Liz Mathews
Saving Space from Wasted Waste
December 12th, 2006
Tackling over-stuffed landfills and peak oil in the same afternoon
A new technology pioneered in the 1980’s by microbiologist Paul Baskis, and commercially carried out by Changing World Technologies claims to efficiently convert any organic waste into usable energy and minerals. The process is called Thermal Depolymerization and if the success of the first two commercial plants continues, this will be the means for solving two of man’s most pressing issues: The billions of tons of municipal waste that we have piling up in landfills, and the current ecopolitical energy crisis over depleting oils supplies.
thermal depolymerization or ( TDP): A process using heat, water, and pressure to break down most waste to produce new, simpler carbon chains. (mainly: clean burning gas, light oils, purified minerals, and water) It mimics the natural geological processes thought to be involved in the production of fossil fuels. Under pressure and heat, long chain polymers of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons.
Light Can Travel Faster, Slower, and Backwards?
November 12th, 2006Light wins the race against time and meets itself back at the starting line before the race starts: The speed of light has been illuminated. In a spot, light can travel faster than the traditional speed of light, slower, and… dun. dun. dun. Backwards.
The latest web of physics has been elegantly spun by Mr. Robert Boyd, professor of Optics at the University of Rochester. Like gold out of thin air, Mr. Boyd has carefully pulled his resources together to astound the scientific community with an elegant experiment that educes how all how light can move backwards. What would appear upsetting to any physics student is the obvious contradiction with Einstein’s premises for relativity: “ Light travels at constant speeds, and nothing can move faster than that constant speed (equal to about 299,792,458 meters per second).”
Boyd’s experiment examines the speed of light sent through an optical fiber, coated in a layer of the element erbium. Why erbium? The element (like all other elements) has its own list of characteristics, one of which happens to be a sort of “fun house” effect. Erbium acts on an optical fiber the way a curve, carefully placed in a mirror acts to distort the path of light. Boyd’s experiment was to send a pulse from a laser beam through the optical fiber and measure the time lapse between light waves entering and exiting the fiber (i.e. measure the speed of light).
My Mother Was a Virus. My Father Was Bacterial.
October 28th, 2006
TALES FROM THE COSMIC SEA: We all share a common ancestor,” but this elusive common ancestor has not been found yet, and it may be because the primordial beginnings of our beings came not from one ancestor, but two! The commonly accepted theory or origin has been bacteria– cosmic bacteria carried in on an asteroid, introduced to a happy earth, and welcomed to the world at large. Since the days of Darwin’s finches, the scientific view of the origins of life on earth has been this: living species on earth spiraled down through space-time from a point of origin – a common ancestor. It was considered that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA –dubbed in 1996) had to be bacterial, archaic, or eukaryotic, anything but viral! However, with the recent discovery of Mimi it seems the tables may have turned. It’s seemingly possible now that the common ancestor we share with fish and trees may be viral (or a combination of viral-bacterial) in nature. Read the rest of this entry »
Magic Darts
October 18th, 2006Dear Readers,
Please excuse my terribly extended absence from SoulDish; I’ve been stuck swimming in a vortex, somewhere in the mountains of southern Vermont. But without such a view of the whirlwind from its center, who knows what kind of mysteries I would have missed.
I recently finished an incredible book of excerpts compiled from anthropological research done over the past 500 years. The book is called “Shamans through Time” and is edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley (you may recall Narby was one of the first interviewees ever to appear on SoulDish). In its pages are 64 amazing accounts (many of them firsthand) of indigenous Shamans from various countries, and various time periods.