Japanese Technology May Help Islands Reap Pacific's Waters

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

YOTO, Japan, March 22 — A number of Pacific island nations are discussing using new Japanese technology that can both desalinate seawater for drinking and produce electricity by exploiting the difference in temperatures between the surface of the sea and the depths of the ocean.

The Republic of Palau in the western Pacific is working with Saga University in southern Japan to build a system that can produce enough drinking water to meet the needs of its 20,000 residents, while producing electricity, said the country's president, Tommy Remengesau Jr.

Japanese Technology May Help Islands Reap Pacific's Waters

Move your mouse over any element in the table to learn more about it. The Haiku field will have either a 'Y' or an 'N' to indicate if that element has a haiku associated with it. Click on the element to open a pop-up window and read the haiku.
For ease of use, a "flattened" table of all elements is below the periodic Table. You can click on an element name there to view the haiku associated with it there as well. Additionally, there is a link for browsers that do not support javascript for the pop-up window

Haiku Periodic Table

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer - New Scientist

LOS ANGELES --

Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to venture out of the solar system, has fallen silent after traveling billions of miles from Earth on a mission that has lasted nearly 31 years, NASA said Tuesday.

What was apparently the spacecraft's last signal was received Jan. 22 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network. At the time, Pioneer 10 was 7.6 billion miles from Earth; the signal, traveling at the speed of light, took 11 hours and 20 minutes to arrive.

HoustonChronicle.com - Lonely Pioneer 10 phones home for last time

Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA.

A year ago, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips. Now the team has gone one step further. In the new device, the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel.

Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes

quoted (use cpunk@cpunk.com as email address for login) :
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Systems biologists envision a hulking database where all biological knowledge can be stored, freely accessed, and designed to interact. From it, researchers could easily extract data to construct virtual molecular pathway models working in their respective networks and in dynamic contexts of time, space, and various environmental cues. Hypotheses could be plucked like apples from the electronic tree of knowledge, and drug targets would fall like leaves. Some want to play out this tremendous vision, but they know it cannot be done at a single lab, by a single investigator. Members of Alliance for Cellular Signaling (AfCS), call for a new scientific world order--a shift toward socialist science.

...

The real difficulty, however, could lie in redirecting the scientific mind from individual to collective. The AfCS comprises more than 50 investigators from 20 academic and industrial institutions, and has garnered financial support from pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lily and Company and Johnson & Johnson. Gilman, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize for discovering G proteins asks, "Can we get the community to behave in a benevolent, interactive, cooperative manner? Only time will tell."

The Scientist :: The People's Biology, Feb. 24, 2003

RUSSELS -- Last week I went to lunch at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Davos, Switzerland, and discovered why America and Europe are at odds. At the bottom of the lunch menu was a list of the countries that the lamb, beef and chicken came from. But next to the meat imported from the U.S. was a tiny asterisk, which warned that it might contain genetically modified organisms — G.M.O.'s.

My initial patriotic instinct was to order the U.S. beef and ask for it "tartare," just for spite. But then I and my lunch guest just looked at each other and had a good laugh. How quaint! we said. Europeans, out of some romantic rebellion against America and high technology, were shunning U.S.-grown food containing G.M.O.'s — even though there is no scientific evidence that these are harmful. But practically everywhere we went in Davos, Europeans were smoking cigarettes — with their meals, coffee or conversation — even though there is indisputable scientific evidence that smoking can kill you. In fact, I got enough secondhand smoke just dining in Europe last week to make me want to have a chest X-ray.

Ah, Those Principled Europeans

] LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists are turning to desktop
] printers in an effort to produce three-dimensional tubes
] of living tissue and possibly even entire organs.
] Instead of using a degradable scaffold and covering it
] with cells to produce tissue, scientists in the United
] States are modifying ink jet printers and using cells to
] create 3D structures.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

How mushrooms will save the world
Cleaning up toxic spills, stopping poison-gas attacks, and curing deadly diseases: Fungus king Paul Stamets says there's no limit to what his spores can do.

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By Linda Baker

Nov. 25, 2002 | Once you've heard "renaissance mycologist" Paul Stamets talk about mushrooms, you'll never look at the world -- not to mention your backyard -- in the same way again. The author of two seminal textbooks, "The Mushroom Cultivator" and "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms," Stamets runs Fungi Perfecti, a family-owned gourmet and medicinal mushroom business in Shelton, Wash. His convictions about the expanding role that mushrooms will play in the development of earth-friendly technologies and medicines have led him to collect and clone more than 250 strains of wild mushrooms -- which he stores in several on- and off-site gene libraries.

Salon.com Technology | How mushrooms will save the world

Aerogel is a silicon-based solid with a porous, sponge-like structure in which 99.8 percent of the volume is empty space. By comparison, aerogel is 1,000 times less dense than glass, another silicon-based solid. Discovered in the 1930s by a Stanford University researcher, aerogel is the world's lightest solid.

JPL Technology Feature - Spotlight: Ideas that Gel