Travel Photo of the Week

Seljalandsfoss Waterfall, Iceland

A 3D Fly Through Of London's Science Museum

N-Fix Could Drastically Reduce Fertilizer Use

Good news for farmers and gardeners. Until now, plants have gotten all their nitrogen from the soil, even though there is abundant nitrogen in the air (I wonder how evolution got that one wrong). The use of nitrogen based fertilizers has not been without controversy because they are a huge source of pollution when they wash out of fields and enter watersheds.

Prof. Edward Cocking of the University of Nottingham has developed a nitrogen-fixing bacteria, dubbed N-Fix, that enters through a plant's roots, and then ends up in every cell of the plant, making it possible to use atmospheric nitrogen.

“Helping plants to naturally obtain the nitrogen they need is a key aspect of World Food Security,” says Cocking. “The world needs to unhook itself from its ever increasing reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers produced from fossil fuels with its high economic costs, its pollution of the environment and its high energy costs.”

N-Fix has been in development for 10 years and now has been licensed to Azotic Technologies for commercial production. It is expected to be available worldwide within three years.

What’s Killing Bees

It's not news that bee populations are collapsing. Its cause is news. Scientists studying the problem now
know why.

They looked at the pollen the bees were gathering and found it was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides and  identified eight agricultural chemicals that have been associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite that's been blamed for killing bees, Nosema Ceranae.

But the real killer here seems to be fungicides. Bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite.

The choice before us appears to be no pests and no food or giving up ag chemicals. Seems to me there's no better time to go organic than now.

Fun Time! The Complete Unaired Pilot Of ‘The Monkees’!

Light Completely Stopped For One Minute

I can't exaggerate the importance of this breakthrough.

Researchers have stopped light for a record-breaking minute using lasers and magnets. I won't go into the methods here. If you want to learn more about this, please go to the article in New Science for a layman's view or to Physical Review Letters for the science.

Why is this so important? Two words: quantum computing.

Five Abilities You Need To Master After 50

No one is getting younger and if you're like me (someone over 50), you've seen the world transform several times. It gets to be a pain to wake up in the morning to find life's rug being pulled out from under you. Resilience becomes something that's harder and harder to muster on a daily basis. If only you had a checklist to help remind you to pay attention and keep your eyes on the ball.

This comes from George H. Schofield, Ph.D. who is a business consultant, speaker and professor and is the author of After 50 It’s Up to Us: Developing the Skills and Agility We’ll Need. He offers five skills that will help aging folks navigate the disruptive world we'll all be dealing with. They are.....

1. Identity Ability. Eventually, the roles that define us comes to an end and we have to adapt our sense of self accordingly.

2. Selecting Ability. What happens when you can no longer do something that gave your life meaning? You select other activities that restore that meaning.

3. Meaning-Finding Ability. Managing disruptions that are turning your life upside-down and putting them in perspective can take years. Decide how to put events into context and find ways to add meaning to the time you still have.

4. Community Ability. Your community needs you. Your wisdom. Your experience. Find ways to stay involved.

5. Financial Reality-Check Ability. No matter how well you've planned, you can lose a job, your investments, your savings. You should always be prepared to embark on a new career or find other sources of income to sustain you as you age.

Good advice all, but remember, the main advice here, as the article states at its conclusion, is to expect the unexpected.

SPECIAL! Travel Film of the Week: Burma

Is War A Recent Development?

Does this look like fun to you?

Is it possible that war is a recent development in human history? Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg of Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland think so.

Their recent paper in Science contends that archaeological evidence from Europe, the Middle East and western Asia contains relatively few signs of murder and war until after 10,000 years ago.

Of course this is a controversial notion and many researchers have chimed in with their two cents, but the idea is that before man organized mass killing (warfare), most murder was one-on-one.

Fry and Söderberg used modern nomadic groups as a way to model the past and found that lethal attacks on one community by another rarely occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries, and murders of one person by another in the same group accounted for a majority of intentionally caused deaths. Ten of the hunter-gatherer groups had no recorded killings involving more than one attacker, effectively making those societies no-war zones.

Fry and Söderberg say that this evidence suggests that humans evolved a tendency to avoid killing in general. War originated only within the past 10,000 years, in their view, with armed conflicts intensifying as the first states expanded between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago.

It will be very interesting to see where this line of research leads us. Hopefully the researchers won't organize into opposing sides and attack each other. It seems that's what other groups of humans have learned to do when they disagree.

Town Considering Drone Hunting Licenses And Bounties

Are you paranoid and well armed? Do you think the government is coming to get you? Well then, do I have the town for you!

You need to move to Deer Trail, Colorado, where you soon may be able to hunt and bag drone aircraft.

A proposed town ordinance, drafted by resident Phillip Steel, states that "The Town of Deer Trail shall issue a reward of $100 to any shooter who presents a valid hunting license and the following identifiable parts of an unmanned aerial vehicle whose markings and configuration are consistent with those used on any similar craft known to be owned or operated by the United States federal government."

"They'll sell like hot cakes, and it would be a real drone hunting license," said Steel, "It could be a huge moneymaker for the town."

If passed the license will cost $25 and be valid for one year.

Jeff Bezos Finds An Apollo 11 F-1 Rocket Engine

As a young person in the 1960's there was little more exciting than the Moon landings. Huge Saturn V rockets thrust three men a quarter of a million miles out into space and after it was all done, they would coast back home.

The Saturn rocket itself would be dumped in the ocean minutes after launch, having delivered the acceleration and momentum that would be needed for the tiny capsule and lander to make the journey across the vacuum.

And after all was said and done, only the capsule and men would return, everything else lost in the effort.

Until now.

Back in March, Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions raised Saturn V rocket components from their watery grave in the Atlantic. It has now been confirmed, by the serial numbers on the engine, that Bezo's scored big. He has found one of the engines from the Apollo 11 mission that first put men on the moon.

Here's some video of the recovery.

Super Special Fun Time! William Shakespeare's STAR WARS!

                                    William Shakespeare's Star Wars: An Excerpt

LA To NYC In Under An Hour

Going from New York City to Los Angeles? In a hurry? Tesla's Elon Musk has proposed The Hyperloop, which he has described as being a “cross between a Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table.”

A better description would be a magnetically levitated train-like vehicle suspended in a tube. Sort of like a railgun projectile filled with passengers. In theory, it could be built for a tenth of the cost of high-speed rail and a quarter the cost of a freeway.

The projected cost for a passenger to travel from Los Angeles to New York is $100.

Harvesting The Energy In Human Motion

From MIT's Technology Review comes this article with an idea straight from the Matrix movies. At some point in the not too distant future, almost everything will have an embedded computer and getting all these devices to talk to each other will allow us to do things from track individual pieces of mail to knowing when we're running low on milk.

How to power all this new tech? Batteries are expensive and impractical. Maria Gorlatova and pals at Columbia University in New York who have measured the inertial energy available from the activity of 40 individuals over periods up to 9 days have come up with an answer: human motion.

The article discusses the methods and the amount of energy available from this method and they are not inconsiderable. And here are some of the results of their findings.

             Periodic motion is energy rich. So writing with a pencil generates
             more power (10-15 microwatts) than the acceleration associated
             with a 3-hour flight flight including take off, landing and turbulence,
             which never generated more than 5 microwatts.

             Walking generates the same amount of power as indoor lighting
             (about 150 microwatts). Running generates around 800 microwatts.

             Purposeful shaking generates up to 3,500 microwatts, 30 times
             more than walking.

Now they just have to figure how to collect this wasted energy, instead of just measuring it.

(Time) Travel Photo of the Week

Broadway, NYC 1928

Homemade Pickles

I love pickles. Sweet, dill and especially kosher pickles. I found a great recipe in the New York Times that anyone can try. All you need are water, salt and cucumbers. You can use dill, garlic and even jalapeño and other flavors to make your perfect pickle.

Transparent Aluminum

From makezine.com: "Transparent aluminum starts out as a pile of white aluminum oxynitride powder. That powder gets packed into a rubber mold in the rough shape of the desired part, and subjected to a procedure called isostatic pressing, in which the mold is compressed in a tank of hydraulic fluid to 15,000 psi, which mashes the AlON into a grainy “green body.” The grainy structure is then fused together by heating at 2000 °C for several days. The surface of the resulting part is cloudy, and has to be mechanically polished to make it optically clear."

Monumental Plant Sculptures

At the 2013 Mosaicultures Internationales de Montréal

Fun Time! The Makers Of Things!

The Makers of Things is a short documentary series about the Society of Model and Experimental Engineers, based in London.

Explore Space With Telescopes You Control Over The Internet

Now you can use robotic telescopes to explore the cosmos. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has developed an online interface for users to control 3-foot-tall reflecting telescopes, from their home computers, to capture the light from distant objects in space. Instead of an eyepiece, the telescopes focus their light onto CCDs.

From their website: "This Observing With NASA website is part of a NASA-funded project to make the MicroObservatory robotic telescopes accessible to all audiences who want to appreciate and understand the amazing images and data from NASA's space science missions. Using many of the same technologies that NASA uses to capture astronomical images by controlling telescopes in space, YOU can control a sophisticated ground-based telescope from the convenience of your computer."

First you choose your target are in space and after selecting other parameters, you submit your email address along with your request for the telescope to take the image. Within 48 hours you receive a notification with links to your image.

Spider Web Replicated?

Bullet proof dresses. Cool.

A Japanese company named Spiber, Inc. has created what they are calling artificial spider thread, claiming it is as strong as steel and as flexible as rubber.

Creating synthetic spider silk has long been a goal of the biomimicry crowd. Stronger than steel and at the same weight as nylon but with twice the strength, experts believe that if stranded spider thread were as thick as a pencil, it would be strong enough to stop a jumbo jet in flight.

Many companies have failed in the quest to synthesize spider thread. Spiber's technique is to use bacteria with recombinant DNA to produce the long and complex molecular structure of spider-silk and then isolate those proteins into a fine powder, which can then be extruded through a hollowed-out needle tip to form thread.

I'm thinking that this might be a way to make a space elevator or perhaps some snazzy bullet proof evening wear.

Travel Photo of the Week

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

Reading Is Good For You

Well, duh! What we long time readers have always known has finally been proved.

A recent study, published in Nature, noted that reading and other similar activities reduced the rate of cognitive decline in dementia patients. Other studies have found that the more immediate benefits of reading include an increased tolerance for uncertainty.

As the Atlantic Wire article states, "Besides making you an empathetic, sexy, cultured and all around more interesting human being, reading apparently provides definite benefits to your mental health, sharpening the mind as it ages."

Warmly Wakes You Gently

I'm lucky. I don't need an alarm clock. I have an internal clock that has always allowed me to get up right when I want to.

Most folks aren't as lucky as me and want an alarm that doesn't jar you awake with a barrage of noise that is the sonic equivalent to a baseball bat upside the head.

Warmly is an Android app that begins the wake-up five minutes before the time you've set with a quiet rendition of your selected sound and gradually raises the volume until you're ready to get up and then it gives you the weather. Here's a short video.



For Android - $2.

California Developer Building Survival Shelter and Resort For The Apocalypse

Robert Vicino has found a Kansas cavern that he believes will allow humanity to ride out the end of the world, so he did what any wealthy, red-blooded American male would do. He bought it and now he's turning it into a survival shelter and resort.

"I do believe I am on a mission and doing a spiritual thing," said Mr. Vicino, who has purchased a large portion of the former U.S. Army storage facility on the southeast edge of Atchison, about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City, Mo. "We will certainly be part of the genesis."

Looks cozy, doesn't it?

But before armageddon arrives, he's also saying it "will be a fun place for members to take vacations and learn assorted survival skills to prepare them for whatever world-changing catastrophe awaits."

Here's the link to the original Associated Press article, just in case you want to book a stay.

Fun Time! RAGNAROK, A One-Hour Comedy Special From John Hodgman!

Make some popcorn! The first comedy special by noted humorist John Hodgman is now streaming on Netflix! Here's a minute and a half preview!

IdeaBox (Tiny) Houses

Ideabox offers a group of tiny homes that are gorgeous, if pricey. Priced from $42k-$155k, the site has all the details.

Happy Independence Day!!

Oh and welcome to freedom from work.

Watch Man vs. Machine: Will Human Workers Become Obsolete? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

(Time) Travel Photo of the Week

A shoe salesman with a 1.2 square meter shoe store in London, 1900.

Iris Halmshaw, Autistic Three Year Old Fine Art Genius

Iris Halmshaw is three and a half years old and is autistic. She also makes exquisite abstract art. Here's a link to her website.

Do You Want To Run A Radio Station?

It looks like the FCC is giving the public back a portion of the radio spectrum. Here's how you can start your own radio station.



For more information go the The Prometheus Radio Project website.