Logical Fallacies Do-Gooder Turns Ferns Into Arsenic-Filtering Super System | Wired Design More than 70 million people in Bangladesh drink polluted water every day and one in five water wells have dangerous levels of arsenic, a metalloid that leads to high rates of infant mortality and cancer. Photo: Stephen Goodwin Honan U.S. Navy officer Stephen Goodwin Honan has developed a plant-based solution that can remove arsenic from drinking water using $10 worth of ferns. Photo: Stephen Goodwin Honan If the project continues to scale, Honan hopes the arsenic sequestered in the leaves of the plants can be extracted and sold to manufacturers. There are two traditional ways to reduce arsenic in water supplies. More than 70 million people in Bangladesh drink polluted water every day and one in five water wells have dangerous levels of arsenic, a metalloid that leads to high rates of infant mortality and cancer. 3.4 million people, almost the entire population of Los Angeles, die from water-related diseases every year. Stephen Goodwin Honan, a 24-year-old U.S.
Beyond Wikipedia: 19 References You Can't Do Without February 19, 2008 | 200,905 views Share Wikipedia can serve as a great introduction to a subject, and connect you to other related ideas, people and places. Bartleby -- Famous quotes and full poetry texts Citizendium -- More “professional” Wikipedia, although usually not as detailed Answers.com -- Makes use of the information on Wikipedia and many other reference sites to become a one stop shop ePodunk -- Information about cities and places Encyclopedia Britannica -- An excellent source of information, and much more authoritative than Wikipedia. Scholarpedia -- A step up from both Wikipedia and Citizendium in terms of scholarly respectability; the articles are all written by experts with peer review JSTOR (limited access; talk to your school or library) -- All those stuffy journals around your professor’s office, and articles in your course packets Oxford English Dictionary (limited access; talk to your school or library) -- The definitive resource when it comes to the English language
Creationism Is Not Being Ignored On 'Cosmos' -- It's Actually The Focus By Betsy Phillips, Guest Contributor "Creationism Is Not Being Ignored On ‘Cosmos’ — It’s Actually The Focus" CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Invision for FOX/AP Images Danny Faulkner, a “scientist” working for the same group that runs Kentucky’s creation museum was complaining last week that Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey doesn’t address creationism. From Mashable: Faulkner claimed the 13-episode series has a distinct “evolutionary bias,” and agreed with Mefferd’s concern that Cosmos doesn’t even present creationism as an alternative theory. This seems to be the prevailing sense on the other side as well. Actually, Tyson is deliberately and straightforwardly giving a whole lot of time to creationism. Another example: Why did Tyson spend so much time explaining the similarities and differences in how polar bears have evolved through natural selection vs. how dogs have changed in the time we’ve been breeding them for certain traits? Tyson isn’t ignoring creationism.
Chemists work to desalinate the ocean for drinking water, one nanoliter at a time By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery. The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale. The technique, called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination, was described last week in the journal Angewandte Chemie. "The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health," said Crooks, the Robert A. This new method holds particular promise for the water-stressed areas in which about a third of the planet's inhabitants live.
If you have an Android phone, try these secret codes! | Daily Pastime Various hidden menus, diagnostic, look at the state of wireless networks, all available without installing special applications, it is necessary only to take advantage of the possibility that the numeric keypad is revealed when activating the phone part of the device. photo/ google images Even in the age of of ordinary mobile phone users are aware of the existence of a “secret codes” that would allow them access to things normally hidden from sight, a variety of tests designed mobile operators and the like. Of course, this should be borne in mind that not all Android devices support all codes, and some are intended only series or individual devices, but you should definitely try:
What Is the Higgs? - Interactive Graphic Imagine never having seen a snowflake. Now prove one exists by probing the slush and mist of melting snow. You can’t see a Higgs boson, and no sensor can pick one out from the Higgs field that it forms. For 50 years, physicists have been building larger and more powerful accelerators to vaporize particles and sift through the debris. In the tunnels at CERN, protons are sped along a track to within a breath of the speed of light, then smashed together in a violent explosion. The protons annihilate each other, releasing a burst of energy. But Einstein tells us that mass is energy, and physics tells us that energy can’t be destroyed. An array of new particles pours from the fireball, energy spun back into tiny specks of mass. A machine surrounds and tracks the debris, bending charged particles as they plow through layers of sensors. Repeat this a million times, then tens of millions, before a second has passed. And keep going because you’re looking for something very rare. Once every few billion impacts,
A Graphic Biography of Darwin by Maria Popova The evolution of the father of evolution, illustrated. Charles Darwin — father of evolution, decoder of human emotion, hopeless romantic, occasional grump — was born on February 12, 1809. From Smithsonian Books comes Darwin: A Graphic Biography (public library; UK) — a fine addition to outstanding graphic nonfiction, joining other famous graphic biographies of cultural icons like Richard Feynman, Hunter S. Thompson, The Carter Family, and Steve Jobs. Complement Darwin: A Graphic Biography with the legendary naturalist’s original list of the the pros and cons of marriage, then revisit the best graphic novels of 2012. Images courtesy Smithsonian Books Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr
Online Learning: A Bachelor's Level Computer Science Program Curriculum Introduction [Update: See also the follow-up post to this piece, An Intensive Bachelor's Level Computer Science Curriculum Program.] A few months back we took an in-depth look at MIT’s free online Introduction to Computer Science course, and laid out a self-study time table to complete the class within four months, along with a companion post providing learning benchmarks to chart your progress. In the present article, I'll step back and take a much more broad look at com-sci course offerings available for free on the internet, in order to answer a deceptively straightforward question: is it possible to complete the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree in computer science through college and university courses that are freely available online? The former question is more difficult to answer than it may at first appear. Yet, this does not mean that all the necessary elements for such a curriculum are not freely accessible. Our hypothetical curriculum will simplify this model.
How to Explain Complex Ideas (Like Tech) to Those Who Don’t Understand Google launches Timelapse | Getaway Gear All those years of Google Earth has resulted in some of the most incredible time lapses you’re likely to see. Timelapse powered by Google shows how the Earth’s surface has changed by collecting footage from 1984 until today and sped up the process for us to enjoy. According to the authorities, NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites to eternally orbit our planet, looking down on the progress of the Earth. Landsat was built for the public to monitor how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later we have a vast accumulation of images that create one of the most intriguing movies ever shown. Google gives us a variety of time lapses that show processes such as the development of Dubai, growing from sparse desert to modern city and the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska and the waning forests of the Amazon. Of course, it wasn’t easy. Watch the timelapses captured by Google here