The Element Four WaterMill

The WaterMill is a new device from Element Four that promises to magicallty pull water right out of thin air sans top hat. The device which uses roughly the same amount of energy as three light bulbs works by drawing air through filters to remove dust and particles, then cooling it to just below the temperature at which dew forms. The condensed water is passed through a self-sterilizing chamber that uses microbe-busting UV light to eradicate any disease causing bacteria.

Our current water obtaining situation is putting strain on our economy and our environment to the tune of about $11Billion and 1.5Million Barrels of oil a year in the U.S. alone. While the new device is currently priced at $1,200, as prices come down it could help to alleviate this situation and become a staple of the modern kitchen in the same fashion as a microwave has become common place in today's homes.

Anti-Matter: Because Peace & Complacency Are Overrated

Ah the nuclear bomb, what a wonderful thing that was, good times. The nuclear bomb was the perfect dooms day device. First of all there was nothing worse than a nuclear bomb which made it a hit with Hollywood. It seems like every action movie I've seen since the 1980's has featured a nuclear bomb because it's so terrifying, what with the ability to wipe out an entire civilization and all it's the perfect weapon of a well funded antagonist, or even a protagonist. Take the 2003 movie 'The Core' where director Jon Amiel conducts and all star casts of winners who, when the earths core stops spinning, decides the best way to start it again is by setting off a series of nuclear explosions in the core. Right, when in doubt, nuke it! The nuclear bomb was the perfect dooms day device because although it was the "sum of all fears" we could all sleep soundly knowing it could never happen because anyone who used a nuclear bomb was sure to wipe themselves out as well. We all learned this lesson because in 1983 a young Matthew Broderick hacked into NORAD and accidentally got the WOPR computer to begin initiation of WWIII in the movie 'War Games'. A quick thinking Matt gets WOPR to play tic-tac-toe which the computer magically uses to realize no one can win a nuclear war stating "the only winning move, is not to play".

But all that wonderment is now behind us thanks to a group of geniuses (and I say that in the most sarcastic way possible) from Livermore, California. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL for all you acronym lovers) have discovered a way to create anti-matter. For those of you who can't remember the term from your comic book loving days, anti-matter is most easily described as the opposite of matter. You can CLICK HERE if you're day is lacking serious bored0m for a more "scientific" description. The important thing to note is that it is believed that when anti-matter meets our well known friend matter (you know, buildings, air, us, the universe) the two will combine, canceling each other out and the two would cease to exist. Some of you may have missed that point so I will repeat it, cease to EXIST! Not blown up, not dead, not burning alive or even slowly rotting away in nuclear winter but ceasing to EXIST! And these winners thought it would be a good idea to create the stuff. Apparently this cracker jack group of think it all the way through to the end scientist heard about us sleeping soundly in our beds after watching 'Broken Arrow' and said "That just won't do"! Why? I can only posit that, to these guys at least, our every day squabbles just weren't getting the ratings.

From the South Park Episode 'Cancelled'.

Message in a Bottle? That's so last Century!

If you find a rubber ducky floating along the shores of your favorite beach don't be so quick to dismiss it as a toy lost by some errant child, there may be a reward for returning the buoyant sea goers. Researchers from the University of Colorado hoping to better understand global warming have release 90 of the beloved childhood toys at the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, one of Greenland's largest. While this may seem like a kooky idea that some hope to work, it has actually been in practice for some time and has actually been given a name by researchers, Flotsam Science. Imprinted on the rubber duckies is an email address and the promise of a reward in three different languages.

In a time of petaflop computers, billion dollar satellites and telescopes and the LHC, one can't help but laugh at the fact the best insight we have into global warming is a rubber ducky. One thing is for sure though, Ernie would be proud!

A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS

It has been about 6 1/2 years since the "Jared Has Aides" South Park episode announced that AIDS was officially funny since it had been 22.3 years since the discovery of the fatal disease. Which makes it almost 29 years since it's discovery today. But today is a new day and there may finally be a cure for the AIDS causing HIV disease.

From The Wall Street Journal:

"The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Gero Hütter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn't an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patients bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS."

All I can wonder is: I should have been a doctor. 30 year deadlines??? That's my kind of time line! How long would you last in your industry if it took you that long to accomplish something?

Deepest Ultraviolet Image of the Universe Yet

For those of you who have been dying to download a 30MegaByte 27MegaPixel Jpeg deep field image of the universe, today is your lucky day.

From Slashdot:

"European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope has captured the deepest ground based U-band image of the universe yet. The image contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observations with the VIMOS instrument. 'Galaxies were detected that are a billion times fainter than the unaided eye can see and over a range of colours not directly observable by the eye. This deep image has been essential to the discovery of a large number of new galaxies"

Low to High-Res image available HERE.