flickering pictures

A California company called LS9 says it has done the impossible: come up with cheap, homegrown, renewable “carbon-negative” oil to satisfy the world’s growing fuel needs. With bug poo.
From the Times:

To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs -– very, very small ones –- so that when they feed on agricultural waste such […]

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Interested yet?
Having cured cancer and solved world hunger, U.S. researchers have focused their skills and public research dollars on an age-old quandary: why is James Bond sexy?
From the New Scientist:

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, […]

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The New Scientist reports that over 20 years and 44,000 generations in the lab, a particular population of Escherichia coli (or E. coli for short) bacteria have evolved the ability to metabolize citrate, a nutrient that the bacteria normally can’t use. This is a big deal — something akin to humans developing the ability […]

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From Science News:

You bite into a piece of candy and find a cricket leg. Eewwww. Or notice that raisin in a bowl of cereal has legs and wings. Bam, down the disposal it goes. Such filth in foods is supposedly illegal, but the Food and Drug Administration’s actual tolerance is far from zero. FDA rules […]

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The folks at Damn Interesting have done it again — this time with a great piece by Alan Bellows on the origins of eugenics, the practice of selectively breeding humans for the purpose of improving the gene pool.
From the article:

In 1865, Darwin’s half-cousin Sir Francis Galton pried the lid from yet another worm-can with the […]

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In the spirit of uncovering weird and wonderful things, here’s a link to Divine Caroline, which features pics and tidbits on some of the world’s strangest plants.
Up top is welwitschia mirabilis, which apparently has only two leaves in that entire writhing mass of foliage. The one at right is amorphophallus, which translates from the […]

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British Columbia’s forests are being ravaged by a scourge of tiny pine beetles, which are turning lush green trees into rotting pulp at an alarming rate. The beetles are killing so many trees that the greenhouse gases released by decomposing wood are expected to outweigh all similar gases emitted by BC’s 4.5 million residents […]

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