Kickstarter Monday: Liquid Glass, a Spray-on Miracle

Wow. This "liquid glass" sounds like one of the most amazing - and useful - scientific inventions ever!

It sounds too good to be true: a non-toxic spray invisible to the human eye that protects almost any surface against dirt and bacteria, whether it is hospital equipment and medical bandages or ancient stone monuments and expensive fabrics. But true it is. The spray is a form of "liquid glass" and is harmless to living things and the wider environment. It is being touted as one of the most important, environmentally-friendly products to emerge from the field of nanotechnology, which deals in objects at the molecular end of the size scale.

These are some of the possible - and actual - uses for the stuff:

Nano invention: Macro possibilities

Agriculture

Wood treated with liquid glass was found to be resistant to termite attacks in tropical climates. This led to tests on vines showing that treated plants are more resistant to a fungus that attacks the grapes. Seeds coated with liquid glass are less likely to be be attacked by fungal spores and germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds, probably because they do not waste energy fending off the microbes. Wine corks treated with liquid glass may also be protected against "corking", when contaminants in the cork taint the flavour of the wine.

Stone monuments

Stone surfaces coated with liquid glass are protected against the weather and easier to clean, especially if grafittied. For 18 months, scientists in Turkey have been running trials on the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara and a 15th-Century mosque. They report continued water protection and no discolouration. Talks are taking place about the possible use of liquid glass in Britain to protect memorials and war graves.

Domestic bathrooms

Millions of homes use cleaning agents and bleach. Tests by food processing companies in Germany have shown that sterile surfaces treated with the liquid glass can be cleaned with plain hot water and have levels of sterility seen on surfaces washed in bleach.

Its uses in the fashion industry

The liquid glass produces a highly flexible, invisible barrier to liquids and dirt. It cannot be seen by the naked eye and yet it allows fabrics to "breathe", according to its manufacturers. Expensive fabrics could be treated to make them stain resistant and at least one maker of upmarket handbags and coats is understood to be conducting negotiations about treating its products before they leave the factory.

Animal Farm Friday 2 - Dont worry, we dont bite

This is the luckiest little impala ever! Three cheetahs catch it, but decide to play with it instead. Check out the hi-res photos and read the story here. (Don't worry. It has a happy ending!)

President Obama Present the iPad

I knew it was out there! (Thanks, Barely Political!)

Now that corporations are people...

...they're JERKS!

Animal Farm Friday - Poor bees

Kind of makes me think about how the Dems having a supermajority in government re still being man-handled by the supposedly "banished into exile" GOP.

From Environmental Graffiti:

“All it takes is one. One enterprising scout to find the honey
bee colony. Mark it with a pheromone. Return with a band of natural born killers. And make all hell break lose.” Sounds like the latest Tarantino? Close. It’s the beginning of a National Geographic video that documents the annihilation of 30,000 European honey bees by 30 (yes, 30!) Asian giant hornets. We’ve found out more about these bullies of the insect world.

Red the full article, though. It's not political, and is actually fascinating.

Fading Lightbulbs

Who knew?

More Americans are buying energy efficient lighting and are aware of the energy-saving benefits -- but most are clueless about the phaseout of incandescent bulbs that starts in two years.

Dear Apple,

Alito is not an impartial justice, he is a political hack!

From Glenn Greenwald:

It was clear from Sam Alito's confirmation hearing and his record of appellate opinions that he is a dogmatic, state-revering, right-wing judge.  But last night, he unmasked himself as a politicized and intemperate Republican as well.  Much of the public will view his future "judicial" and "legal" conclusions -- and those of his fellow Court members -- with an even greater degree of cynicism.  And justifiably so.  Whatever impulses led him to behave that way last night, they have nothing to do with sober judicial reasoning or apolitical restraint.

I know a political party who will probably lose their majority in the 2010 elections

Democrats Put Lower Priority on Health Bill

With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Obama’s top domestic priority on Tuesday, saying they no longer felt pressure to move quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing them.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, deflected questions about health care. “We’re not on health care now,” Mr. Reid said. “We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.”

Well, good riddance. Maybe we will finally get more progressives elected.

Haiti's head Voodoo priest question the true motive behind these humanitarian acts

What are the odds of seeing this on US television?

Thanks, Al-Jezeera!

Dr. Norman Finkelstein at the University of Waterloo

This clip is from American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein.

In it, he stands up against [Jewish?] students who try to play the Holocaust card against him. He's just about one of the last persons that would work on.

Extremely powerful!

Internal Power

Graphic: Christine Daniloff

The geniuses at MIT have a very interesting idea for capturing abundant and clean energy straight from our mother's cracks:

Everywhere on Earth, a few miles below the surface, the bedrock is hot, and the deeper you go the hotter it gets. In some places, water heated by this hot rock comes naturally to the surface or close to it, where it can be easily tapped to drive a turbine and generate electricity.

But where naturally heated water is not available at or near the surface, this process can be recreated by drilling one very deep well to inject water into the ground, and another well nearby to pump that water back to the surface after it has been heated by passing through cracks in the hot rock. Such systems are known as Engineered Geothermal Systems, or EGS.

Bottled Water - The More You Know...

Presented by Online Education: (click on image to zoom)

Animal Farm Monday - Colbert would love this cat!

Why wait 'til Friday?

Crystal Cave

I had no idea such an amazing place like this existed on Earth. WOW!

Animal Farm Friday - Fat Cat

In honor of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Fat Cats, allowing corporations to pump unlimited amounts of cash into our political system, I present to you this:

It's not funny, nor is the Supreme court ruling.

Unit 731 - Japanese worse than Nazis

I think I could have gone my whole life without knowing this, and it would have been for the better. No wonder the Chinese and Koreans hate the Japanese so much!

From brainz.org:

While the Nazis were doing their horrific work in Germany, the Japanese outdid them in mainland Asia, undertaking a regime of ruthless experimentation the likes of which are too disturbing to imagine. Everyone knows about Nazi experimentation, but the story of Unit 731 is far less known, and all the more horrific for it. Unit 731 was a research base in Northeast China, and the home of more than 10,000 deaths by experiment. The patients were vivisected without anesthesia after infection with diseases; pregnant women were vivisected and the fetus removed; limbs amputated to study blood loss; said limbs re-attached to the opposite side of the body; extremities were frozen by repeated immersion in water while left in icy conditions, then amputated or thawed to study gangrene; prisoners had their stomachs removed, and their esophagus attached to their intestine directly; live humans were used to test grenades at various ranges and positions; flamethrowers; chemical and biological agents including plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, syphilis and gonorrhea; being hung upside down until they choked to death; air injected into their arteries to cause embolism; horse urine injected in their kidneys; deprived of food and water till death; placed in high pressure chambers till death; being exposed to extreme cold; burned to see how well they could survive different degrees of burns; spun until death on a centrifuge; animal blood injections; lethal radiation doses; injected with sea water to see if it could be substituted for saline; and buried alive. A laundry list of human atrocities.

While many of the Nazi doctors were at least brought to justice for their crimes, Unit 731 merely disbanded and General MacArthur gave immunity to its doctors in exchange for information on biological warfare, and the majority got off scott free. However, Russia brought war crimes proceedings against a number of the perpetrators, and sentenced them to hard labor in Siberia. I can't help but think they got off light.

Juxtaposed against the Japanese whalers, and the Japanese that slaughter the Taiji dolphins, I am liking the Japanese less and less every day. I know it's wrong to generalize in such a way, but it's hard not to.

That's one way to prove a point...

As a rationalist, I like the idea of proving the falsehoods of homeopathic medicine, but this seems like an extreme way to do it.

In what is being billed as "rationalism's Kool-Aid moment", a mass "overdose" is being planned next week in protest at the marketing of homoeopathic medicines.

More than 300 people who style themselves as "homoeopathy sceptics" will each swallow an entire bottle of homoeopathic pills in protest at the continued marketing of homoeopathic medicines by Boots, the high street chemist chain.

The protest is due to take place at 10.23am on Saturday 30 January. It is organised by the "10.23 Group", who take their name from Avogadro's constant, which they claim proves that homoeopathy cannot work.

I can't wait to see what happens on January 31.

DODT17

The Known Universe - Video

This video by the American Museum of Natural History is one of the more fascinating and beautiful examples of the known universe I've seen. (In an exhibit at the actual museum in NYC, there's an even more incredible video, but that has to be experienced in person!)