Minor Thoughts

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This is pretty cool. Teams around the world are working on plans for building indoor farms on the moon. These farms would scrub CO2 out of the air, produce about 500 pounds of oxygen a year, and produce food for the astronauts. And, most of it could be run by robots.

Even assuming that all of the warming that occurred from 1900-2000 was due to human activities (a very dubious assertion to begin with), the climate still isn’t as sensitive to increases in CO2 as the climate models predicate. The climate models have to add in additional fudge factors to get the results that the “scientists” want to see.

Until that changes — until there is hard evidence that the climate really is that sensitive to increases in CO2 — I’ll continue to oppose any kind of carbon caps, carbon taxes, or any other attempt by the government to control how we generate and use energy.

NOTES ON THE INTRODUCTION

That Geisler and Turek have written a book about how much more intellectual sense it makes to be a Christian is, to my mind, interesting in itself for what it says about the modern Christian.

The title isn’t simply a catty remark about how ridiculously unsupportable Geisler & Turek believe atheists’ world view …

We can now answer the question: “Where do new drugs come from?”. A new paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery takes on all 252 drugs approved by the FDA from then through 2007, and traces each of them back to their origins. What’s more, each drug is evaluated by how much unmet medical need it was addressed to and how scientifically innovative it was.

James Byrne wrote about new developments in cancer treatment for Scientific American. Researchers are looking at ways to use bacteria to kill cancerous tumours, without making you sick the way chemotherapy and radiation do.

We’re going to run out of oil someday — whether it’s now or 75 years from now. Plastics are pretty important and we’ll need a way to produce them once we run out of oil. Given all of that, how cool is this?

Engineered yeast could produce low-cost plastics from renewable resources:

The researchers engineered …

I need a new religion.

Or a philosophy – I’d be OK with that, too. I’m not limiting myself to theist solutions. Any and all world views may apply.

My cousin recently wrote on his Facebook page: ”Well, it’s official, college is a wrap. The question now is, are we going to at least try …

I talked earlier this week about capitalism and its blessings, in regard to cleanliness. Consider this, about the blessings of capitalism in regard to food.

What’s so tragic about this is that we know from experience how to fix the problem. Wherever the rural poor have gained access to improved roads, modern seeds, less …

This is just incredibly cool.

Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able …

Organic food is no healthier, study finds | Science | Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) – Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food …