If you’re looking for a slick way to power your gadgets while away from the civilized world, or if you just want to be the coolest EcoGeek on the block, check out the Power Monkey Explorer. It comes with an adapter plug for just about everything. iPods, USB, European outlets, standard Borg power cuplink, everything.

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Here are my results:

Your Body is Producing 258 Watts!
This is 29% MORE wattage than the average person
You could light up 3 light bulbs
You could power 65 iPods
You could power 1 Xbox 360
4 of you would be needed to keep a refrigerator running

258 WATTS Body Battery Calculator - Find Out How Much Electricity Your Body is Producing

Pew has released an extensive analysis of three decades of its news consumption data. Among the key findings, since the 1980s, the percentage of the public who say they follow news about science and technology “very closely” has dropped by half. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who say they follow personalities and entertainment has doubled.

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A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.

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The problem with being constantly bombarded by information, as we web workers are, is not so much that we can’t deal with it, or that it distracts us from our work, or that it shortens our attention spans or stresses us out. It’s that we have allowed that information to control our lives. Here are 21 tips on how to deal with it.

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The objects scientists think are black holes could instead be wormholes leading to other universes, a new study says.

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What if I told you there was a pill that slows aging and allows you to live a healthy life to age 100? Such a pill may exist right now.

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The DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory says hybrids have saved 230 million gallons of fuel since being introduced to the market.

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“Today Toyota joined almost every other major car company who had already unveiled plans for producing cars that run on energy supplied by the electric grid. Announcing the official plug-in Prius based on the most popular hybrid vehicle to date…”

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By Michael Szabo

QUEENSFERRY (Reuters) - The world’s richest corporations and finest minds spend billions trying to solve the problem of carbon emissions, but three fishing buddies in North Wales believe they have cracked it.

They have developed a box which they say can be fixed underneath a car in place of the exhaust to trap the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming — including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide — and emit mostly water vapor.

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During the early 1900’s, Dr. William Coley re-discovered a cancer treatment that was surprisingly effective. By infecting tumors with common bacteria, Coley learned the body could be triggered to kill off cancerous tumors. Conventional modern medicine rarely employs Coley
’s technique today for 1 reason: they still don’t understand how it works.

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What do you think — meat grows on trees? Maybe not, but how about in Petri dishes? Scientists in the Netherlands and the United States are working (separately) to create edible meat in the lab from animal stem cells.

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Now this is cool! Didn’t Tesla already have this covered when he planned to power the entire planet back almost a hundred years ago now? Hmmm i’ll research that and let you know if I find something . . . OK, in fact, I couldn’t resist and just found something. You can check this out at your leisure if you’re really curious. It’s Tesla’s proposed system to power the world wirelessly dated circa 1900, or so.

http://www.tfcbooks.com/articles/tws8b.htm

-Zack

===============
The latest technical advance out of MIT could dramatically change the drudgery of recharging portable devices: An MIT research team has figured out how to wirelessly illuminate an unplugged light bulb from seven feet away.

Details about WiTricity, or wireless electricity, are scheduled to be reported today in Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said.

In a December story in the Globe, MIT physicist Marin Soljacic sketched out a vision of how everything from iPods to laptops could be wirelessly recharged by using a carefully designed magnetic field to deliver power to such devices from a range of 10 to 15 feet.

Now, MIT said, Soljacic and a research team he works with have some data to begin validating his theory - namely, the successful experiment to light a 60-watt light bulb from a power source two meters away, with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb.

If Soljacic’s idea bears fruit, consumers could be truly unplugged, their rechargers replaced by single device that transmits power wirelessly.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)

Link to original article

“Some 450 million years ago, sharks and humans shared a common ancestor, making sharks our distant cousins.

And according to recent research, this kinship is evident in our DNA, as at least one shark species possesses several genes that are nearly identical to those in humans.”

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Conference Bike!

An odd new material could be a boon in dry regions with limited access to clean water.

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Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:55 PM GMT
By Randall Palmer

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Nerve cells in the pancreas may be a cause of type-1 diabetes in mice — a finding that could provide new ways to treat the disease in humans, Canadian and U.S. scientists said on Friday.

Defective nerve endings may attract immune system proteins that mistakenly attack the pancreas, destroying its ability to make insulin, the researchers said. This destruction is what causes diabetes.

Injecting a piece of protein, or peptide, to repair the defect cured diabetic mice “overnight,” Dr. Hans Michael Dosch of the University of Toronto said in a telephone interview.

“It is very effective in reversing diabetes,” said Dosch, principal investigator for the study.

Writing in the journal Cell, Dosch and colleagues said the faulty nerve endings did not secrete enough of the peptides to keep enough insulin flowing.

Type-1 diabetes, once called juvenile diabetes, affects two million Americans and 200,000 Canadians. There has been no known way of preventing it.

The team will soon begin clinical studies on people whose family history suggests they are at risk of developing type-1 diabetes to see if their sensory nerves work well.

If they do not, Dosch said, that would suggest the bad nerve endings were a cause of diabetes, not only an effect as has been widely assumed.

Trials could then begin injecting peptides into patients with diabetes or those at high risk. It could take a number of years, Dosch said.

He said the findings might also hold promise for type-2 diabetes — which affects about 10 times as many people as type-1 — though the results were not as strong.

The researchers found that the peptide injections lowered resistance to insulin, which is used to move blood glucose to the body’s cells.

People with type-2 diabetes often are obese. By lowering insulin resistance, it might be possible to prevent further obesity and damage from diabetes.

“Whether we can reverse the process, I don’t know. But I think we can certainly impact on the major physiological problem, and that’s insulin sensitivity,” Dosch said.

“So if these people then have normal insulin, then a little activity, then a little walking would actually help lose weight, and then you stop the vicious circle.”

——————
Original article link.

By Gary Krakow
Columnist
MSNBC
Updated: 8:35 p.m. CT Dec 11, 2006

I really like Apple MacBook computers. What’s not to like? They’re beautiful to look at and wonderful to work on. They run on Apple OS X and also let you use Windows XP. They’re well designed, fast and sleek. That’s what I wrote six months ago, when I was lucky enough to get to test what was then a brand new black MacBook.

So when Apple asked me if I’d like to try their new MacBook model — this time with an Intel Core 2 processor and a built-in iSight video camera — I figured why not? The additions could only make for a better computing experience.

I was right.

Apple’s MacBook is their most portable and least expensive laptop. It comes in three configurations: the 1.83GHz model (512 MB memory, 60 GB hard drive, $1,099), the 2.0GHz (1 GB memory, 80 GB drive, $1,299) and the top-of-the-line, 2.0 GHz (1 GB memory, 120 GB drive, $1,499). The two lower-end models are white, while the top-of-the-line MacBook is sleek and black.

Rest of the story is here . . .

DaimlerChrysler today announced that an all-electric version of the Smart Fortwo will be available in the near future. The automaker will first run a market trial for the car over in Britain. Initially, it will be leased to select corporate customers. If all goes well, we may see the car offered in other markets, including here in North America. The Fortwo EV offers even better in-town performance than its gasoline powered stablemate, with 0-30 mph in 6.5 seconds. The Smart EV also sets a new benchmark in the electric vehicle sector; it has 30kW output and a top speed of 70 mph. Smart will begin selling its cars in the United States in 2008. It’s not known if the ‘EV’ model will be ready for mass sale by that time, though it remains a distinct possibility.

original article . . .

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the promise of biofuels (such as ethanol and bio-diesel made from plants) to reduce our dependence on oil. However, to produce enough corn-based ethanol to meet current U.S. demand for gasoline, we would need to nearly double the land used for harvested crops, plant all of it in corn, and not eat any of it.

Fuel from plants? Sounds pretty good. But before you rush out to buy an E-85 pickup, consider:

The United States annually consumes more fossil and nuclear energy than all the energy produced in a year by the country’s plant life, including forests and plants used for food and fiber, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy and Cornell University researcher David Pimentel.

To produce enough corn-based ethanol to meet current U.S. demand for automotive gasoline, we would need to nearly double the land used for harvested crops, plant all of it in corn, and not eat any of it. Even a greener fuel source (such as the switchgrass Bush mentioned, which requires fewer petroleum-based fertilizers and ingredients than corn and reduces topsoil losses by growing back each year) could provide only a small fraction of the energy we demand.

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