Emotional genes and Flying Windmills

Transmaterial

Backlight - Backlight is a demonstration of electroless metal plating by Tony Wurman of New York–based Wunderwurks. In contrast to conventional electrolytic processes, electroless plating uses a nongalvanic chemical plating method involving multiple reactions in an aqueous solution without external electrical power. Electroless plating can provide decorative and protective finishes for many materials, including metal, wood, glass, plastic, stone, fiberglass, ceramics, and even fabrics.

ABC News: Technology

Scientists Find Gene for Emotional Memory - Research, published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, found that those with a certain common genetic variation tend to more readily remember emotionally charged events, for better or for worse.

'Camera on Every Corner': Protection or Invasion? - Fourteen-year-old Roberto Duran loved computers and soccer, but his dreams ended in a roar of gunfire on a quiet Chicago block earlier this summer. Roberto's alleged killers, who had mistaken him for a rival gang member, were eventually arrested thanks to police surveillance cameras that captured the getaway. But critics worry more surveillance will mean less privacy for Americans.

Explosion Kills 3 at Mojave Airport - An explosion that killed three at a Mojave Desert airport during testing of a new space tourism vehicle has shaken a small community that prides itself as the hometown of the first private space launch. The blast Thursday at a remote test facility belonging to Scaled Composites LLC critically injured three other employees working on a propellant system for the vehicle.

The Globe and Mail

Author sees happy ending without humans - In his new book Alan Weisman imagines the Earth after polluters, proselytizers and the rest of us disappear

Are your friends making you fat? - Researchers who have studied “networks” of obesity think so: they found that if someone's friend becomes obese, that person's chances of becoming obese increase by more than half. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers said their findings show that obesity is contagious — not like a virus is contagious, but in a social sense.

New Scientist - Energy and Fuels

Flying windmills could harness the jet stream - Flying windmills tapping jet stream wind currents may sound far fetched, but groups in the US, Netherlands and Canada say such devices may soon be within reach. If successfully developed, they could harness an enormous amount of reliable, renewable energy.

Physics Org

New aerogels could clean contaminated water, purify hydrogen for fuel cells - Argonne materials scientists Peter Chupas and Mercouri Kanatzidis, along with colleagues at Northwestern and Michigan State universities, created and characterized porous semiconducting aerogels at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source (APS). The researchers then submerged a fraction of a gram of the aerogel in a solution of mercury-contaminated water and found that the gel removed more than 99.99 percent of the heavy metal. The researchers believe that these gels can be used not only for this kind of environmental cleanup but also to remove impurities from hydrogen gas that could damage the catalysts in potential hydrogen fuel cells.

Lithium and bone healing - Researchers have described a novel molecular pathway that may have a critical role in bone healing and have suggested that lithium, which affects this pathway, has the potential to improve fracture healing.

Web Site Archives the Dead of MySpace - Somewhere deep in cyberspace, where reality blurs into fiction and the living greet the dead, there are ghosts. They live in a virtual graveyard without tombstones or flowers. They drift among the shadows of the people they used to be, and the pieces they left behind.