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We (almost) have the technology.

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The new issue of The Economist has a long feature on the declining confidence in the high estimates of climate sensitivity.  That this appears in The Economist is significant, because this august British news organ has been fully on board with climate alarmism for years now.  A Washington-based Economist correspondent admitted to me privately several years ago that the senior editors in London had mandated consistent and regular alarmist climate coverage in its pages.

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Using a technique known as two-photon lithography, Austrian researchers have developed a high-precision 3-D printer capable of producing nanometer-sized objects in the shape of race cars, cathedrals and bridges — all in a matter of minutes.

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Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

The “Freedom in the 50 States” study measured economic and personal freedom using a wide range of criteria, including tax rates, government spending and debt, regulatory burdens, and state laws covering land use, union organizing, gun control, education choice and more.

It found that the freest states tended to be conservative “red” states, while the least free were liberal “blue” states.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Hey, here’s another item for the “Crazy stuff rich Chinese people will do for their kids” file! Hot on the heels of the Hong Kong couple who spent $2.2 million on a college consultant (who failed to get their sons into Harvard), here’s the tale of the Chinese woman who bought a $6.5 million apartment at a super luxurious 57th Street condo for when her daughter goes to college in the city. That’ll be sometime in 2029, because her daughter is currently 2-years-old.

Hey, it never hurts to be prepared.

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Just trying to spread the knowledge around, here.

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Some exciting research from the University of Montreal has found that the drug metformin, commonly prescribed for diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), has the potential to slow aging and fight cancer. The study, published in Aging Cell, found that metformin reduces the body’s production of inflammatory cytokines, which accelerate aging.

Watch the FDA prohibit it being used for such an unapproved purpose.

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The big machines that define modern life — cars, airplanes, furnaces, and so forth — have become exquisitely efficient, safe, and responsive over the last century through constant mechanical refinement. But mechanical refinement has its limits, and there are enormous improvements to be wrung out of the way that big machines are operated: an efficient furnace is still wasteful if it heats a building that no one is using; a safe car is still dangerous in the hands of a bad driver.

It is this challenge that the industrial internet promises to address by layering smart software on top of machines. The last few years have seen enormous advances in software and computing that can handle gushing streams of data and build nuanced models of complex systems. These have been used effectively in advertising and web commerce, where data is easy to gather and control is easy to exert, and marketers have rejoiced.

Broadsword Umbrella

Kitchen Gadgets That You Don’t Need

Great Helm Trash Bin

Umbrella Leash

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The tower is based on a novel energy technology invented in Israel in the 1970s. Intended for hot, dry climates, the tower is essentially a hollow cylinder, open at the top. Water is sprayed into the opening, making the uppermost air humid and heavy. That heavy air sinks and accelerates, reaching speeds of 50 miles an hour before escaping at the base via 52 tunnels, where the rushing air spins turbines and create electricity. (I learned about the idea while reporting a story about new wind-energy designs for Sierra magazine.)

Each tower would generate 610 megawatts of electricity, of which about 100 would power the plant. The remainder would go to the power grid.

No doubt there will be a prize for the first person to figure out how to use it to sneak illegal immigrants into the U.S.

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The basic drinking fountain—requiring you to bend over, press a button and slurp—was a steady seller for decades. Then, nearly 10 years ago, executives of Elkay Manufacturing Co. started noticing what they call “the airport dance.”

More people were toting plastic water bottles. Rather than drinking from the fountain, they wanted to refill those jugs. It wasn’t working.

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Recently, even more evidence was presented by British scientist David Whitehouse, the Science Editor of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Despite the organization’s name, Whitehouse’s group held firm that their data indicate no warming trend; in fact, global temperatures are at a decade-long standstill.

Their original assertions were met with the usual vitriolic scorn and disbelief faced by all “deniers”. Yet, they fought back and prevailed: Britain’s Met Office, “a congenitally warmist organization”, was eventually forced to concede that have not risen or otherwise changed significantly for the past 10 years.

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Using image scans, a glass mold, and stem cells, Dr. Francisco Fernandez-Aviles has nearly created a transplant-ready human nose. The Wall Street Journal reports that surgery could occur later this year, but first the nose must be removed from the patient’s arm, where Aviles is hoping that skin will graft to it. The procedure would be quite an accomplishment, but not as much as what he’s hoping to do next; working with Dr. Doris Taylor — who was able to grow rat hearts five years ago — Aviles intends to grow a working human heart. He believes that his lab may be transplanting heart parts in about 10 years, but first, he tells WSJ, “we need to make the heart come alive.”

We almost have the technology.

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The question of who might have made an aluminum gear in the dawn of time remains unanswered.

I’ll just bet it does.

Hanging Cocoon

Cap Zappa Launcher

+10 Electronic Dice Barbarian Gauntlet

Vavuud Wind Meter For Smartphones

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Before the dinosaurs roamed the earth, a number of other species did — including other large sea reptiles and mollusks. But they abruptly died off about 200 million years ago, marking the end of the Triassic period, one of five major extinction events that scientists have identified throughout Earth’s history. Today, an international team scientists from MIT, Colombia, Rutgers, and other prestigious universities in Canada and Morocco released what they say is the best evidence that a series of powerful volcanic eruptions caused this mass extinction event, which opened the door for the dinosaurs to take over millions of years later.

It’s always something….

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And nary a peep of Dan Brown.

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A new type of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) could enable doctors to detect a number of diseases in a matter of minutes. Unlike the traditional MRI method, which generates an electromagnetic field and pulses of radio waves to map the body, Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) works by generating the same field across multiple frequencies simultaneously and using software algorithms to decode the results.

Mark Griswold, a radiology professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, compared the difference between the techniques to the difference between two choirs. While MRIs “sing” a single tone, MRFs generate a rich harmony that can distinguish between multiple tissue properties. Researchers believe they could develop a “songbook” of diseases that will allow doctors to identify diseases based on their tone. “If colon cancer is ‘Happy Birthday’ and we don’t hear ‘Happy Birthday,’ the patient doesn’t have colon cancer,” says Griswold.

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Over the past few months, sheriffs across the country have emerged as bulwarks for freedom by telling President Obama they will not enforce any new federal gun control laws. Now, Colorado’s Weld County Sheriff, John Cooke, has made clear that if the Democrat-sponsored gun control bills for his state are signed into law they will not be enforced.

Speaking specifically of expanded background checks and bans on high capacity magazines, Cooke said “these are feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are unenforceable.” He said these two measures are simply part of the “uniformed,” hectic response Democrats have employed in trying to do something in the wake of the Aurora theater shooting.

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OBJECTIVE:

To describe the epidemiology of genital injuries caused by trouser zips and to educate both consumers and the caregivers of patients who sustain such injuries.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A company spun off from MIT is claiming it has cracked the holy grail of nuclear technology: a reactor design that runs on materials the industry currently discards as waste and which could meet all of the world’s power demands for the next 70 years. It’s also “walk-away safe,” the designers claim, making it immune to the kind of meltdown that destroyed the Fukushima reactors.

The Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) is based on designs first dreamt up in the 1950s for reactors that used liquid rather than solid fuels. Two graduate students at MIT have now upgraded those designs so that the reactors can be fueled by nuclear waste, and also designed a safety system that will automatically shut the reactor down without power or human intervention.

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A Chinese coin about 600 years old was recently unearthed on an island just off the coast of Kenya. If it proves to be authentic, the coin could show that the Chinese explorer Zheng He — like a Christopher Columbus of the East — came to this part of east Africa.

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Real-world staffers create fingers with their own prints, somehow also create a phantom worker and someone then clocks on for both. The fingers, pictured below, don’t look particularly hard to make given silicone is nicely malleable when liquid. The mark on the cloudy cylindrical case at the finger’s base might even be an identifier of some sort, used to make the scam work among multiple scammers.

Still a few bugs in the system.

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The achievement is a big deal for resource-poor Japan, whose energy needs are being satisfied in large part by expensive fossil fuel imports since the 2011 Tohoku earthquake stalled the country’s nuclear energy production. But methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, prompting environmental concerns about its extraction, and detractors are criticizing the government for investing so heavily in fossil fuels at the expense of renewables.

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Nuclear power basically comes down to two issues: Safety and cost. Nobody denies that mass nuclear has the raw production capacity to provide for our energy needs through the remotely foreseeable future, but some argue that doing so would either bankrupt us, sicken us, or both. While this is certainly a disputed interpretation, it’s one that has been gathering support in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and a prolonged PR campaign from coal, natural gas, and certain wings of the environmentalist movement. As a result, the conventional nuclear industry, floundering due to widespread public unease and growing legislative opposition, seems to be begging for a revolution.

Pebble-bed reactors solve all of these problems, but nobody appears to be interested.

Transatomic is not hedging its bets: the researchers claim their design is production-ready, and stand behind their numbers. “I wish someone would build this thing,” said one early investor. The project has raised about $1 million, so far.

Heh. If someone is so foolish as to try to build one, the enviro-nazis will tie it up in the courts during the rest of my lifetime, at least. The only nuclear reactor they like is 93 million miles away.

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Richard III could be laid to rest under a simple slab, under plans revealed by Leicester Cathedral officials.

Stick him in the ground, put a big rock over him so he can’t get out again. Works for me. Probably not a lot of money, too. Win-win!

Well, at least there’s a plan….

Sound the alarm.

The Ukrainian navy’s dolphin program has a long pedigree. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists noted that trainers there inherited the Soviet military’s 70 trained dolphins after the Soviet Union collapsed. Some of them were retrained to help with child therapy and other civilian tasks. The others? Well…

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‘When you go … to San Francisco; … be sure to stay … out of the ‘vator shaft….’

BART officials are calling the death of a man crushed to death in an elevator shaft at one of its San Francisco stations “upsetting and disturbing,” and said they have as many questions as answers about what happened.

Perhaps they were filming a sequel to Mission Impossible. I hear that they do shoot movies in California — although not as much as they used to, before prices went up so much. Oh, and taxes; taxes are pretty high in California.

The person who was stuck in the elevator told rescue personnel that he was riding the elevator when he heard a “crunching sound” in tandem with a scream as the elevator stalled, Trost said. The dead man had some personal belongings on the top of the elevator shaft, but BART officials stopped short of saying whether they were sure the man was living there.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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No, we’re not talking about Obama (for once). The concept of ‘zero’ is a vital step in mathematical progress. This is its story.

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Perhaps no American will mourn Hugo Chavez more than Joe Kennedy.

For years, the eldest son of the late Robert F. Kennedy has relied on the Venezuelan strongman to prop up his charity with tens of millions of dollars in donated oil.

The steady flow of heating oil allowed the former congressman from Massachusetts to portray himself — and Chavez — as heroes to the poor even as Kennedy and his wife pull down more than $1 million in salary and benefits from a web of for-profit and nonprofit energy concerns.

Hey – the Crust takes care of its own.

Thor Ice Scraper

Lockitron

Pedal Pub

$10 LED Light Bulb

The Lumio Lamp

Authorea

Thermodo

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That’s the conclusion of a new study, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the past 11,300 Years,” being published in the journal Science today. But before drawing in a sigh of relief about the future of global warming, the researchers also point out that the rapid warming over the last century has essentially cancelled out 2,000 years of gradual cooling.

How ’bout that Global Warming, eh?

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Pediatric oncologist Stephan A. Grupp of CHOP and his colleagues presented the updated results of their clinical trial of the innovative therapy at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting on December 10 in Atlanta. To conduct the treatment (officially called CTL019), doctors collect T-cells from the patient and reengineer them with a disabled form of HIV to recognize and attach to a protein that is found only on the surface of B-cells. B-cells are found in the immune system and become cancerous in certain leukemias and lymphomas. Once the reengineered T-cells are injected into the patient, they multiply and are able to attach to the cancerous B-cells—which would otherwise fly under the immune system’s radar—and destroy them.

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Presumably to give the increasing number of Muslims in Spain someone to blow up instead of native Spaniards.

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 We’re still years away from quantum computing becoming an everyday reality, but the physics geniuses over at the University of California Santa Barbara have made a discovery that might speed that process along. A team under professor John Martinis’ tutelage has developed a way to manipulate light on a superconducting chip at the quantum level, allowing the group to control the wave forms of released photons with a switch and a resonator. That might not seem like much, but it’s ultimately a launching pad for much more. With photons now bowing to researchers’ whims, the next step is to see if the particles can securely transfer data over long distances, such as between Earth and orbiting satellites, or just from one end of the world to another. It’s a lofty goal to be sure, but nobody said the revolution would be over in a day.

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Automatic doors have been around for so long that we barely even think of them as technology, but maybe it all comes down to the execution. Alex Shakespeare certainly thinks so — he’s rigged his kitchen with a Star Trek-style pneumatic sliding door, complete with “whoosh” sound. The device is controlled by an Arduino microcontroller, a pneumatic arm, and an air compressor, and can be remotely opened and closed by sliding a magnetic puck across the kitchen surface. Alternatively, IR sensors handle automatic operation for fans of supermarket-style activation

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The fossilised remains of stone age people recovered from two caves in south west China may belong to a new species of human that survived until around the dawn of agriculture.

The partial skulls and other bone fragments, which are from at least four individuals and are between 14,300 and 11,500 years old, have an extraordinary mix of primitive and modern anatomical features that stunned the researchers who found them.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Spoof  “vote for Turkson” posters have popped up in Rome along walls still plastered with campaign posters from Italy’s general election on Sunday and Monday. Campaigning for the papacy is officially forbidden and even suggesting one is a candidate is usually enough to end any cardinal’s chances of ascending to the throne of Saint Peter.

Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson is the Irish bookmakers’ favorite to replace Pope Benedict, putting a non-European in pole position to lead the 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic Church for the first time in more than a millennium.

Actually, that’s kind of funny.

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WikiHouse, the “print your own open source pad” project, has called for contributors and cash to help it establish an online archive of downloadable dwelling designs.

The site’s aim is nothing short of the democratisation of the construction industry: to allow, in short, “anyone to design, download and ‘print’ CNC-milled houses and components which can be assembled with minimal formal skill or training,” according to British architect and WikiHouse co-founder Alastair Parvin.

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Green tech boffins at Osaka University have developed new highly efficient solar panel “paper” technology made from wood pulp, and says it is lighter, more flexible and eco-friendly than traditional clunky solar energy collectors.

The solar paper can be less than one millimetre thick thanks to its basic components: transparent cellulose fibres just 15 nanometer thick produced from wood pulp and a thin film of silver wiring.

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They mean ‘journalism based on information gathered by aerial drones’, which is news, not ‘journalists are drones’, which is not news.

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Where she was beheaded, no doubt, because she wasn’t Muslim. Hey … it happens.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Angelina Jolie. I hope.

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‘Britain’s Atlantis’ – a hidden underwater world swallowed by the North Sea – has been discovered by divers working with science teams from the University of St Andrews.

Doggerland, a huge area of dry land that stretched from Scotland to Denmark was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC.

Cue hordes of Global Warming lemming running around and screaming about how we’re all gonna die when the sea levels rise.

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Today, Foursquare is expanding Specials to the rest of the world through partnerships with Visa and MasterCard for both credit and debit cards. This means that Visa and MasterCard can approach Foursquare to reward cardholders for checking in to places like Burger King. Merchants, on the other hand, get enhanced analytics from Foursquare about the kinds of people spending money at their location. “Every person in the US has an American Express, Visa, or MasterCard credit or debit card, and the offers now work for all of them,” Product Manager Noah Weiss says.

I wish someone would tell this to the stupid women who stand in the grocery checkout lane taking half an hour to write a check. Sheesh.

Once you’ve initially added a credit card to your Foursquare account, discounts activate automatically any time you check in to an eligible location, like a restaurant or bar.

My bank has a similar program that gives me rebates (miniscule, but better than nothing) when I shop with local merchants and use their debit card. Once I ‘load’ the discount on the card (which takes about a second), I get the rebate whenever I use the card at that merchant. Since I use the card to pay for damned near everything, it’s totally painless for me. At the end of the month, they total up the rebate and credit my account. Granted, the rebates are miniscule, but they’re nevertheless greater than any interest I could earn on my checking or savings account in the Ben Bernanke Era, so I am content.

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

In fact, the physicists found that just one spider web could do the job — if it were the web of Darwin’s bark spider from Madagascar. The silk has been found to be tougher than any other known material and more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

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In addition to making our lives more comfortable, advancing technology allows us to waste time in ever new and different ways.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Flowers’ methods of communicating are at least as sophisticated as any devised by an advertising agency, according to a new study, published today in Science Express by researchers from the University of Bristol.  However, for any advert to be successful, it has to reach, and be perceived by, its target audience.  The research shows for the first time that pollinators such as bumblebees are able to find and distinguish electric signals given out by flowers.

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Thanks to decades of breeding, the modern agricultural tomato has a lot of properties that are great for farmers: the plants are incredibly productive, and the resulting tomatoes hold up well to shipping. Just one small problem: they are nearly tasteless. Heirloom tomato strains have become available precisely because people aren’t especially interested in the mass-produced, modern tomato.

In the words of a panel at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of science, we “broke” the tomato by allowing the plant breeders to respond to the needs of farmers, instead of the tomato’s end-users: consumers.

Gee, Congress does the same thing. Unfortunately, voters don’t have any panel of scientists to stick up for them.