Sounds crazy, but just read…
SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. — A Florida man may have accidentally invented a machine that could solve the gasoline and energy crisis plaguing the U.S., WPBF News 25 reported.
Sanibel Island resident John Kanzius is a former broadcast executive from Pennsylvania who wondered if his background in physics and radio could come in [...]

An interesting post over at The Moderate Voice caught my attention today. It’s about the scars that war leaves behind…the scars that nobody can see.
From Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés:
You hear it a lot: Men and women soldiers went to war. When they came home, they would not often speak of what they’d done and seen.
Many [...]

Yes, organic storage. This has the potential to be huge but there’s still a long, long, long way to go yet.
From the AP:
The four characters that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much like digital data. Character combinations can stand for specific letters and symbols � so codes in genomes can be translated, or [...]

We’ve written about dichloroacetate before, but I thought I’d point it out again because it’s a wonder why we’re not hearing about it the media at large.
From the University of Alberta:
DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule. And researchers at the University of Alberta believe it may soon be used as an [...]

Okay, see, this is why we’re going to witness the downfall of the religious right. They really can’t see the forest for the trees. Because instead of giving millions of girls almost 100% certain protection against cervical cancer, they’re against it because they think it would promote promiscuity.
So let’s see here…cancer or more sex…cancer or [...]

They say it’s space junk.
I think it looks like a petrified alien turd.

The temperature could be just right for liquid water. And where there’s liquid water, there could be life.
From Malaysia Sun:
An international team of astronomers from Switzerland, France and Portugal have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date.
The planet has a radius only 50 percent larger than Earth and is very likely [...]

France embraced it long ago, and it’s paying big dividends…
Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports [...]

There’s a good conversation going on in our “God Or No God?” post about just that.
Check it out and add your thoughts.

Big breakthrough since heart valves involve many different types of cells.
From the Guardian:
Sir Magdi Yacoub, a professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, has worked on ways to tackle the shortage of donated hearts for transplant for more than a decade. His team at the heart science centre at Harefield hospital have grown tissue [...]

MSNBC has a great debate between a Christian and an Atheist. The whole thing is well worth the read, but I wonder if many Christians can agree with this summation…
I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction [...]

Researchers have discovered a way to turn any blood type into type O, that being the blood that can be used in any transfusion. This is huge.
How’d they do it? From BBC:
The new technique works by using bacterial enzymes to cut sugar molecules from the surface of red blood cells.
After a search of 2,500 fungi [...]

There’s always been stray electricity bouncing invisibly and silently here and there all around us. But until now, we’ve never been able to capture it and power devices.
One company has cracked the code…
Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your desk, and you start to get a sense of [...]

(h/t: Sully)

He was on his bus answering a question about whether our government should spend money to provide condoms in Africa. And then the reporter asked him an excruciatingly simple question.
You will be amazed…
Q: Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?�
Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.�
Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably [...]

As a follow-up of sorts to my genetics of altruism post, The New York Times magazine had a fascinating, thought-provoking piece on the evolutionary advantages of belief.
Turns out that some scientists have been studying religion from an evolutionary perspective, trying to figure out why religion is universal when it is seemingly maladaptive to survival: usually, [...]

Are humans innately good, or innately selfish?
That’s a fundamental question when it comes to discussing morality, law and society. If humans are innately selfish, then the only way society functions is by the majority forcing everyone to behave, through tools of social control like government, religion and culture. Without such control, the argument goes, society [...]

…which the drug companies won’t test because they can’t make any money off of it? Hmmm…
From the New Scientist:
It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality�. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic [...]

That’s the claim for this pretty cool looking “Sport Utility Truck.” And you can go 130 miles on that single charge. Not too shabby.
From TechEBlog:
Powered by the revolutionary Altairnano NanoSafe™ battery pack, Phoenix Motorcars’ zero-emission, all-electric Sport Utility Truck (SUT) can cruise on the freeway at up to 95 m.p.h. while carrying five passengers and [...]

A little holiday science…
Snowflakes are symmetrical because they reflect the internal order of the water molecules as they arrange themselves in the solid state (the process of crystallization). Water molecules in the solid state, such as in ice and snow, form weak bonds (called hydrogen bonds) to one another. These ordered arrangements result in the [...]