GEN-ERIC News

The device works by capturing solar energy on metal alloy plates. These plates then transfer their energy to a laser, amplifying it many times. The laser is then beamed down to earth where it is captured and converted to electricity. I’m not sure how this last step is accomplished, but possibly through a traditional boiler. The process, according the scientists, can be up to 40% efficient, which makes it comparable with the most efficient solar panels of today. The problems will arise with launch costs, weather interfering with the laser, and international outcry at the supposedly peaceful deathray.

Russian scientists in the Khibinsky Mountains in the Arctic Circle have made an important scientific discovery. They’ve found a new mineral which absorbs radiation. It does not yet have an official name and is known only as number 27-4. It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste. “It can extract radioactive substances from any water-based solution and so has a very important practical significance,” said Yakov Pakhomovsky, the head of the Kolsky Research Institute. After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe. Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different, as both accidents resulted in contamination from radioactive water.

Kyla Ebbert, 23, was recently escorted off a Southwest Airlines flight by a male customer service supervisor for wearing the outfit shown in this photograph. The college student and Hooters waitress was later permitted to return to the plane and take her flight, but only after she put up a fuss and adjusted her outfit: “I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive,” she said. “The shirt? The skirt? And he said, ‘The whole thing.’” “Keith” asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.

In a study publishing in PLoS Computational Biology on September 7, 2007, they show that for realistic networks of spiking neurons, the number of memories is not proportional to the number of neurons, it’s proportional to the number of connections per neurons – at most about 10,000. Moreover, they provided evidence that the constant of proportionality is small, not more than a few percent, and they eliminated one of theorists’ favorite tricks – reducing the number of neurons involved in any one memory – for increasing that constant. Thus, if networks use the algorithm proposed by Hopfield, they can store at most about 500 memories, no matter how many neurons they contain. So we’re not exactly back to square one, but we’re not much farther than square two: we no longer know how the brain holds so many memories.

We abuse our food. Or so says Columbia University professor Dr. Dickson Despommier. “We treat our plants poorly,” Despommier observes. “I go inside when it’s cold. Why don’t we do this with our crops?” What began as a class project to lower the heat bubble that forms every summer above Manhattan by planting green rooftops, turned into a quest to feed the world safely and sustainably. But as nice as green roofs were, they were completely inadequate. “You can only feed two per cent of New York City on the most energetic crop we can raise, which is rice,” Despommier says, noting that rice has its own problems, namely that it produces methane, a greenhouse gas. “Just as a flippant remark I said, ‘Why don’t we move the whole thing inside?’” This simple observation spurred the microbiologist and his students at the School of Public Health to take farming indoors and start the Vertical Farm Project as a way to make food production practical for urban centres. Vertical farms are like condominiums for food. Completely automated, they are a closed loop ecosystem which recycles air, water, and sewage while eliminating food–borne diseases, such as E. coli or Salmonella.