My prediction, and it's a hot take: Folks will eat less sugar, but will be no less obese and likely might find that heart disease proliferates faster.

Hypothesis: The Oxidized Linoleic Acid hypothesis of torpor & obesity (think https://fireinabottle.net/getting-fat-causes-you-to-overeat/ ) is behind the "diabesity" epidemic. Linoleic acid in excessive amounts drives us to get fat, and we overeat (because we're getting fat). We'll overeat something else instead of sugar. Sugar does make things a tad worse though so I dunno. Maybe outcomes for diabetic patients will improve but the rate of non-diabetic patients becoming diabetic will increase.

Eating more non-sugary stuff means we will end up eating a bit more fat, and as so many "western" and especially processed foods are replete with linoleic acid we'll end up with more linoleic acid in the diet, more inflammation and more heart disease. Inflammation of the fat tissue will progress faster, diabetes will occur at seemingly lower & lower BMIs.

That would be best, yes.

If I had a dollar for every time someone suggests OMG EV battery storage for the grid....

You nailed the problems on the head. Using an EV to supply battery back to the grid is like loaning out your car to the general public... You had better be paid princely for the "miles" they put on your vehicle, in this case, the charge-discharge cycles put on the battery.

Most vehicles are not wired to allow this at residential level - the J1772 standard doesn't allow the vehicle to pump inverted AC power out, although that would be a neat trick (and probably feasible in future cars). The crutch required with current tech would be some expensive DC Fast Charge-based inverter you plug into at night which can go bidirectional at the request of the grid - charge the EV over DC when appropriate and pull DC from the vehicle, invert and feed into a grid-tie system much like solar or wind.

The next best thing may be load trimming, which eMotorWorks has in the form of JuiceNet - juicenet compatible J1772 chargers can trim the available current as needed to create a large-scale electrical load shedding system.

Much of the problems I attribute here to politics and impatience - the funding dries up when folks just get impatient that progress isn't occurring. It's understandable, but sometimes there are HARD problems that need a lot of time and money to solve, yet the payback will be worth it in the long run. Nuclear frequently ticks that mark IMO. I don't think our (US) investment climate is compatible with this much.

A old letter posted by Will Davis @atomicnews today - http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf - Easily as relevant today, and basically agrees with your statement. It's a hard problem but we've done hard problems before.

In some sense, I wonder if our economic trend towards consolidation of resources into a few rich individuals is a subtle "invisible hand" reaction to our incessantly short-term thinking, because it's those few with overabundance who are in the best position right now to fund long-term, hard projects with open-ended amounts of capital.

Many of the processes required to utilize thorium (which is fertile, not fissile, but fertile at slow-spectrum which is interesting) can be applied to 238U at fast spectrum instead. EBR-II (IFR) demonstrated this. The main advantage of thorium is it's an abundant reserve source for making 233U (+232U, which makes it difficult to handle) if we can't find uranium anymore.

IIRC, a startup called Oklo is looking at reviving the EBR-II technology at very small scale, ~1-2MW, basically diesel generator replacement (or maybe it becomes your primary electricity source and the grid becomes your "backup"?)

That is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

The lime emits CO2 as CaCO3 converts to CaO. It does not absorb back into the material in the use-case of Portland Cement.

Lime plaster, which I posted about further down, DOES bring that CO2 back into the material (as it cures by Ca(OH)2 converting back to CaCO3+H2O with the introduction of carbonic acid, i.e. CO2 dissolved in a thin film of water).

This is an important point. Houses made from biomass materials, including Strawbale, sequester quite a bit of carbon and keep it dry so it doesn't rot in the wild (driving off CO2 over time).

The crux of the article was Rammed Earth, which I think is a great replacement for concrete for certain applications (some load-bearing vertical walls mainly). Dirt cheap, clay & sand.

Some applications of concrete are frivolous and I think can be replaced. The reason is mostly cost and availability, and the current labor force is skilled with using it. The wall-facade material of choice before concrete, and before gypsum drywall, was Lime plaster. For wet or exterior applications I am in favor of using lime as it is less carbon-intensive than concrete and produces a beautiful lighting effect from birefringence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birefringence), owing to the tiny calcite crystals that form when it cures back into limestone. See http://www.sapphireelmtravel.com/travel-journal/chefchaouen-morocco-blue-city for an example.

There's also benefits to the water vapor breathability of lime vs. concrete (which doesn't breathe, unless it's cracked).

Producing Lime plaster is less carbon-intensive than cement as it requires lower temperatures, and the CO2 driven off by the limestone during calcining (which happens in Ordinary Portland Cement production as well) is mostly re-absorbed by the slaked lime as it cures back into limestone (leaving the net CO2 footprint coming from the fuel used to calcine the lime, if coal or natural gas or wood is used, although perhaps decades into the future someone comes up with a nuclear-fueled kiln, electric or high temp gas or whatever).

The big downside to lime plaster is the time it takes to cure, and what that does for timelines and labor costs. It usually requires multiple thin coats (with a week or more between =3/8 inch coats - need time for CO2 to reabsorb as carbonic acid which also requires the material be damp, but not covered in water) which blows up the labor costs.

https://johnspeweik.com/2011/10/27/the-lime-cycle/

The upside to using lime plaster is there's a wealth of historical information on what to do with it... much of the "bling" of the pre-1800's architecture can be traced to the use of lime or limestone.
E.g. the Moroccan process of Tadelakt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadelakt
Venetian plaster - https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/venetian-plaster-trend-guide

I find it amusing they call nuclear "old-fashioned", when Fission was only discovered in 1938... granted photovoltaic may be newer, but we've known about solar and wind power (and combustion) in varying methods of harvest for millennia.

Wouldn't this be a suitable power source for the EmDrive? Say.... when you're too far from the sun to collect enough solar power?

Basically my perspective on this- Arduino LLC is delivering real value by developing the open-source IDE along with an API and the capability to provide 3rd party hardware support easily in their IDE. (Recent example: http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-ide-support-for-the-esp8266/ )

Folks might not like the IDE, but the API provides a nice platform for obtaining working code for interfacing with lots of hardware. Arduino LLC's work is partly defining and expanding that API & framework.

Arduino SRL makes crappy hardware. Their market is now quite commoditized. I will be donating to Arduino LLC soon to make my point.

They certainly tried, and I personally looked at the MSP430 launchpad as a fun distraction last spring ... and ended up ditching Arduino altogether, seeing as most of my projects didn't need the space. What TI was missing was Arduino's IDE, as hideous as it sounds, but they have it now--in the form of Energia (http://www.energia.nu). Still not as established as Arduino though.

Another big hit was the chips they released initially--the 1st gen "value line" chips were hideously underpowered, like 2KB flash/128 bytes of SRAM, more ATTiny-like in size. The current "v1.5" LaunchPad you buy comes with 3rd-gen value line parts, up to 16KB flash, still not quite arduino but doing a lot better (and with hardware UART).

I hope the Stellaris LaunchPad catches on quicker, it looks like OpenOCD is starting to work with it so I have high hopes a UNIX-based environment can be easily deployed for Stellaris development soon. What I am personally more impressed with is the LaunchPad's BoosterPack form factor ( http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/BYOB )--they have thought of a simple and straightforward way to expand the capabilities, while retaining (in theory) some backwards compatibility with boosterpacks made for the MSP430 for example. Much nicer than Arduino's "shield" layout IMO.

As mentioned, yes, but additionally these things have "WebTop" which is some ARM-compiled distro of Ubuntu with firefox and maybe a few others running on that HDMI port. Looking at a ps listing on one of these you'll see "/usr/bin/Xorg" running.

Ask how Motorola did it, I own the Droid Bionic and its "WebTop" feature is a running Ubuntu on the phone that exports its display via HDMI. Not entirely sure how it works (I don't have the hdmi adapter to use it, either) but I know it runs Ubuntu.