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An injectable regenerative gel causes new vessels to grow and restore blood flow in the limbs of diabetic mice with severe vascular disease, and the inventors of the experimental therapy say it could be ready for clinical testing in just a few years.

Peripheral vascular disease is an expensive and often devastating medical condition that affects millions of people and has no long-term treatment options. It is especially prevalent among diabetics, and up to 25 percent of diabetic patients with peripheral vascular disease require amputation. In a recent demonstration using diabetic mice, researchers led by Aaron Baker, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, showed that their regenerative gel restored 85 percent of normal blood flow to limbs with diseased blood vessels.

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Well, duh. They know perfectly well that she can’t be trusted not to throw them under the bus, as she did in Benghazi.

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The method uses solutions of peptide and protein molecules that, upon touching each other, self-assemble to form a dynamic tissue at the point at which they meet. As the material assembles itself it can be easily guided to grow into complex shapes.

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Robots will be the farmers of the future. A company in Japan is building an indoor lettuce farm that will be completely tended by robots and computers. The company, named Spread, expects the factory to open in 2017, and the fully automated farming process could make the lettuce cheaper and better for the environment.

I’m still waiting to see how they’re going to replace the free stuff, like sunlight and dirt and rain.

Creative Kitchen Gadgets site. I have the banana slicer; it works very well, if that’s what you want to do. GBHOME12 coupon code.

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Engineers from GE Global Research unveiled a turbine that could provide power for 10,000 homes. But what’s truly remarkable about this turbine is its potential to solve the world’s energy challenges.

Typically, turbines weigh tons and use steam to run—this one is no bigger than the size of your desk, weighs around 68 kg (150 pounds), and runs on carbon dioxide. “This compact machine will allow us to do amazing things,” said Doug Hofer, lead engineer on the project, in Albany, New York. He continues, “the world is seeking cleaner and more efficient ways to generate power. The concepts we are exploring with this machine are helping us address both.”

The current design of the turbine will allow up to 10,000 kilowatts of energy to be produced; however, researchers are looking into scaling up the technology so that it can generate up to 500 megawatts, which could be enough to power a city.

Well, we’ll see.

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As my wife likes to say, I am duberous.

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Scientists from Virginia Tech and the University of Bristol have revealed how pigment can be detected in mammal fossils, a discovery that may end the guesswork in determining the colors of extinct species.

The researchers discovered the reddish brown color of two extinct species of bat from fossils dating back about 50 million years, marking the first time the colors of extinct mammals have been described through fossil analysis.

The techniques can be used to determine color from well-preserved animal fossils that are up to 300 million years old, researchers said.

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Wating for the eco-Nazis to raise the cry of ‘Frankenfuel!’

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

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Previous research from Duke environmental engineer Ana Barros demonstrated that the regular landfall of tropical cyclones is vital to the region’s water supply and can help mitigate droughts.

Now, a new study from Barros reveals that the increase in forest photosynthesis and growth made possible by tropical cyclones in the southeastern United States captures hundreds of times more carbon than is released by all vehicles in the U.S. in a given year.

Cue conniptions by the Usual Suspects. (‘Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ science?’)

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The Army is developing its weapons, technologies and platforms with a greater emphasis on being ready for great-power, mechanized force-on-force war in order maintain cross-the-board readiness and deter near-peer adversaries from unwanted aggression.

While the service aims to be prepared for any conceivable contingency, to include counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and hybrid-type conflicts, the Army has been shifting its focus from 15-years of counterinsurgency war and pivoting its weapons development toward major-power war.

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Some 1,300 pounds of bronze Roman coins dating to the 3rd and 4th centuries have been unearthed by construction workers digging ditches in Spain.

The find, in 19 amphoras — storage containers — is unique not only because of the volume of coins but because the coins appear to have never been in circulation, making them almost pristine by comparison with other discoveries.

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If Hillary is elected in the fall, we’ll all need to study up.

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For over 250 years it has been believed that the Battle of Crécy, one of the most famous battles of the Middle Ages, was fought just north of the French town of Crécy-en-Ponthieu in Picardy. Now, a new book that contains the most intensive examination of sources about the battle to date, offers convincing evidence that the fourteenth-century battle instead took place 5.5 km to the south.

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a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe – has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump.

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

Suction cup planters.

The Slammer.

CoyoteVest dog body armor.

Mini pick and hook set.

Weed killing steamer.

The Selfie Toaster.

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Next step: Artificial marijuana. (Betcha)

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Medieval people ate a lot of bread. A lot. They ate pounds of bread every day, and even used it as plates – or trenchers – which sounds both practical and delicious (although trencher bread was usually stale). But the bread they ate wasn’t always made of wheat, or even rye. In some parts of Europe, especially the mountainous regions of Italy, France, and Spain, they made their bread out of something that literally grew on trees: chestnuts.

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If you’ve ever used crutches, you know that they can be awful tools that slowly torture you the longer you use them. Thankfully, Mobility Designed realized our long international nightmare and decided to do something about it. The company has designed a crutch from scratch that removes the pressure from underarms and forearms, the traditional load-bearing areas for crutches, and shifts support to the elbows

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Teodoro Obiang Nguema has never received less than 97 per cent of the vote in an election. On Monday, with partial results indicating that 99.2 per cent of the vote has gone in his favour, Equatorial Guinea’s leader was surely all set for another seven years in a seat that has no doubt molded to his figure.

One-sixth of African countries have an executive who has been in power for more than 20 years, which equates to nine out of 54 of the continent’s leaders. Mr Obiang, who took power nearly 37 years ago in a bloody coup, has Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea and King Mswati III of Swaziland for company. But Mr Obiang is most similar to José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola.

Mr Dos Santos and Mr Obiang preside over Africa’s second and third highest crude-oil producers, respectively, and are accused of embezzling much of the resulting wealth, while not distributing it fairly, if at all, to their citizens. Equatorial Guinea, once a Spanish colony, has the biggest gap of any country worldwide between its per-capita wealth and its human development index – a sure sign that there are a few outliers skewing the per-capita figure way upwards.

No doubt they are victims of White Privilege.

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For decades, futurists have predicted that commercial miners would one day tap the unimaginable mineral wealth of the world’s ocean floor. Soon, that subsea gold rush could finally begin: The world’s first deep-sea mining robots are poised to rip into rich deposits of copper, gold, and silver 1,600 meters down at the bottom of the Bismarck Sea, near Papua New Guinea. The massive machines, which are to be tested sometime in 2016, are part of a high-stakes gamble for the Toronto-based mining company Nautilus Minerals.

Saw that coming.

“Everyone deserves to feel like they belong. And you’ll always be accepted, respected, and welcomed at Target.”

Unless you’re normal.

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LOOKING somewhat like a stormtrooper from “Star Wars”, Martin “The Wolf” Söderström, a Swedish devotee of kung fu, raps a heavy fighting stick down onto the arm of his opponent, who is clad in similar attire. At the other side of the room a computer quickly determines if the blow would have caused a bruise or a fracture if his adversary had not been so protected. Welcome to a new world of violent martial arts brought to you by advances in materials and microelectronics.

Ordinarily, Mr Söderström would not be able to fight like this. His punches would have to be pulled to avoid causing serious or even fatal injuries. Chunky body protectors and helmets offer fighters more defence from harm, but such gear also slows and restricts their movements. Nor does it make scoring any easier. Would whacking that stick over his opponent’s head, for instance, have broken his skull, or delivered but a glancing blow?

The armoured body suit which Mr Söderström and his opponent are wearing is called the Lorica. It has been developed by Chiron Global, an Australian firm. At just 19 kilos, it is neither too heavy nor cumbersome to prevent even aerial cartwheels, but it is tough enough to render painless a powerful sword strike to the head or the chest, says Mr Söderström.

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Austria’s far-right, anti-immigrant party has come out comfortably on top in Austria’s presidential vote.

Early results released by the country’s election authorities appear to show the candidate of the right-wing Freedom Party taking 35 per cent of the vote, leaving his two establishment rivals with not much more than 10 per cent each.

Norbert Hofer has run on a pro-gun manifesto, carrying his Glock pistol with him on the campaign trail and declaring that the public arming themselves is a logical reaction to the influx of refugees as part of the pan-European crisis.

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A fascinating detective story.

Ho-Mi Korean Hand Tool.

Survival tube. I am not making this up.

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Construction workers on some sites are getting new, non-union help. SAM – short for semi-automated mason – is a robotic bricklayer being used to increase productivity as it works with human masons.

SAM and a human mason work together. SAM repetitively lays bricks, leaving the detailed finishing touches to the mason.
In this human-robot team, the robot is responsible for the more rote tasks: picking up bricks, applying mortar, and placing them in their designated location. A human handles the more nuanced activities, like setting up the worksite, laying bricks in tricky areas, such as corners, and handling aesthetic details, like cleaning up excess mortar.

Even in completing repetitive tasks, SAM still has to be fairly adaptable. It’s able to complete precise and level work while mounted on a scaffold that sways slightly in the wind. The robot can correct for the differences between theoretical building specifications and what’s actually on site, says Scott Peters, cofounder of Construction Robotics, a company based in Victor, New York, that designed SAM as its debut product.

Let me guess — it doesn’t get $15 an hour, or benefits. Nor does it take lunch breaks, vacation, or call in sick.

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One of the most sinister developments of our time is the Left’s use of both criminal investigation and mob harassment to suppress dissent. An outrageous instance of this trend is the effort by 20 Democratic state Attorneys General to investigate ExxonMobil and others for criminal “fraud,” i.e., carrying out research that doesn’t support the hysterical exaggerations of the Climatistas.

One of the leaders of this attempt to suppress scientific debate is California’s Attorney General, Kamala Harris. She has initiated a purported investigation into “whether Exxon Mobil Corp. repeatedly lied to the public and its shareholders about the risk to its business from climate change — and whether such actions could amount to securities fraud and violations of environmental laws.”

Kamala Harris is running for the Senate. As part of her campaign, she has sought press coverage of her attacks on “dark money,” i.e., money the Democrats don’t control. Harris has demanded that conservative 501(c)(3) organizations file their federal IRS Form 990s, including Schedule B, which identifies donors, with her office. Her obvious intent was either to publicize the names of donors, which are confidential under federal law, so that they could be threatened by liberals, or else to shut them up herself through bogus investigations.

Americans For Prosperity brought an action in federal court, seeking an injunction barring Harris from seeking Schedule B to its Form 990. Today, following a full trial on the merits, Federal Judge Manuel Real granted AFP’s motion and issued a permanent injunction against the Attorney General.

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After years of complaining that America’s paper money featured only dead white guys, a lot of folks on the Left are in a snit that Harriet Tubman is going to replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the twenty-dollar bill. You can practically hear them: “We didn’t mean a gun-toting, Bible-believing Republican black woman! We meant Angela Davis!

Of course, if anyone in the Obama administration knew any history, I’m sure they would have picked Rosa Parks (or Rosa Luxemburg). But they don’t. Pass the popcorn.

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Researchers have demonstrated 3D printing of micron-scale optics with unprecedented performance and reproducibility. Their approach can be used to create almost any type of integrated optical element on a micron or smaller scale, which could help miniaturize instruments and devices used in applications from sensing to telecommunications.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. Think of it as evolution in action.

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The Army’s new plug-and-play network for missile defense passed its third flight test on April 8th. In a particularly complex exercise, the Integrated Air & Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) controlled two types of radar and two types of Patriot missile shooting down two types of incoming missile in the same engagement, contractor Northrop Grumman announced today. Next up for the program — its “Milestone C” review to determine whether IBCS can move from development into production.

IBCS is intended to connect the current arsenal of stand-alone systems into a greater whole, one in which any shooter — including potential future weapons such as lasers — can get firing data from any sensor. In a previous test in November, for example, a low-altitude cruise missile threat evaded a Patriot radar but got picked up by a Sentinel — originally designed for short-range anti-aircraft fire, not missile defense. With both radars plugged into IBCS, the network fed the Sentinel’s targeting data to a Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) launcher for a successful shoot down.

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Precision medicine, an emerging field in which treatments are tailored to an individual’s genes, environment and lifestyle, is on the cutting edge of cancer treatment. President Obama launched his Precision Medicine Initiative earlier this year; several research institutions have undertaken large-scale clinical trials in which patients with different diseases can enroll, one of which was conducted by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with results published last week. And while some patients like Swain have benefitted from what researchers have figured out so far, precision medicine isn’t nearly as widespread—or precise—as proponents want it to be. To bring this field to its full potential, researchers will need to figure out how to best tailor treatments to suit every patient’s biological differences. And the more they learn, the more difficult that seems.

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Watch the imprint of a tire track in soft mud, and it will slowly blur, the ridges of the pattern gradually flowing into the valleys. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have tested the theory that a similar effect could be used to give forensic scientists something they’ve long wished for: A way to date fingerprints.

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Introduced from Asia in the late 19th century as a garden novelty, but not widely planted until the 1930s, kudzu is now America’s most infamous weed. In a few decades, a conspicuously Japanese name has come to sound like something straight from the mouth of the South, a natural complement to inscrutable words like Yazoo, gumbo and bayou.

…

Now that scientists at last are attaching real numbers to the threat of kudzu, it’s becoming clear that most of what people think about kudzu is wrong. Its growth is not “sinister,” as Willie Morris, the influential editor of Harper’s Magazine, described in his many stories and memoirs about life in Yazoo City, Mississippi. The more I investigate, the more I recognize that kudzu’s place in the popular imagination reveals as much about the power of American mythmaking, and the distorted way we see the natural world, as it does about the vine’s threat to the countryside.

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In food processing technologies, Knight devoted most attention to those having to do the grains, so important for bread, beer, and other foodstuffs, dairy, ice and sugar.  It was still early in the industrialization of food processing.  He has little or nothing on canning and bottling (except for wine), on meat, on fats and oils, and even where the grains are concerned, little on roller milling or on the mechanization of baking.  All those were in the future.

But you can see the future coming.  Inventors are busy on all the heavy, onerous tasks of grinding and of moving liquids around (like milk in creameries), on ways to reduce heat (condensing pans), on ways to preserve food (ice), on ways to package food for transport (barrels), all employing the power of steam (or particularly in the United States with its many rivers, water) to do the work.

PolyScience Control Freak Induction Cooker.

Trash Krusher.

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If this sounds like the Cold War is returning to Europe, it is. There are other signs of this. For example the Americans are reviving the REFORGER exercises. As part of this the U.S. Army plans to store more pre-positioned military equipment in Europe and have brigades move their personnel to Europe for training with that equipment each year. The pre-positioning of equipment continued after the Cold War ended in 1991 but the annual troop movement exercises (REFORGER) to use the pre-positioned equipment stopped. Now it is being resumed with at least one brigade a year being sent to Europe to use the pre-positioned equipment for training exercises aimed at defending East Europe against Russia. Just like the Cold War, except then the Russian armies were already in East Europe before 1991 and it was Western Europe being defended.

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There you go. Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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

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Much like Helen Thomas.

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Genes, like people, have families — lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member. That ancestor multiplied and spread, morphing a bit with each new iteration.

For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that this was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions.

Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. They’re the molecular equivalent of a mysterious beast discovered in the depths of a remote rainforest, a biological enigma seemingly unrelated to anything else on earth.

The mystery of where these orphan genes came from has puzzled scientists for decades. But in the past few years, a once-heretical explanation has quickly gained momentum — that many of these orphans arose out of so-called junk DNA, or non-coding DNA, the mysterious stretches of DNA between genes. “Genetic function somehow springs into existence,” said David Begun, a biologist at the University of California, Davis.

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Not mentioned: How many illegal immigrants (excuse me, ‘refugees’) hitched a ride on their way to jihad in Molenbeek because robot drivers aren’t built to notice such things (that would be raaaaaaacist.)

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I wasn’t.

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According to Llanberis Mountain Rescue, a 30-year-old man was part of a group of three who were climbing the Crib Goch ridge – which means “red ridge” in Welsh and is over 3,000ft above sea level – when the incident happened at around 1pm on Sunday.

It is believed the group had already turned back due to heavy snow.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Someday, when someone says you’re the very picture of health, they won’t mean your health.

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“The ship? Great God, where is the ship?,” wondered the fictional sailors crewing Captain Ahab’s mighty Pequod, right after the legendary whale Moby Dick rammed the vessel, tearing it asunder. The sudden, apocalyptic climax of Herman Melville’s iconic novel is rich with meaning, and nestled inside it is a deep, enduring scientific question: Could a sperm whale like Moby Dick actually ram a ship apart, and survive?

The answer, according to research from Olga Panagiotopoulou at the University of Queensland, is a resounding “probably.”

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.