Mining asteroids with ants.

recipe:
Find a gravelly, not solid, asteroid.
shoot at it with ant egg bullets
spray paint it with plastic paint that will harden into a air tight(ish) coating.
Place air injectors here and there.
Put testers that extrude ant food and occasionally trap an miner ant and test him for gold or other metals of interest. If you find enough, you send an alarm.

Todays anti aging drugs. They exist already.

I find myself googling on ‘target of rapamycin’
every so often, when I get bored. This is one of the likely areas we will see anti-aging drugs in the next few years. (if you want credentials I have an MS in Biology)

Actually rapamycin IS an antiaging drug, and is approved for human use today, just not a very good one, because of its side effects. We need better ones.

Incidentally, I think the cosmetics industry has done us a disservice by constantly saying this or that is good for aging, when in fact, this is a lie. And it desensitizes people, so that now when we actually have real scientific progress, people don’t believe it. They think it’s just more hype from cosmetics companies or vitamin pushers.

Is it just me?

We live in an age where scientists are on the cusp of human life extension (we can do it in animals today), and we have space flight, and almost anything you want to know is available on your cell phone. … and yet its seems like people care less and less about real things, and more and more about games and entertainment. We seem to be looking inwards instead of outwards.

Is it just me?

CDC Zombie Apocalypse guide. Hilarious.

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp

Useful ideas too, like for flu outbreak, so funny but also useful. Since when did the government develop a sense of humor?

Next big thing in Biology

Now the genome is mapped, a friend asked me, “so now we can do a lot of experiments in silica, instead of in vitro or invivo, right?”.

The answer is no, because a lot of real bio chemistry is 3D interactions and we cant model that in computers yet. The next question of course is “why not”

Well, we dont have a database with all of the 3D shapes in the body yet. (complete with +-charges and vanderwaals areas of course). If we had that, we could then find a new molecule, find its 3D shape and then do a database search of every other molecule or DNA etc that it might interact with. How great would that be?

Zombie Apocalyse

tornado videos.

Apparently I slept through all of the excitement again, but here are some videos I found online. The only times Ive ever been close to a tornado it was too dark to see anything. And too rainy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/28/tornado-2011-videos_n_855074.html#s270645&title=Mississippi_and_Alabama