we are the people we have been waiting for

thanks to tom friedman at the ny times for pointing out this website: vehicle design summit. if you have any interest in alternative resources of energy, and particularly a vehicle "designed to maximize occupant, pedestrian and environmental safety", then you may be interested in these guys. tired of waiting for governments and businesses to put aside short-term goals in favour of long-term solutions, the vds mission statement asserts that they "will begin by assembling a global consortium of the world's leading thinkers, dreamers, revolutionaries and change agents to develop the collaborative framework necessary to harness the world's genius, imagination and inspiration." Who are they? check them out at the people menu on the website. this appears to have begun at m.i.t., so as a temporary local i may feel some local pride. or not. i await further developments.

o yeah, and the title is also from the mission statement!

good news for frogs

yahoo reports:

"by Miwa Suzuki Thu Sep 27, 2:54 PM ET
TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese researchers have succeeded in producing see-through frogs, letting them observe organs, blood vessels and eggs under the skin without performing dissections."You can see through the skin how organs grow, how cancer starts and develops," said the lead researcher Masayuki Sumida, professor at the Institute for Amphibian Biology of state-run Hiroshima University. "You can watch organs of the same frog over its entire life as you don't have to dissect it. The researcher can also observe how toxins affect bones, livers and other organs at lower costs," he told AFP. Dissections have become increasingly controversial in much of the world, particularly in schools where animal rights activists have pressed for humane alternatives such as using computer simulations."

the rest of it is here.

as far as i can recall, i never dissected anything at school. we were a bunch of wusses anyway in our early days at spgs. the day we were supposed to look at blood under the microscope, charlotte ward slipped with her scalpel and before she was taken to the nurse, we borrowed some of her blood rather than slice ourselves up. nu - well done you japanese researchers!

the power of chocolate?

damn and blast the bbc! today they had a report online that debunks the well-known scientific fact that eating chocolate makes us feel better.

"Peter Rogers, professor of biological psychology from Bristol University who is speaking at the BA Festival of Science in York, has carried out research that suggests this is not the case.

... he suggested that chocoholics were chocoholics because their favourite food was often deemed "naughty but nice". He explained: "The nice bit is its sweet taste, lovely melt-in-the-mouth texture, and our associations that we have in our food culture - we use it as a gift, a reward and as something to treat ourselves with - which gives it extra appeal. On the negative side, it is something we shouldn't eat too much of, it's not a staple food in our diet, it is relatively high in fat and sugar, and therefore potentially unhealthy. It is this that makes us want it so much. We are wrestling with the desire to eat it because it is so nice; but we restrain ourselves, because we perceive eating it as being naughty. And this unfulfilled desire, said Professor Rogers, was experienced as a craving, which in turn is attributed to addiction.

"It is explained by culture and not chemistry," he added."

if you really want to, you may read more about this here.

the periodic table

so there i was browsing the widgets on the apple pages, and i saw a new one - the periodic table (oddly named the 'period' table, which made me think for a moment, although not in an appropriate direction). i how have it on my widgets. it is not as nice as this one from an aesthetic perspective, but very handy.



very handy? what am i saying? i was the girl who was thrown out of the chemistry class because sophie bit me and i screamed. i had squirt fights with the distilled water containers, and hysterics when the teacher got his white coat caught in the centrifuge and it was horribly ripped.

yet i was strangely fascinated by the chart. first of all, i was amazed that i could recite, in order, the inert gases. next, there seemed to be a lot more of which i'd never heard. and some of them had the weirdest names (if you're not a scientist) : darmstadtium (i've been there, i think); ununbium, ununtrium, ununhexium et al; and then a bunch more named after people and places. they all have little radioactive signs at the top of the boxes so i guess they are another result of nuclear proliferation.

o, let's be honest here, i probably just want to learn all the words of the tom lehrer song :-)