Category Archives: technology

Skepticator

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I’m an avid listener of the Edmonton based podcast Skeptically Speaking, not only for the sultry tones of it’s host Desiree Schell, but also for the engaging discussions and interviews.

I loaded up Episode 56 in anticipation of the Baba Brinkman interview, but recieved a bonus bit of information about a skeptically focused news feed aggregator called Skepticator. This service pulls blog posts and news entries from skeptic and science feeds into one handy location. Skepticator features a fairly speedy search engine and if you’d like to subscribe to a single RSS feed with content from all 290 featured sources, Skepticator’s got you covered.

Of course I registered MeddlingKids with the service, so you have another option for keeping up to date with our ramblings as well.

Marc

A Great TED Talk On Science Denialism

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I was just poking around Skepchick and found this reposting of a TED Talk given by Michael Specter, who is a journalist and a pretty fantastic orator on the subject of scientific denialism. This TED Talk really struck me as something that I’d like to share. Scientific denialism is easily one of the biggest threats we face, and he puts things in simple and clear terms.

If you’re not a regular watcher of TED Talks, change that. I’ve seen some incredible talks about topics ranging from classical music to stem cell research, and they never fail to entertain and educate.

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Two Interesting Articles About Green Energy

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I just read a couple of interesting articles from Science Daily about energy and thought I’d share them.

The first article is about a group of researchers who have managed to find a much more efficient means of generating hydrogen through photosynthesis. Hydrogen as a gas is very intriguing in terms of the war on greenhouse gasses, but there have been technical difficulties in finding a way to generate it efficiently. However:

Bruce and his colleagues found that by starting with a thermophilic blue-green algae, which favors warmer temperatures, they could sustain the reaction at temperatures as high as 55 degrees C, or 131 degrees F. That is roughly the temperature in arid deserts with high solar irradiation, where the process would be most productive. They also found the process was more than 10 times more efficient as the temperature increased.

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NASA Replicator: Not quite Star Trek, but Scotty would be proud

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replicatorMy dad first introduced me to the world of Star Trek, and opened my mind to a world of communicators, dark matter, and replicators. These days we all own mobile devices so advanced they would make a Cardassian jealous, the existence of dark matter has been proven many times over, and now at long last it looks like the replicator is about to make its debut.

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