Items like cell phones and other modern electronic devices are dependent on supplies of rare-earth elements like neodymium. WASHINGTON, D.C. – Karl A. Gschneidner Jr., a senior metallurgist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, today cautioned members of a Congressional panel that “rare-earth research in the USA on mineral extraction, rare-earth separation, processing of the oxides into metallic alloys and other useful forms, substitution, and recycling is virtually zero.” |
Cheaper, greener magnets hint at other advanced technologies, such as improved batteries and magnetic refrigeration, that could result from increased research into rare-earth materials. |
| Though little known outside of research circles, rare-earth magnetic alloys can be used to manufacture highly efficient and green cooling devices that Gschneidner and others believe could reduce the nation’s energy consumption by 5 percent |
“Europe and China are moving rapidly in this area,” Gschneidner told panel members, “the USA needs to put together a strong, cohesive effort to retain our disappearing leadership in this technology.” Read more at www.sciencecodex.com |
Ideas, issues, knowledge, data – visualized!
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SnakeOil? Scientific evidence for health supplements |
I’m a bit of a health nut. Keeping fit. Streamlining my diet. I plan to live to the age of 150 in fact. But I get frustrated by constant, conflicting reports and studies about health supplements. |
Is Vitamin C worth taking or not? Does Echinacea kill colds? Am I missing out not drinking litres of Goji juice, wheatgrass extract and flaxseed oil every day? |
We only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our data scrape – wherever possible. No animal trials. No cell studies. Many of the health claims made by the $23 billion supplements industry are based on non-human trials. We wanted to cut through that. Read more at www.informationisbeautiful.net |
I kind of have to wonder if this didn’t get stuck into the text by someone trying to make the South Dakotans look bad. (And by the way, “thermology” means the medical use of thermal imaging. Looks like someone forgot to check their Wikipedia before drafting this.)
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363R0643
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HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 1009
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| A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for balanced teaching of global warming in the
public schools of South Dakota |
| WHEREAS, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for
all plant life on earth. Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as “the gas of life” |
| NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South
Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming
include the following:
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| (1) That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact |
| (2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological,
cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and
that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculativeRead more at legis.state.sd.us |
I knew there was a reason I was feeling a little sleep-deprived. It was that extra 1.26 microseconds we lost. | Chilean Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days |
The Feb. 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day.
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JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).
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Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).
Read more at www.nasa.gov |
Why Biology And Sex Is The Future Of Automotive Design |
Is that a Porsche in your pocket? |
| What Saad and Vongas discovered is that, while driving a Porsche certainly sends signals of conspicuous consumption to the world, a 911 literally makes a driver more potent from a biological standpoint, whether or not there are witnesses to your possession of the car. A Porsche driver, science says, no matter where or how they drive, have higher testosterone levels than if they were stuck in a sedan. By driving a Porsche they become more potent competitors in the game of life, presumably upping their ability to continue to do whatever they were doing to enable them to procure a Porsche in the first place. One might argue that, rather than costing more because marketers tell us they’re worth it, Porsches are expensive because our genes value them so highly. In so far as they give us a reproductive advantage, their value is an intrinsic quality, not a social, Veblenesque construct.Read more at autos.aol.com |
An editorial from 2007 shows how research into three promising anticancer drugs has been abandoned. The reason is that the compounds on which the drugs are based cannot be patented (melatonin, for example), which means that pharma companies are unlikely to turn a profit. Understandable, from the perspective of the pharma companies, but unconscionable, from the perspective of cancer patients. WE could make faster progress against cancer by changing the way drugs are developed. In the current system, if a promising compound can’t be patented, it is highly unlikely ever to make it to market — no matter how well it performs in the laboratory. The development of new cancer drugs is crippled as a result. |
Early this year, another readily available industrial chemical, dichloroacetate, was found by researchers at the University of Alberta to shrink tumors in laboratory animals by up to 75 percent. However, as a university news release explained, dichloroacetate is not patentable, and the lead researcher is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test the chemical. So the university is soliciting public donations to finance a clinical trial. |
I’m actually clipping this not because I find the news particularly interesting or shocking, but because I find the wording of the excerpt from the biology textbook kind of interesting: “God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. ” This emphasis on separateness and uniqueness seems characteristic of creationist thinking. Fundamentalist exams on a par with A-levels |
Evangelical course that treats Nessie as fact endorsed by government agency |
Exams for an Evangelical Christian curriculum in which pupils have been taught that the Loch Ness monster disproves evolution and racial segregation is beneficial have been ruled equivalent to international A- levels by a UK government agency. |
Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. |
Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur. |
No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all.” Extract from Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc. (1995) Read more at www.tes.co.uk |
Annals of De-mining
Man, Mongoose, and Machine
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A trained mongoose sniffs the ground in search of mines. Behind the mongoose is an impediment sensor, which tells the robots (below) if it has bumped into something too solid to push out of the way.
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Standing outside a Sri Lankan army base in the spring of 2007, Thrishantha Nanayakkara mapped an entire minefield without once setting foot in it. Nanayakkara held a remote control and periodically made a note on his computer. A mongoose hitched to a robot did most of the work. |
| Nanayakkara, a visiting scholar at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a 2008-09 Radcliffe Institute fellow, picked an indigenous mongoose for its temperament, size (roughly 2.5 kilograms, light enough to step on a mine without detonating it), and sense of smell (able to detect explosives three meters away). He equipped his robot (roughly a meter long and half a meter wide) with a harness to keep the mongoose under control and a video cameraSee more at harvardmagazine.com |
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