electrons.

We have the the technology, heh heh heh….

Never fear, however: as the image below shows, a mere lump of Teflon is sufficient to absorb the positrons, so the setup doesn’t actually risk the earth-shattering kaboom of a matter-antimatter annihilation.

Well, shucks.

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Dr. Rafael Grossmann, of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, recently performed his first Google surgery with Google Glass in tow. As far as we can tell, it’s also the first such Google Glass-equipped surgery in the device’s history – complete with a corresponding Google Glass Hangout (which wasn’t open to the public, for those looking to tune in to a live surgery when the thrill of a YouTube video just isn’t enough anymore).

“By performing and documenting this event, I wanted to show that this device and its platform, are certainly intuitive tools that have a great potential in Healthcare, and specifically for surgery, could allow better intra-operative consultations, surgical mentoring and potentiate remote medical education, in a very simple way,” Grossmann writes.

No surprises.

Wonder whether it will lower his malpractice insurance rates?

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ReasonGovernment officials like to use eminent domain for the convenience of their preferred policies and/or the enrichment of themselves and their buddies. Usually, they get away with it, because the folks on the receiving end are too few and powerless to hold their tormentors to account. In Hackensack, New Jersey, however, the officials who targeted Michael Monaghan’s property for seizure as part of an “area in need of redevelopment,”  even while denying him the right to develop it himself, pushed too many people around, too often. Last month, voters booted out the entire city council.

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A new blog analyzing the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV) minute by agonizing minute.

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The engineered vein was created with donated human blood vessel cells, which are implanted onto a tubular, biodegradable scaffold. The scaffold supports those cells as they grow into a fully-formed vessel. Once the process is complete, the new vein is “scrubbed” of cellular properties that might trigger an immune response — and subsequent rejection — in a patient. Where kidney disease is concerned, the vessels could replace synthetic grafts used to link an artery to a vein for the process of hemodialysis. Such synthetics are accompanied by serious risks, including clotting and infection.

Gavin MacInnes lightens the mood.

I can’t tell you what Hasidic Jews are like or even if I like them, but I can tell you what it’s like to be around them. Here are 10 things I’ve noticed over the past quarter-century.

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A sandwich shop owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, has posted signs in the front windows of his two shops announcing guns are welcome, although he asks that they remain holstered unless a need for self-defense arises.

A perfectly reasonable expectation.