Tilapia farms in China using pig feces as fish food

This is one of those stories that’s almost too ridiculous to believe until you remember that China has shown a great lack of concern for health in food products (remember the dog food scare, melamine in baby formula, pesticides in tea, and so on).  Now, in an effort to boost profits, some fish farms in China are using pig and goose feces as fish food.   Nutritious?  Perhaps, but this does increase the risk of bacterial infections like salmonella…and is just plain gross.

The article in Bloomberg also describes shrimp processing facilities in Vietnam, where the shrimp are packed in dirty tubs, covered with ice made from local tap water.

The FDA does inspect imported food, and has rejected a lot of shipments, but the thing is, the FDA only rejects about 2.7% of imported food.

“Made in China” – ok for cheap plastic junk, but not for food!  Not until they start taking health and quality seriously.

(via Bloomberg)

How much water IS there on Earth?

This is really cool…the image here shows how much water there is on Earth, if you were to gather it all up in a ball and compare it to the size of the whole planet.  It really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

(via io9)

Now, take this a step further, and think about the water on this planet compared to others in our solar system.  Our little blue marble in space seems to be the gem, the most water-rich planet orbiting this star.  Well, it turns out that’s not exactly true, if you count moons at least.  Check out the picture below, showing the water on Earth, compared to the estimated water on the moon Europa!  In terms of volume, Europa is estimated to have two to three times the volume of water that Earth does.  Incredible!

(via io9)

Bad news for dinosaur fans

If you watched Jurassic Park and thought, “wow, wouldn’t it be cool if we actually COULD recreate dinosaurs like that” (and let’s be honest, who DIDN’T think that), then I have bad news for you.  Nature reports that researchers have found the bonds between nucleotides in DNA break down over time.  Pretty quickly, too…the half-life of DNA is about 521 years (after 521 years, half of the bonds have been broken; another 521 years and half the remaining bonds have been broken, and so on).

The bright spot here is that scientists reached this conclusion by analyzing a very specific set of bones…so there’s perhaps a chance that bones preserved in some different environment may yield usable DNA.  It’s not looking too likely though.

If you hope to have a pet dinosaur someday, it looks like your best bet may be to follow the works of Jack Horner, who wants to engineer modern-day dinosaurs (aka ‘birds’) to gradually undo millions of years of evolution:

Coolest solar panel ever

I have no idea of this rotating, conical solar panel(?) from V3Solar lives up to their marketing hype (which you can hear in the embedded video below), but it’s far and away the coolest looking photovoltaic system I’ve ever seen. The inner conical section rotates inside of a fixed transparent shell, which in itself seems like a concern…it takes energy to overcome the friction of rotating this 12 hours a day (they say it uses 1A and floats on magnets), but it does seem like a plausible way of addressing efficiency, through optimization of the angle and improved cooling of the cells. Another neat part of this is that, since it’s rotating, the DC produced by the cells is converted to AC by nature of this rotating motion and the junction between that and the fixed base…it should be a simpler conversion process, in theory (which might improve efficiency further).

They claim this produces more than 20 times the electricity of a flat panel with the same area of PV cells, though I didn’t see information on the orientation of that flat panel.

Read more over at Gizmag.

Shopping for Quality Camping Gear

One of the best things you can do for this planet is, if you have to buy something, shop for quality. Buy something that will last as long as feasible, not something designed to be thrown away and replaced in a short time. For camping, I came across a great article in TheGoodHuman with information and links to sources for quality camping gear. Tents, sleeping bags, etc. Check it out!

Possible link between Alzheimer’s and diabetes

The NYTimes has an interesting article in the opinion section suggesting that Alzheimer’s could be a form of diet-induced diabetes (‘type 3 diabetes’, they call it). It’s far from definitive at this point, but what IS clear is that eating sugars and carbs has more downsides than upsides. Really no upsides, actually, just downsides! But that’s a subject I’ll be covering more in this blog in the coming weeks and months.

In the meantime, you can read more over at the New York Times.

Hubble’s Latest Masterpiece

Hubble stunned us in 2009 with its incredible Deep Field Image. In a 48-hour exposure image covering about 1/15th the width of the moon, the Hubble Space Telescope captured thousands of galaxies. To put the scale in perspective, if the entire sky were photographed at this image size, it would result in approximately 30 million pictures. That’s a lot of galaxies!

Anyway, in the time since the original picture, the telescope has been pointed at the same area of the sky again and again and the images combined, for a total image exposure time of around 23 days (two million seconds)! There are around 5500 galaxies visible in this image; you can view the full image by clicking on the thumbnail above.

Read more in Discover Magazine.

Tesla is building a network of free charging stations

Tesla Motors is making great strides in eliminating the ‘range anxiety’ argument against electric cars. Their cars already offer amazing range (hundreds of miles, depending on the battery option chosen), but now they’re building a nationwide network of solar-powered charging stations where Tesla car owners can top off their cars for FREE! This means that you can drive from coast to coast for just the cost of food and lodging. No gas stations to worry about, just plan your trip accordingly and stop for ~30 minutes every few hundred miles at one of the ‘Supercharger’ stations. There are currently six of these stations in California, with a fast nationwide roll out planned.

You can read more about it in their press release or view the Supercharger website here.

1500 ping pong balls + liquid nitrogen

If you want to get kids interested in science, just show them this awesome physics demo.  Liquid nitrogen is placed in an enclosed container, buried under 1500 ping pong balls, and allowed to heat up.  Care to guess what happens?  Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

 

Fox News and Wall Street Journal misleading on science

Fox News (and to perhaps a lesser extent, the Wall Street Journal) have reputations for being less than factual with the news they report, but is that fair?  The Union of Concerned Scientists took a look at the science reporting done by these two outlets, and have a published a report which you may view in its entirety here.  In summary, 93% of the references to climate change on Fox News were misleading and most commonly broadly dismissing “the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring or human-induced.”  The Wall Street Journal fared similarly poor, with 81% of letters, op-eds, columns, and editorials misleading their readers.

I see no problem with news stations having a political bias, but I do believe they have a social and moral obligation to be factual.  What’s scary is that Americans are following these companies willingly (Fox News is the most-watched cable news channel in the US, with the Wall Street Journal leading for newspaper circulation).  They are doing the public a great disservice by establishing this form of misleading reporting as the norm.

(via: link)

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