Take a vacation and visit this cool engineering project: Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa Rangali Island (they broke link so I removed it).
Related: Travel Guide Books – Curious Cat Travels – travel photo essays – The Red Sea Star (another undersea restaurant)
Having fun is good, but the real key is creating environments where learning is fun, as is the case here. I believe people naturally learn and the largely learn to suppress that desire when subjected to bad formal education as they learn to equate learning with bad experiences.
Related: Middle School Engineers – Engineering Education Advocate – Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology – Building minds by building robots – Lego Learning (June 2006)
Commercialization and Future Developments in Bionanotechnology by Marcel P. Bruchez:
Interesting paper, from The Bridge, an open-access publication of the National Academy of Engineering. This issue includes papers from the 12th U.S. Frontiers of Engineering including: New Mobility: The Next Generation of Sustainable Urban Transportation and Creating Intelligent Agents in Games.
The health benefits of 40 winks
Too tired to work? Then have a snooze:
A nap a day keeps lost productivity at bay
Related: Taking a nice nap could save your life – – Alertness Management: Strategic Naps in Operational Settings (NASA) – Snooze, You Win – Bosses, let your people nap – Take a Nap! Change Your Life (book)
I bought an avocado a the supermarket yesterday. While eating some today I decided to search the internet for some nutritional information. That info wasn’t that interesting to me, but I did find this interesting: the avocado fruit does not ripen on the tree. When it is harvested it will ripen. If the fruit is picked once it reaches maturity, and will then ripen in a few days. This can be speed up by putting the avocado in a paper bag and speed up more if other fruit such as bananas are included, because of the influence of ethylene gas.
Anyway I found the information interesting 🙂 Related: Bannanas Going Going Gone – Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. – Drinking Soda and Obesity
Patenting Life by Michael Crichton (new book = Next, also The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park…):
Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldn’t somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitor’s test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you can’t even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property.
This bizarre situation has come to pass because of a mistake by an underfinanced and understaffed government agency. The United States Patent Office misinterpreted previous Supreme Court rulings and some years ago began — to the surprise of everyone, including scientists decoding the genome — to issue patents on genes.
This has to be fixed, and here is one way that might help: Continue reading
3-D seismic model of vast water reservoir revealed:
Previous predictions calculated that a cold ocean slab sinking into the earth at 1,200 to 1,4000 kilometers beneath the surface would release water in the rock that would escape the rock and rise up to a region above it, but this was never previously observed.
“That is exactly what we show here, the exact depth and high attenuation amounts right above it,” Wysession said. “I call it the Beijing anomaly. Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it’s quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water. The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water.
“If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.”
Close Look at Human Arm Finds Host of Microbes:
The work is part of a broader effort by a small coterie of scientists to better understand the microbial world that populates the human body. Virtually every orifice and the digestive tract are swarming with bacteria, fungi and other microbes. By some estimates, only one out of every 10 cells in the body is human.
…
Blaser’s team swabbed an area of skin about the size of silver dollar on the right and left forearms of three healthy men and three healthy women. They then used sophisticated molecular techniques to amplify and analyze fragments of bacterial DNA captured by the swabs. The analysis revealed 182 species, the researchers reported. Of those, 30 had never been seen. They identified an additional 65 species when they sampled four of the volunteers eight to 10 months later, including 14 new species.
DNA Transcription webcast – via How DNA transcription works
Produced by The World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) at North Dakota State University faculty dedicated to developing internet-based educational software. Funded by NSF and the US Department of Education.
Related: RNA interference webcast – More Great Webcasts: Nanotech and more – Directory of Science and Engineering Webcast Libraries
Mini helicopter masters insect navigation trick:
Previous experiments involving bees suggest that optical flow is crucial to landing. Maintaining a constant optical flow while descending should provide a constant height-to-groundspeed ratio, which makes a bee slowdown as it approaches the ground. Distorting this optical flow can cause them to crash land instead.
Related: Autonomous Flying Vehicles – World’s Lightest Flying Robot – Why Insects Can’t Fly Straight at Night