Archive for May, 2009

Mission Seedbomb involves a bomber aircraft and charges full of the Seed Capsules. Essentially the project involves artificial dispersal of seeds over arid areas where natural vegetation has lapsed due to man-made follies like deforestation leading to desertification. Each capsule contains artificial soil and seeds, and are air-dropped over the selected regions.

Housed in biodegradable plastic, the artificial soil provides nourishment and moisture to the seed; till it grows out to be a strong enough plant to sustain itself. As the sapling matures, the plastic capsule melts away, leaving behind a brand new generation.

The rest is here.

The crap we scrape off of our homes and whatnot to keep it clean actually has the ability to create human proteins?

This made the result of the experiments carried out by researchers in the group led by Martin Fussenegger, Professor of Chemical and Bioengineering at ETH Zurich, all the more astonishing. In collaboration with researchers at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, the PhD student Marc Gitzinger carried out tests to see what happens when unmodified human or mammalian genes are inserted into the moss genome. They transferred the foreign, unmodified genes into the moss and discovered that the moss was easily able to manufacture the proteins encoded therein.

This cannot be taken for granted, since the same process does not work when a mammalian gene is implanted into what are known as “higher” flowering plants. The reason is that sections of the start and finish sequences of the genes of animals, plants, fungi and bacteria are considerably different.
The rest is here.

I love when things get deconstructed, a-like so:

Rejecting Vaccinations

Why People Do It:

Because the chemical cocktails in vaccines are poisoning our children! Depending on what websites or episode of Oprah you watch, vaccines contain poisonous mercury, and are causing everything from autism to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is about as scary a medical term as you can have without using “flesh-eating” or “dick-melting.”

Why They Shouldn’t:

In a word: science. While the folks pushing the anti-vaccination agenda mean well (though some seem to be doing it out of a knee-jerk fear of “Big Pharma”) their claims aren’t backed up by the actual studies.

The rest is here.

I suppose to some this will be a given, to others it’ll be a slap in the face, to still others funny and the rest just sad.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
What surprised me was that it wasn’t the evangelicals who were more likely to support tourture, it was the protestant denominations.

Then again, when it comes to mainstream religion, why should I be surprised by anything given the past few years?