pee

Image of mosquito from http://bloodinurineandpainofca.wordpress.com/ Until now I thought I had come up with enough reasons to dislike mosquitoes, those tiny little blood sucking vectors of disease. With reports of the debilitating mosquito-borne virus chikungunya in the Americas (Carribean), I was ecstatic hear that researchers are working hard to find ways to control mosquito populations. As mentioned in a previous blog, only the females bite to obtain nourishment for developing eggs. According to the study authors, the female mosquito can double her own body weight after just one meal,…
There's a terrific new article in New Scientist about some of the ways scientists are working on turning pee into energy. There's a lot of pee in the world all going to waste, often at huge cost to the environment in terms of energy used to collect and purify waste water. Methods that can produce even small amounts of power from urine could be useful to help power office buildings or farms where there are a lot of people or animals all peeing in the same place, and smaller fuel cells could even also be used to power portable electronics, with no need to carry any fuel or batteries, just a…
Well, I'm headed off for my weekend away - I'll be at NOFA NH on Saturday giving the keynote and at the NESEA Building Energy Public Forum Panel on Tuesday night. Posting will be intermittent while I'm gone, but I figure I'd leave you all with a laugh at my expense. Eric had a horrible moment the other day in class. Students were coming in and he was calling up a youtube video on space exploration for his students to see. But somehow while answering a student question, he committed a typo, which brought up, on a huge screen a hard-core porn site with very explicit visuals. After a second…
Here's a snippet of some of the relevant text from the article describing the model below: show attribute/state-oriented functions. Type7. [Useful Attribute/State]: 2.3) Change of structure or object directly make a useful "attribute" including "ability". Type8. [Attribute/State]àInteractionà[Useful State]: 2.4) Change of structure or object makes interaction between its "attribute/state" and the other "attribute/state" which makes up a useful "state". show And now for the actual model: Any guesses? Head past the break for the big reveal. Trust me - you'll be surprised. Got it yet? No? I…