Turns out that the NASA rover, Opportunity, is still Number 2 when it comes to distance traveled on non-Earth surfaces. Revised data shows Lunokhod 2, the intrepid Soviet era lunar rover traveled 42 kilometers in its lifetime, 5 kilometers longer than the official mission logs. In my blog posting of

Every year I get my influenza vaccine. So does my wife. We do this because our daughter was born with heart disease and we want to ensure that we don’t give her an unneeded bout of the flu which could compromise her health. But every year those who make the flu vaccine or using a best guess ap

With all these coal-fired and fossil-fuel driven power plants in the world the quest for capturing CO2 continues in research laboratories all over the world. Two labs, one at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the second at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), have come up

Smartphones are too smart for their own good. Users have come to rely on them so much that they constantly need recharging. The batteries just can’t keep up with the usage. One French company, The Sun Partner Group, located in Aix-en-Provence, has come up with a solution. As seen in the illust

Only in a centrally controlled economy could you pull off what China is attempting to do by moving a quarter billion of its people from rural villages and farms to new urban centres. This begs the question – why? The government argues that there is little value creation in rural populations. T

An article in today’s Globe & Mail  by Shaun Pett got me thinking about our heavy reliance on annual staple crops to feed the world and the cost we bear because of this. Annuals are labour intensive. They involve plowing the soil every year and seeding. They are responsible for 70% of the

Despite Michael Crichton’s “Next,” a sci-fi novel in which he described a world in which a company could own the genetic information of an individual, I never doubted for a moment that the future he described would not be one upheld by the American Supreme Court. In their 9-0 rulin

What’s in this week’s headlines? Three medical stories, one on world population and food, and another on China and capping carbon emissions.   MS Breakthrough Holds Promise for Treating Autoimmune Diseases and Responses; Non-invasive Treatment May Be a Cure for Blindness; Macrophage

Meet the Scanadu Scout (TM), the first medical tricorder coming to you in the near future, in fact by March 2014 if it passes clinical trials. The Scanadu Scout is a medical scanner packed with a mashup of sensors. Unlike the tricorder of Star Trek you cannot just pass it over the body in Reikian fa

Carbonate fuel cells may be one answer to capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. The manufacturer is FuelCell Energy, a company located in Danbury, Connecticut.  Carbonate fuel cells normally using CO2 created ions for conduction in a continuous loop. But they can be altered so that the loop is interrup