John Edwards and clean coal
Saw this first at Gristmill. There is no such thing as clean coal. Particulate scrubbing and carbon-capture and sequestration (CCS) are both ways of capturing pollutants and storing them either in...
View ArticleEnrolling in non-employer health insurance
Due to changes in my employment status I lost my employer-covered health insurance. I worked with the people in my HR department to find, enroll, and ultimately pay for my own insurance - luckily,...
View ArticleWind, Solar, Nuclear and Environmental Preservation
Many of the nuclear energy diaries I've read are perhaps even more contentious than current candidate diaries. One major issue argued over is whether renewables can provide base-load power-defined by...
View ArticleWhy we should think in gallons per mile
With gas prices heading north of $4 a gallon, many people and companies are thinking of switching to a more fuel efficient vehicle.Lets say, like many American families, you are a two car family with...
View ArticleA Government Freeze of New Solar Installations
Much of the desert Southwest that holds great promise for large scale solar installations is owned by the Federal Government, and managed by the Bureau of Land Management.The BLM has received over 130...
View ArticleRadiation, the IAEA, GMOs and your food
What do radiation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and genetically modified organisms have to do with your food? A great deal actually, as I'm learning at the IAEA's current International...
View ArticleMyths and Misconceptions of Nuclear Energy Part I - Cost
Let me start out by saying I'm not necessarily pro nuclear energy - I consider myself primarily anti-fossil fuels and I've come to believe over the last year or so that nuclear energy will be key if we...
View ArticleRadiation, Cancer, and the Linear No-Threshold Model
With the recent events in Japan, there have been a lot of diaries and comments discussing what can happen, what sort of worst-case scenarios there are, but I have yet to see a diary discussing...
View ArticleMolecular evolution, autism, and a case for sperm banking
A relatively recent article in Nature (Kong et al. Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father's age to disease risk. Nature Volume: 488 Issue: 7412 Pages: 471-475 DOI:...
View ArticleGun deaths - a powerful infographic
This will be short and simple, and I'm sorry if its been posted already. How many years of life have been cut short in the first few months of 2013 - an astounding 121,770.guns.periscopic.com
View ArticleCan Antioxidants be Bad for You?
Vitamin C is often touted as a wonder - an antioxidant found in high amounts in citrus fruits, it is generally accepted as a cure-all for everything from the common cold to helping to fight off cancer....
View ArticleGATTACA: Are genetically engineered human embryos already here?
Over the past few days, my twitter account has been filled with calls for a moratorium on the genetic editing of the human germ line, that is, any cell that will eventually give rise to either a sperm...
View ArticleYou say potato, I say po...GMO?
There were two related stories that popped up in my twitter feed today about GMO potatoes; the stories intrigued me primarily because they once again call into question what it means to be a...
View ArticleGenetically engineered human embryos are here
I wrote previously about the rumors that scientists were using a new biotech tool, the CRISPR/Cas9 nuclease system, to genetically engineer human embryos. Nature News broke the story today that this...
View ArticleRapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
The title is a portion of the title of a new article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery...
View ArticleThe Next Great GMO Debate
This is the title of an article I stumbled across from MIT Technology Review.I've written previouslyabout how the nature of GMO's are changing. Instead of taking a gene from bacteria and randomly...
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