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Comment Re:purify things other than water (Score 1) 120

by mkcheme (#20994697) Attached to: New Plastic to Cut CO2 Emissions and Purify Water
The energy cost to biomass --> ethanol is not in the distillation, it's in the enzymatic digestion of the biomass into fermentable sugars. Current processes require large amounts of enzymes made in a separate process. According to a recent talk at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, the smart money is in pairing the enzymatic digestion with microorganisms that exoress the enzymes. This compresses two steps into one ("process intensification") and as a side benefit, the enzymes and microbes work better together than individually.
User Journal

Journal SPAM: DiCaprio's 11th Hour Features Real Environmental Superstars

Journal by Blog 11th Hour
Olivia Zaleski - "Two weeks ago, fellow Treehugger George Spyros and I had the opportunity to catch a sneak preview of Leonardo Dicaprio's The 11th Hour. Appropriately, the screening was held outdoors and under the stars at Marders, an organic nursery in Long Island. The film's mantra, "Consume Less Live More." Ironically, an adjacent shopping center blared signage for Gap, Yankee Candle Co, and T.J. Maxx. A reference to the very last moment when change is possible, The 11th Hour, explores h
Quickies

Submission + - Human origins theory tested by recent findings. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by annamadrigal
annamadrigal writes: The BBC new is reporting on findings presented in nature which suggest that Homo Errectus and H. Habilis were in fact sister species which co-existed.

This challenges the view that the upright humans evolved from the tool users.
United States

Submission + - Vote Swapping Ruled Legal!

Submitted by cayenne8
cayenne8 writes: Way back when (2000), during that election, there were some sites set up (voteswap.com and votexchange.com) for people across the nation to agree to swap votes. This was set up mostly for Nader and Gore voters to work against Bush.

California representatives threatened to proscute these sites as criminal offenses, and many of them shut down. On Monday, the 9th US court of appeals upheld that "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected" and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit also said the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause."

See the story HERE .

Feed Engadget: Nintendo patent application reveals plans for motion-sensing handheld (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

Nintendo's already dipped its toes into motion-sensing handheld gaming with the gyro-equipped WarioWare: Twisted for the Game Boy Advance, but it looks like the company looks has even grander plans to let you make a fool of yourself in public, at least if a recent patent application is any indication. According to it, Nintendo has a new "game system" on the drawing board that incorporates acceleration sensors in a "housing" to detect movement and direction. Somewhat curiously, a significant chunk of the patent application has been marked as "cancelled," but the remaining bits do have some interesting details, including what seem to be multiplayer capabilities. In patent speak, that part is described as a " game system structured at least by two game apparatuses," each of which have a means for "transmitting mutually-related data to the game apparatus on the opposite side." Of course, this simply being a patent application it could well turn out to be something entirely less exciting than it seems, if it ever actually comes to fruition at all.

[Via Joystiq]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed Engadget: DIY'er puts the Wiimote on your Xbox 360 (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming

We've seen some pretty wild Wiimote mods in our day, but this control rig for the Xbox 360 definitely springs into the upper echelons of Wii-hackdom. This particular DIY effort involves a rather varied list of components, including a Wiimote and Nunchuk (obviously), an Xbox 360, a PC (in this case the Samsung Q1), a MagicBox XFPS, custom drivers, and a "black box" consisting of a hard coded microcontroller and spliced PS2 cable. Just a few things to get the job done. And the end result? A fully compatible, reticule-smoothing, Halo 2-ready Wii control system for your Microsoft gaming rig. Don't believe the hype? Hit the video after the break to see what it's all about.

[Thanks, Francis]

Continue reading DIY'er puts the Wiimote on your Xbox 360

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed Engadget: FCC chimes in on 'white space' device from Google, Microsoft and others: it does (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Wireless

It's hard not to love the promise of the White Space Coalition, which includes players like Google, Microsoft, Dell, Earthlink, HP, Intel and Philips. Those crazy kids want to bring us wireless internet over the "white space" bandwidth in between TV broadcast channels, and we say let 'em. One little problem though, FCC says the concept doesn't work. The prototype that the Coalition submitted for review was designed to sense existing TV signals and transmit around them, but the FCC found it inconsistent in this aim, and won't be giving its stamp approval to a device that interferes with existing broadcasts. The FCC does say that it's open to looking at the next generation of the technology, since better performance is certainly possible, and the White Space Coalition wasn't too downhearted: the group is "encouraged that FCC engineers did not find fault with our operating parameters and remain confident that unlicensed television spectrum can be used without interference." Between this fledgling technology and that upcoming 700MHz auction, things are really looking up for WiFi-jilted mobile internet users across the States.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Biotech

Journal Journal: Scientific tattoos 1

Journal by Otter
Blogger Carl Zimmer wondered if any of his readers had tattoos associated with their research or scientific enthusiasms. Terrifyingly, they sure do: atoms, animals, ATP, Necker cubes. The renaming of transuranium elements probably takes on new importance when you have a periodic table tattooed on your forearm!
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Sun Enters the Commodity Silicon Business (sun.com)

Submitted by Samrobb
Samrobb writes: According to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Sun has decided to release its UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL. According to Schwartz, "We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week — delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip — running standard Java applications and open source OS's. Simultaneously, we've said we're entering the commodity marketplace, and opening the chip up to our competition... To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2... the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL."

Feed Science Daily: Spatial Cognition Research Explains Explorers' Limited Ability To Navigate (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
Historical reports suggest that when Magellan, Columbus and other explorers sailed from Europe to the New World 500 years ago, they navigated the open sea by imagining an island just over the horizon. If they kept track of where the "virtual island" was, they knew in which direction to sail in the open water. But new research suggests that people's ability to imagine virtual islands -- without any perceptual cues to help -- is quite limited.

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