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MonthJuly 2009

‘Synthetic tree’ claims to catch carbon in the air

July 13, 2009 /

Scientists in the United States are developing a “synthetic tree” capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.

As the wind blows though plastic “leaves,” the carbon is trapped in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid carbon dioxide.

The technology is similar to that used to capture carbon from flue stacks at coal-fired power plants, but the difference is that the “synthetic tree” can catch carbon anytime, anywhere.

“Half of your emissions come from small, distributed sources where collection at the site is either impossible or impractical,” said Professor Klaus Lackner, Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University.

“We aim for applications like gasoline in cars or jet fuel in airplanes. We are going after CO2 that otherwise is nearly impossible to collect,” he told CNN.

CNN: ‘Synthetic tree’ claims to catch carbon in the air

(Thanks Bill)

Infant-Sized Teenager May Provide Key to Reversing the Aging Process

July 13, 2009 /

Brooke Greenberg looks like a toddler, but she is actually sixteen years old. She is only 30 inches high. Now scientists are studying her genome to figure out whether she possesses a mutation that prevents her body from aging.

Greenberg also possesses the mental capacity of an infant, and has never learned to speak or eat on her own.

She has also suffered from several strange maladies, including burst ulcers, a stroke and a brain tumor, which healed after Greenberg appeared on the verge of death.

It’s unclear whether her capacity to heal is related to her agelessness, but researchers hope to find out.

I09: Infant-Sized Teenager May Provide Key to Reversing the Aging Process

Thanks to Bill Whitcomb, who notes: ” Poor kid. Apart from having spent 16 years as toddler, she’ll NEVER get away from the doctors. She’s too interesting.”

Game with AI designed weapons

July 10, 2009 /

gar weapons

Galactic Arms Race is a free computer game created by University of Central Florida’s Evolutionary Complexity Research Group. It appears to be a traditional sci-fi blaster game, with a twist: the various “power-up” weapons are created by the game, based on actual user behavior.

For example, the “Ultrawide” (above) “fires a wide pattern that is good for blocking incoming projectiles and is hard to evade.”

Galactic Arms Race

(via Chris 23)

Want to support this year’s EsoZone? Sponsor or donate

July 10, 2009 /

Click here to lend your support to: EsoZone Portland 2009 and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

EsoZone Portland 2009 admission is free. We are funding this year’s event through sponsorships, merchandise, individual donations. We hope to raise as much in individual sponsorships as the cost of a single sponsorship fee – $250.

Speaking of which, if you’re interested in sponsoring, you can find more information here.

Future of work?

July 9, 2009 /

I’m trying to compile non-draconian visions of “the future of work.” I’m interested in both fiction and non-fiction – anything that rethinks the way people in large organizations get their work done. Examples:

–Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling, and his vision of a large multinational co-op.
–Hacking Business Models
–Get Back in the Box by Douglas Rushkoff. Not sure about this one, haven’t read it yet.

I’m particularly interested in:
-Anything that deals with larger scale organizations (it’s relatively easy to have an “alternative” work organization in a group of 10, much harder as it scales up to 50, 150, 5,000, etc)
-Anything that deals with non-knowledge work – manufacturing, restaurants, etc.

What I’m not interested:

-Orwellian visions of work (ie, Snow Crash)
-Regressive visions of work (returns to small tribal systems – ie, primitivist visions, Bolo’Bolo, etc.)
-Anything that deals only with establishing worker owned co-ops without any other rethinking.

Photos: Rice paddy crop art (2009)

July 9, 2009 /

rice paddy cropart 1

rice paddy cropart 2

More pics at Pink Tentacle: Photos: Rice paddy crop art

Chillout, an ice bar in Dubai

July 9, 2009 /

the ice bar

My friend Fred snapped some shots of Chillout, an ice bar, during his trip to Dubai.

More Pics: Simnatic

Incredible Shadow Art Created From Junk

July 9, 2009 /

shadow art from garbage

shadow art from garbage 2

British-born and -based artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster skilfully skirt the boundaries between beauty and the shadowier aspects of humanity, playing with our perceptions as well as our notions of taste. Many of their most notable pieces are made from piles of rubbish, with light projected against them to create a shadow image entirely different to that seen when looking directly at the deliberately disguised pile.

Environmental Graffiti: Incredible Shadow Art Created From Junk

(via Grinding)

“Mirror neurons” – real or not?

July 8, 2009 /

Oliver Morin at the International Cognition and Culture Institute sheds some light on the history of the science of “mirror neurons” and the recent study that found no evidence that they exist in humans. Long story short: the evidence has always been sketchy but played up to stimulate interest in science journals.

Oliver’s Blog: “No evidence of Human Mirror Neurons”

(Hat tip to Matthew Godwin, whose link to lead me to find the above link)

Can we transition to renewable fuels?

July 7, 2009 /

Jeff Vail concludes his series on the “Renewables Hump”:

It was my plan to conclude this series by answering (with pretty graphs, no less!) several questions like this. However, I fear that such an exercise is largely meaningless: I have been unable to come up with a verifiable proxy for EROEI measurement, and without that I would only be addressing hypotheticals. Worse, questions that will be permanently hypothetical.

Instead, I am left with only a confirmed sense of uncertainty. Perhaps that uncertainty is itself valuable. If I have poked holes in (what I believe to be) the widespread assumption that we can surely transition to a renewables-driven economy if only we make the decision to do so, then perhaps this series has been of value. If I shift the discussion (even only in my own mind) toward what to do in light of this uncertainty, then I will feel that this has been worthwhile. It is in answer to this last question that I am most excited: I plan to focus more in the future on decentralized, networked, open-source, platform-based systems that we can use to simultaneously build resiliency, address this fundamental uncertainty, and address the problem of growth by reducing the hierarchal nature of our civilization.

Jeff Vail: The Renewables Hump 7: Can We Transition?

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