(photo from Andy Ihnatko's 2007 You-Do-It Sale Flickr set)

Andy Ihnatko writes about the annual You-Do-It Electronics Store Presidents' Day Sale, which looks like a great opportunity to rummage for cheap, useful, and unusual electronics:

The Sale is a big day on the New England nerd's calendar. And YDI is a special kind of electronics store. Put it this way: I needed to get my hands on a few 5V relays, LEDs, 555 timer ICs, power transistors, resistors and capacitors, terminal blocks, and a few project boards just a couple of days before I was to leave for Macworld Expo. In most areas of the country, this involves an Internet order and a two week wait. In eastern Massachusetts, it's not even worth an atom of concern, old bean: you just swing by You-Do-It, right off of Route 128 in Needham.

But be warned--although the sale runs until February 21st, the good stuff will go fast:

...to get a shot at the good stuff in the Surplus Room you need to be there well before 6 AM. To be first in line, I've found that 11 PM is the latest safe choice.

Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA) » You Done It

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It's been a lazy few days, in the aftermath of OAuth, which disrupted my flow of development. It was probably a good thing, cause it's giving me some time to reflect, veg out, watch some movies and documentaries.

One of the movies I watched was the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I knew in advance it would be awful, which made it not so awful. After reading the NY Times review, I decided what the hell, it's Keanu Reeves with small roles for John Cleese and Kathy Bates, it's about the end of the world, why not? Exactly. It's about at the "why not" level. Reeves after all is Neo, and I sat through the last two installments of The Matrix, twice, even though they sucked too.

Glad I watched it cause it got me thinking about the end of our civilization.

The end of our civilization. If you believe in global climate change and Al Gore, which I do (both) then as much as Gore doesn't want to say it because it would be counter-productive for him to, our civilization is on the path to self-extinction.

Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn't growth the whole problem? Shouldn't we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.

The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we're adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can't sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven't done anything to limit growth.

So maybe this isn't the biggest downturn since The Great Depression? Maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe this is a corner-turn for the human race, maybe last September was when it finally occurred to us, collectively, that we couldn't keep going as we were going, and we hit the brakes in the way the Invisible Hand does. Maybe the efforts to "jump start" the economy won't work, and maybe that's as it should be, and maybe that's a good thing?

Richard.Tao and a number of other readers sent in a NYTimes piece by John Markoff asking whether the Internet is so broken it needs to be replaced. "...[T]here is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a 'gated community' where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there." A less alarmist reaction to the question was blogged by David Akin: "If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I'm hanging out here in v.1."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Think you've got a bad job? Think again. You could be making keyboards for IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo and HP at Meitai Plastic and Electronics, a Chinese hardware factory. Prompted by the release of High Tech Misery in China by a human-rights group, a self-regulating body set up by tech companies will conduct an audit of working conditions at the factory. In return for take-home pay of 41 cents per hour, workers reportedly sit on hard wooden stools for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Overtime is mandatory, with workers being given on average two days off per month. While on the production line, workers are not allowed to raise their hands or heads, are given 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, and are encouraged to 'actively monitor each other' to see if any company rules are being transgressed. They are also monitored by guards. Workers are fined if they break the rules, locked in the factory for four days per week, and sleep in crowded dormitories. Okay, it's not all bad news — they're hiring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science News has an article on research into a compound found in a particular kind of sea sponge that seems to have the ability to restore antibiotics' effectiveness against resistant bacteria. The hope is that, since the compound is not itself deadly or even harmful to bacteria, it may skew the antibiotic-bacteria arms race in our favor. "Chemical analyses of the sponge's chemical defense factory pointed to a compound called algeferin. Biofilms, communities of bacteria notoriously resistant to antibiotics, dissolved when treated with fragments of the algeferin molecule. And new biofilms did not form. So far, the algeferin offshoot has, in the lab, successfully treated bacteria that cause whooping cough, ear infections, septicemia and food poisoning. The compound also works on... [MRSA] infections, which wreak havoc in hospitals. 'We have yet to find one that doesn't work,' says [one of the researchers]."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was a skeptic at the beginning of the second half of the last season of Battlestar Galactica, one of my favorite shows of all-time, and a signature favorite of geeks everywhere.

The first couple of shows in the run were depressing, who knew where we were going, certainly not anywhere remotely like we thought we were. That's okay, it turns out because where we were actually going is very science fictiony, which is good because that's what BSG is.



Now what does it all mean? I don't have a clue. But that's the way I like it. I had to watch Friday's episode twice, just so I could hear what the characters were actually saying, because in the first pass all I could absorb was the wonderful weirdness of the arc the story was taking.

Having listened, I'm still really really confused. And that's just fine!! Frack me. Gods damn it. So say we all.

There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: Cosmic Night Light. You can view the video here, grab the PDF here and subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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Thomas Hawk writes "An interesting twist over at the Fake Chuck Westfall Blog. Fake Chuck (like Fake Steve before him) has a blog out parodying Canon's real Technical Information Advisor Chuck Westfall. It seems that Canon and their lawyers over at Loeb & Loeb are none too fond of all the fun that Fake Chuck and DSLR geeks everywhere have been having at their expense and have sent Fake Chuck's blog hosting company, WordPress, a notice to take the blog down. Canon's lawyers cite that Fake Chuck's blog is 'calculated to mislead recipients,' even though the blog has 'fake' in the title, 'fake' in the URL and 'fake' just about everywhere else in the blog. What in the heck is wrong with Canon? Do they really thing that trying to shut down a parody blog is going to make their new 5D Mark II ship any faster?" After Fake Chuck removed the Canon logo from his site, WordPress is standing behind him and has rebuffed Canon's demand.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love walking around Berkeley -- it's one of the reasons I moved here from Palo Alto. You can get around on foot instead of having to drive everywhere. But Berkeley drivers are not much better than anywhere else, it seems. Put a nice socially conscious person behind a steering wheel of a 2 ton hunk of metal and they forget everything they learned in Driver's Ed -- like what a crosswalk means.

A lot of them break the law, almost no one comes to a full stop when a pedestrian (one of those people without a 2 ton hunk of metal around them) is in a crosswalk, and a shocking number just don't want to slow down at all. Every time this happens I wonder how much it would hurt as the 2 tons of metal crushed my poor unprotected bod. There are some streets with so much fast-moving traffic that there's just no safe way to cross them.

However, I've learned that most drivers will slow down enough for you to cross if you hold your arm out with all five fingers extended, the universal symbol for STOP. And yesterday quite by accident I discovered another way, when even that doesn't work. It's been cold so I've been wearing gloves, but after an hour walking up and down the hills I have to take them off to let the heat out. Standing just off the curb in a crosswalk, I was holding the gloves as a sedan sped toward me, ignoring my outstretched hand. So I threw the gloves down in the street in his path with a grand gesture like a football referee throwing a penalty flag. He stopped! Not just a slow-down stop but a full wheels-not-turning stop. Amazing. I picked up the gloves and crossed the street.

The psychology of drivers. Stop to save a $10 pair of used gloves, but play a dangerous game of chicken with a human. Hey I'm a driver too, I know it's a whole other world, but the people walking across the street are just like you except they're even more fragile than a cheap old pair of gloves.

I think I've found the slution -- carry a real bright yellow penalty flag with me, and call every offense. Only $8 at Amazon. :-)

Ponca City, We love you writes with news of research from the Salk Institute into small, unconscious eye movements called "microsaccades," the purpose of which has been in question for many years. A recent study showed that those movements were essentially responsible for maintaining a coherent image for interpretation by the brain. They are also the cause of a famous optical illusion in which a still image appears to move. '"Because images on the retina fade from view if they are perfectly stabilized, the active generation of fixational eye movements by the central nervous system allows these movements to constantly shift the scene ever so slightly, thus refreshing the images on our retina and preventing us from going 'blind,'" explains Hafed. "When images begin to fade, the uncertainty about where to look increases the fluctuations in superior colliculus activity, triggering a microsaccade," adds Krauzlis.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times is running a story about the criteria involved when Google scraps one of their projects. While a project's popularity among users is important, Google also examines whether they can get enough employees interested in it, and whether it has a large enough scope — they prefer not to waste time solving minor problems. The article takes a look at the specific reasons behind the recent cancellation of several products. "Dennis Crowley, one of two co-founders who sold Dodgeball to Google in 2005 and stayed on, said that he had trouble competing for the attention of other Google engineers to expand the service. 'If you're a product manager, you have to recruit people and their "20 percent time."' ... [Jeff Huber, the company's senior vice president of engineering] said that Google eventually concluded that Dodgeball's vision was too narrow. ... Still, Google found the concepts behind Dodgeball intriguing, and early this month, it released Google Latitude, an add-on to Google Maps that allows people to share their location with friends and family members. It's more sophisticated than Dodgeball, with automatic location tracking and more options for privacy and communication."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, we discussed news that the FTC would be examining DRM to see if it needs regulation. They set up a town hall meeting for late March, and part of that effort involved requesting comments from potential panelists and the general public. Ars Technica reports that responses to the request have been overwhelmingly against DRM, and primarily from gamers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also took the opportunity to speak out strongly against DRM, saying flat out that "DRM does not prevent piracy," and suggesting that its intended purpose is "giving some industry leaders unprecedented power to influence the pace and nature of innovation and upsetting the traditional balance between the interests of copyright owners and the interests of the public." Their full public comments (PDF) describe several past legal situations supporting that point, such as Sony's fight against mod chips, Blizzard's DMCA lawsuit against an alternative to battle.net, and Sony's XCP rootkit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

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Billy Herrington (born July 14, 1969, Long Island, New York) is a bisexual American actor best known for his work in gay pornography. Herrington began his erotic career when a friend surreptitiously submitted his nude pictures to Playgirl magazine. The photographs won him a "Real Men of the Month" contest and a $500 prize. His appearance in the magazine caught the eye of famed photographer Jim French but it would be two years before Herrington would shoot his first Colt calendars for French. Soon after that he would be shooting hardcore gay pornography for All Worlds Video. Herrington became one of the more well-known gay porn stars of the late 1990s, even appearing on mainstream talk-show "Ricki Lake."

And why is Billy so immensely popular with the Japanese folks and why has he been made into a Japanese action figure too?

Herrington has also become an internet meme among the Japanese community after a clip from one of his videos 'Workout' was posted on Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese video sharing website. Over 3000 parody videos of him have been made, many of which utilizes deliberate mishearings of his lines in the porn flick. He is affectionately called "Big Brother" among the Nico Nico Douga community, and most of his videos are deliberately tagged with "Forest Fairy", "Philosophy" or both.

Photo taken last night where I provided the translations for Billy's first ever live internet broadcast in Japan - see more photos and videos from behind-the-scenes. An example of one of those parody videos below - you cant really see any dolphin waxing so it should be safe for work. Blockquotes from Wikipedia.

Ashmash writes "Phoronix is running a story about S3 Graphics failing to provide Linux support for their Chrome 500 products even though they have announced in press releases going back months that there is Linux support. S3 Graphics has gone as far as advertising OpenGL 3.0 support for Linux and one of their representatives had promised a driver by last December. This situation has been going on for months, but there is no Linux driver at all for the Chrome 500 series."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "As Sirius XM faces bankruptcy, Slate's Farhad Manjoo reports that the company has bigger problems than just the end of cheap credit. While it has what seems like a pretty great service — the world's best radio programming for just a small monthly fee — Sirius XM has been eclipsed by something far cheaper and more convenient: the Internet. Load up Pandora or the Public Radio Tuner on your iPhone, and you've got access to a wider stream of music than you'll ever get through satellite. So forget the satellites, the special radios, and the huge customer acquisition costs, advises Manjoo, and instead focus on getting Howard Stern, Oprah, the NFL, and MLB on every Internet-connected device on the market at very low prices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Ultimate Peanut Sauce Recipe
• CRAFT Valentine's Day Project Contest Winners
  
• The Creation Process of Tetris-Inspired Fabric
  
• Cassette Tape Crafts
• Ask CRAFT - New Weekly Column!

And here's a video preview of CRAFT, Volume 10, on newsstands now!

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On the 15th of February 1564 in Pisa Italy, Galileo Galilei was born. A skilled mathematician, philosopher, and physicist, Galileo is widely known for his contributions to astronomy. By grinding his own lenses and experimenting with new designs, Galileo greatly improved and popularized the telescope - making possible his own detailed study of the planets. A strong adherence to observation led him to side with Copernicus' theory of a universe centered around the sun. For this belief, Galileo was accused of heresy and confined to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Galileo's reliance on observation to further understanding lives on as a foundation of modern science - and a core practice of makers the world over.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, 400 years since Galileo's first observations of the night sky! To learn more of Galileo's work and how to build your own Galilean telescope check out the following -

• Galileo's Telescope
  
• Galileo Galilei on Wikipedia
  
• Stelafane - Home of the Springfield telescope makers
  
  
  Build a Home Made Telescope

  
  Galileo's Telescope Kit

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Alexander "Tolimar" Reichle-Schmehl writes "The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 5.0 (codenamed Lenny) after 22 months of constant development. With 12 supported computer architectures, more than 23,000 packages built from over 12,000 source packages and 63 languages for the new graphical installer, this release sets new records, once again. Software available in 5.0 includes Linux 2.6.26, KDE 3.5.10, Gnome 2.22.2, X.Org 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, Iceweasel 3.0.6, Apache 2.2.9, Xen 3.2.1 and GCC 4.3.2. Other notable features are X autoconfiguring itself, full read-write support for NTFS, Java programs in the main repository and a single Blu-Ray disc installation media. You can get the ISOs via bittorrent. The Debian Project also wishes to announce that this release is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a Debian Developer who died on December 26th, 2008 in a tragic car accident. As a valuable member of the Debian Project, he will be sorely missed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indie filmmakers have filmed the first two episodes of their new Half-Life-2-based miniseries for a total budget of $500. Now, that's an indie filmmaker budget! "Originally envisioned as a project to test out numerous post production techniques, as well as a spec commercial, it ballooned into a multi part series. Filmed guerrilla style with no money, no time, no crew, no script, the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of $500." You know what? It's not bad.

Half-Life 2 Short Film - Escape From City 17 (via Warren Ellis)

From the comments: Nylund sez, "Of course a small group of people filming guerilla style with no budget, no time, and no script aren't going to make something that actually rivals your favorite show/movie. That's comparing apples to oranges. But the discrepancy in resources dwarfs the difference in quality. It was done for a teeny fraction of the cost, but isn't really that much worse."

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Electronic Valentine's Day card [above, top-left]
• LED felt brooches[above, bottom-right]
• PicAxe beat looper [above, top-right]
• How To - Simple method for blinking LEDs
• Making the game … better
• iOSC multimedia controller for iPhone/iPod Touch
• DIY USB Arduino plug
• LED fish = art circuitry [above, bottom-left]

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Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

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Not only is McDonald's Japan a place for great health food, its also a great place to take a nap when you are plastered from a late nights work wrestling with your boss. There always seems to be folks sleeping in McDonald's over here.

And what do folks do over here when they don't have a Mc Dees handy? They sleep *anywhere* and *everywhere*...

Poll: Do you find people sleeping out n about where you live?
-Always
-Sometimes
-Never

Larger photos in my previous McDonald's Japan article.

Mike sez, "In this lecture hosted yesterday by the Long Now Foundation, Dmitri Orlov describes the Russian economic collapse of the 1990s, and explains how he thinks an American decline/collapse would differ:"

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. . . . Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.

Social Collapse Best Practices (Thanks, Mike and all the other people who suggested this!)

This was another fun week in the Maker Shed. We started off with our How-to Tuesday: Arduino 101 the button. These Arduino tutorials are getting a lot of positive feedback. Look for a lot more Arduino tutorials in the next few weeks.

Next, I opened up my Designing Automata Kit and checked out what was included. I am really impressed with the quality of the pieces. Now all I have to do is figure out what I am going to build!

The New Designing Automata Kit is great value and fantastic quality. No glue or tools are required, and you will learn about simple mechanics using cams and a crank slider mechanism. Many different designs can be made, and the kit used over and over again. Produced in Thailand using chemical-free rubber wood, from sustainable sources.

On Thursday I featured a build of the Newton's Reflecting Telescope Kit by Gakken. It was a really good learning experience. In fact, now I'm interested in making a DIY reflecting telescope based on this kit. I guess I'll need to add that to my list of things to build!

A neat working replica of Newton's Reflecting Telescope. Features a 10x magnitude. Includes it's own base. Instructions are in Japanese but features highly detailed assembly pictures, sorry no English translation at this time. Easy to build. Made of high impact plastic.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Nora & Torvald - sensor-controlled digital media in custom-designed pieces of furniture...

‘Nora & Torvald’ - By rootoftwo (John Marshall and Cezanne Charles). Birch plywood, Arduino micro-controllers, sensors, speakers, audio. ‘Nora & Torvald’ embeds sensor-controlled digital media in custom-designed pieces of furniture. The starting point of this work is a re-reading of Henrik Ibsen’s play “A Doll’s House” (1879) to explore user-object relationships.

There is a photocell embedded in the seat of the armchair ‘Torvald’. This sends a message when it registers darkness (i.e. when someone sits down). This triggers a randomly selected line of dialogue (one of ten) from the play to be played as audio. There is an accelerometer in the rocking stool ‘Nora’. When she is rocked this triggers a randomly selected line of her dialogue (also one of ten) to be played as audio.

A&D 5th Annual Faculty Exhibition, Slusser Gallery, 2000 Bonisteel Blvd. 1st floor.

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IDOXLR8 writes "The Harvard Law students defending accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum are doing their best to turn his upcoming trial into a media event. But when it comes to pure spectacle, they have nothing on The Pirate Bay. TPB is referring to the event as a 'spectrial,' a cross between a spectacle and a trial. They have set up a site where you can track their current location, complete with journal entries. The trial begins next Monday and features a live audio feed and Twitter translations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

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When I first started to follow Japanese culture back in the UK, I saw these bags in anime (Japanese cartoons), manga (comics) and in magazines. I then came over to Japan and started to wonder why all the kids had one and why there were all the same shape n size. These bags are known as "Randoseru" which is the Japanese pronunciation of the Dutch word "Ransel" meaning "Backpack" and are used by elementary school children in Japan. They were first introduced into Japan as a backpack for commissioned officers in the imperial army during the Meiji period and then used in governmental schools as the standard commuting bag. A randoseru is a compulsory school item that ones grandparents usually buy for their grandchildren and usually cost 2 kidneys and a bladder - the most expensive one in this store cost 628 USD! The most expensive randoseru that I've been able to find online costs 1805 USD from Rakuten. Some modern schools these days don't enforce use of the randoseru but those are still the minority. An ad for randoseru below. So now we know how much it costs to buy a randoseru for elementary school children, I thought we'd look at how much more it costs to send children to school in Japan - costs converted to USD. -Kindergarten (3 years - public): 7,943 USD -Kindergarten (3 years - private): 17,536 USD -Elementary (6 years - public): 21,798 USD -Elementary (6 years - private): 89,675 USD -Junior High (3 years - public): 15,392 USD -Junior High (3 years - private): 41,360 USD -High School (3 years - public): 16, 995 USD -High school (3 years - private): 34,078 USD -Total for all public (15 years): 62,130 USD -Total for all private (15 years): 182,651 USD University is not compulsory but for those wishing to go would spend an average of 54,412 USD for the 4 years. Schooling free or cost a few limbs in your neck of the woods? More photos and sources of figures in the Randoseru article.

This week on Mur Lafferty's "I Should Be Writing" podcast, a smashing interview of science fiction great Kim Stanley Robinson, conducted by science fiction great James Patrick Kelly. Jim and Stan talk in depth about writing instruction and the Clarion workshops, with which they're both involved (as am I). Jim was the most influential instructor I had the year I attended Clarion.

There's still a few days left to get your application in for this year's Clarion workshop, btw.

ISBW Special Episode #42 - Kim Stanley Robinson Interview

MP3 link

duncan bayne writes "My company is developing some software using Ruby. It's proprietary software — decidedly not free-as-in-beer — but I don't want to tie my customers down with the usual prohibitions on reverse engineering, modification, etc. After all, they're licensing the product from us, so I think they should be able to use it as they see fit. Does anyone know of an existing license that could be used in this case? Something that gives the customer the freedom to modify the product as they want, but prohibits them from creating derivative works, or redistributing it in any fashion?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Johnny Baillargeaux sent in a fun mashup that allows the Nabaztag programmable wireless rabbit to communicate with a Pandorabots AI bot service. With his software, you can write an AI script using AIML, publish it on Pandorabots, and then the output of the bot will be sent through the rabbit. Neat stuff.

Nabaztag/Ubiquity/Pandorabots integration
Pandorabots
Nabaztag wifi rabbit

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Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

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What would happen if you went around your local neighborhood pretending to shoot or stab somebody? Would they shoot you back with a real gun? Slap you in the face with the nearest wet dog?
Or just pretend to be shot or stabbed?
Watch how folks in the Japanese city of Osaka pretend to be shot/sliced by an imaginary gun/samurai sword by a complete stranger...
Photo from Osaka Photos.

Xander Hudson, aka Synoptic Labs, posted this cool heart card project to the MAKE Flickr pool. He writes:

This year I gave my sweetheart a LED valentines day card. The LEDs were animated with a pulse harmonic tuned to my own heartbeat. (sappy, yeah I know, but she makes me feel sappy). Incorporates 1 AVR ATTiny45 microcontroller driving 2 constant-current shift registers driving 16 LEDs.

Bill of Materials:
1 AVR ATTiny45 microcontroller
2 STP08DP05TTR 8-bit contsant current shift registers
16 red LED's (0805 package)
Pyralux flexible circuit board material

Synoptic Labs

More:
LED Valentine's Day heart

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Iddo Genuth writes "Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) has announced its intentions to build a low-orbit space station which, according to the agency, will support future exploration of the moon and Mars. There's also a suggestion to extend the operational lifespan of the International Space Station by five more years, resetting its retirement date to 2020. The project proposal is already on its way for review by the Russian government. Some Russian sources also reportedly proposed the (rather ludicrous) idea of converting the ISS into some kind of an interplanetary transport vehicle, which would serve as the 'ultimate mother ship' in manned planetary missions to the moon or even Mars."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ostracus recommends a Christian Science Monitor piece on the 40-year quest to find a replacement for non-biodegradable plastic. One candidate, written off 20 years back but now developed to the point of practicality, is a formulation based on the lignin found in wood. And it turns out there is another strong environmental reason to put lignin to use in this way: burning it, which is its common fate today, releases the carbon dioxide that trees had sequestered. "Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their first steps in a quest to break the world's dependence on plastics. But in those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of plastic waste — too tough for bacteria to break down — now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. ...[R]esearchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic's main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ostracus recommends a Christian Science Monitor piece on the 40-year quest to find a replacement for non-biodegradable plastic. One candidate, written off 20 years back but now developed to the point of practicality, is a formulation based on the lignin found in wood. And it turns out there is another strong environmental reason to put lignin to use in this way: burning it, which is its common fate today, releases the carbon dioxide that trees had sequestered. "Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their first steps in a quest to break the world's dependence on plastics. But in those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of plastic waste — too tough for bacteria to break down — now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. ...[R]esearchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic's main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.